BLIZZARD!!

!  Pepco (local power outfit) has called me to warn me about power outages, and wot to do, etc.  I am touched, but holy crap..... nobody ever called us in Fargo, ND, and told us wot to do when  we had REAL blizzards.  Everyone is totally excited about this "blizzard" coming.  I forget that where I live now is the SOUTH.  Not to sound snarky, but they don't know wot a BLIZZARD is.  They think of it as a big snowstorm.  They have never experienced the bitter cold, and they have never gone outside to play in such a storm, and built snow forts, where the temperature inside is less than freezing. I love my life, I love my childhood...and here I am in the City of Satan.

crossword puzzles are good for your brain....most often...

OK, I admit to being a crossword fan.  but sometimes I am stumped.  The Thursday NYT crossword this week starts with "ARCTIC RESIDENT' 4 letters.  My immediate response was "POLE."  But Poles do not live in the Arctic as a rule, even though there are two of them--North and South.  All the other suspects don't fit:  Inuit (5 letters), eskimo (6 letters), ice (3).  Bear with its 4 letters fits, but the cross word clue is "school allowance" (8 letters).  Whatever the hey that might be if it starts with B.  I'll have to keep on checking the cross words.  #2 is "immortal flower in 'Paradise Lost'."  Milton??...and so it goes. Feliz Sabado, y'alls!

New Year....

Love this quote from the 27-year-old Albert Camus:

"We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all."

Thanks from Brainpickings.org

Clutter Master

I am quite unable to part with things that have some personal meaning for me.  For example:  I have this little ash tray on my bookshelf (way overloaded with books).  A dear friend gave this ashtray to me after she visited NYC and got it at the Cafe Un,Deux,Trois in the Village.  Since I no longer smoke, it's now loaded with tiny bits of sea glass that I harvested in Capri a number of years ago, plus a wee scallop shell from the same place, half a lovely geode (gift from one of my kids), a tiny feather whose provenance I can no longer remember--safe to toss that!!--a button belonging to a sweater I still have (still useful, can sew it on today, in fact!), and a small red ceramic bird whistle from Brazil given to me by a lovely Brazilleira.  Multiply this kind  of acquisitiveness by many years, and you get the picture.  Clutter City.  Must do better.  Sally gave me a book two Christmases ago:  THE LIFE-CHANGING MAGIC OF TIDYING UP by Marie Kondo.  I haven't worked through everything (anything) the author suggests, but I am getting there.  Kondo asks, regarding the inability to discard things:  is this attachment to the past?  or anxiety about the future?  Both, I'd say.  She says, "Life becomes far easier once you know that things will work out even if you are lacking something." 

No end to joy.....

I have been reading with great enjoyment a book by Alexander McCall Smith:  In the Company of Cheerful Ladies.

Here is a paragraph that struck me, now that I'm entering my 80th year, as one of the key delights of an old woman's life: 

The two women had known one another for many years, and had moved into that most comfortable of territories, that of an old friendship that could be picked up and put down at will with no damage.  Sometimes several months would go by without the two seeing one another, and this would make no difference.  A conversation left unfinished at the beginning of the hot season could be resumed after the rains; a question asked in January might be answered in June, or even later, or indeed not at all.  There was no need for formality or caution, and the faults of each were known to the other.

Want to Avoid Black Friday?

Quel Objet (lovely French stuff) is going out of business--everything half off! 

"I Worried" by Mary Oliver

Got this poem from my friend Mary Lou yesterday.....Spot on! Thanks, Mary Lou....


“I Worried”

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or an I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And I gave it up. And too my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.