Friday, October 28, 2005
"Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin."
More from Barbara Kingsolver:
Weather: Days are in the 70°'s and 80°'s Fahrenheit; with moderate to brisk breezes through the 11th of October that occasionally, like the 11th, die off in the late afternoon. The evenings and mornings are still quite chilly. Still haven't started up the wood stove yet. The oak leaves have begun to cover the ground. I've begun to enjoy the ripening figs...a few here a few there.
Rain Saturday the 15th in the wee small hours. The evenings and mornings have been actually warmer than previously. The days preceding and after the wet were/have been delightful in their moderate temperatures.
October the 20's: Wonderful weather!!! 70°'s and 80°'s. The rain expected the 22nd and 23rd of October was deferred for a bit. I've noticed that I have two different varieties of fig trees! I've been waiting for one tree to ripen its figs like the black skinned variety only to find that its fruit is ripe in a greenish to ruddy state... these are a more tangy tasting variety than the black skinned variety.
October 26th gives us a bit of precip in the form of drizzle early, to showers later, abating late evening; the daytime temperature a bit chill but not cold. The leaves from the lilac bushes are dropping in droves... the plums and apples are all spent... still an occasional blackberry to be found. Coyotes were serenading their kin just after midnight to start the day. Gail started our first heat-stove fire of the season since the grand-kids were here. Gail and I will usually just bundle up more when the grand-kids aren't here and the house is chill.
The 27th was dry with predominate blue sky, large white billowy clouds passing... a bit cool.
A previously written poem of mine to celebrate this Halloween... "Hell on the Mount"... enjoy.
A BLOG I have enjoyed:
THE YANKEES WIN 2 of 5 games to the los angeles? angels in the first round of the American League Baseball playoffs. My baseball season was essentially over herewith. LONG LIVE THE YANKEES!!!
... O.K... I did watch the marathon 14 inning 3rd game classic between the Houston Astros and the Chicago White Sox, and the last two outs of game 4 that clinched the World Series for the White Sox. It just ain't the same without the New York Yankees or the San Francisco Giants or the Oakland A's in contention.
Wonderful sacrament meeting the Sabbath of October 9th, a Fast Sunday. Many powerful testimonies, with more than one moving me to tears.
Two weeks later on the 23rd was my favorite sacrament meeting theme... the primary children's presentation to the ward. Nothing moves me more than the children singing and giving testimonies.
Something cool found browsing Lockergnome's newsletter (September 20 "Windows Fanatics" issue): Tinypic.com/ can host your photos and give the URL's for links for BLOGgers, EBay users, etc. without the need for one to use their own web space to store images. I checked it out in this BLOG (see pic below) and it appears to work fine... and the URL is tiny!!! The website states that all photos larger than 250K Bytes will be automatically resized, but hey, that's plenty big enough for the casual use of pix on the web. File types that are allowed: jpg and .png and .gif and .bmp formats.
Our church hosted a preparedness fair October the 14th that was quite an eye opener for me. Now I need to begin implementing the knowledge gained to be ready for whatever. I'm also thinking along the lines of creating a brief page of all the links that I have gleaned from the fair and further useful links through a little more research.
Rosa Parks has passed on. Her act of civil disobedience is acknowledged as a turning point in human relations in the USA, her courage to defy convention and retain her dignity is a testament of faith. What if she hadn't decided to keep her seat on the bus that day?
A bonus I received from our power company for reducing our home's energy consumption by more than 20% (actual=23%) from June 1st to September 30th (compared to last year's consumption) gave me an energy bill of only $16.27 USD for the past month... SWEET!!!
Of course that money I saved will probably go toward the ridiculous increase(s) (ad infinitum/ad nauseam) in the price of gasoline, but hey! I look forward to checking out gasoline/oil/related profits by the various petrochemical companies around the world... just for a giggle.
Blithly mis speling en Goggle:
The van... died... October 13th, a Thursday... Long live the van!!!
My daughter had borrowed my wife's van to run my grandkids to school... both of her vehicles in sad shape and waiting repair themselves. On her way back home she heard a loud clunk noise in the engine area and didn't have any brakes? She immediately threw the car into park?? while the car was in motion to stall/stop the van??? Not many minutes after I started relating this story in the BLOG draft (same day) I received a call from the school that the kids had been dropped off at... seems they noticed a large puddle and a trail of oil in their parking lot and were calling to see if my daughter had made it home alright? Gail got the van towed home using her cell phone's towing benefit that has come in handy sooooooo many times...!!! Attempts to date have proved futile in resurrecting the poor vehicle.
23 (or Van-trois [sic])... October 13th (continued): Our first van (pictured below) was destroyed in April 2002 when it was driven into one of the narrow Greenwood bridge abutments.
I've been blessed with an extended family within the church that has provided a van for my family. It's a 1993 van (not shown) that runs!!! My daughter's two vehicles had also gone down for the count for a period of time with thisses and thats, so the vehicle situation was quite tenuous at best with school and soccer and church and my daughter Chrissy's (and her husband's) job and all the sundry things Gail runs around for... phew!!! I've long joked that this property was cursed when it comes to vehicles. A long tale it would be about all the vehicles we've had in the 15 or so years here.
Need a freeware solution for a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation creator, and a database integrated, (etc.) into an office suite?... Open Office 2.0 has been released!!! Not yet for MacOS X... but soon? A huge download (75 MBytes) for slow-pokey dial-up users like me, but I have upgraded from my Star Office 5.1 Suite application that I've used for quite some time and the new ap looks quite impressive at quick glance.
Shake me!!!... USGS Earthquake Hazards Program... recent earthquake activity around the world.
BIG Earthquakes... from the Earthquake Notification E-mail service:
A magnitude 7.6 earthquake in Pakistan has occurred at: 34.43N 73.54E Depth 10km Sat Oct 8 03:50:38 2005 UTC
Location with respect to nearby cities:
- 95 km (60 miles) NNE of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan (pop 524,000)
- 115 km (70 miles) ESE of Mingaora, Pakistan (pop 174,000)
- 125 km (75 miles) WNW of Srinagar, Kashmir (pop 894,000)
- 165 km (105 miles) N of Jhelum, Pakistan
... Then the area was hammered continuously... with 24 seismic events of 5.0 magnitude or greater within 40 hours, hampering rescue attempts... many tens of thousands have passed on.
A magnitude 6.6 earthquake northeast of Taiwan has occurred at: 25.30N 123.26E Depth 190km Sat Oct 15 15:51:08 2005 UTC
Location with respect to nearby cities:
- 140 km (85 miles) NW of Ishigaki-jima, Ryukyu Islands, Japan (pop 45,000)
- 165 km (100 miles) ENE of Suao, Taiwan
- 175 km (110 miles) E of Taipei, Taiwan
- 1950 km (1210 miles) WSW of Tokyo, Japan
A magnitude 6.5 earthquake near the east coast of Honshu, Japan has occurred at: 36.40N 140.85E Depth 37km Wed Oct 19 11:44:43 2005 UTC
Location with respect to nearby cities:
- 35 km (20 miles) E of Mito, Honshu, Japan (pop 246,000)
- 75 km (45 miles) S of Iwaki, Honshu, Japan (pop 360,000)
- 130 km (80 miles) NE of Tokyo, Japan (pop 7,967,000)
- 150 km (95 miles) SSE of Fukushima, Honshu, Japan (pop 285,000)
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My entries... poetry.com: " Poetry in Motion "...
& Haiku daily contests:
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" Beautiful Spirit/Child of God "... a pious piece proffered.
" A Quickening "... another poem of time... or another time.
" A Roiled Pumpkin Sky " a Haiku: ... At first glance at the photo for inspiration I thought it to be upside down. It was only when I realized that the ground was dark from lack of sunlight that I identified the sky... a turbulent morass of pumpkin colored hues; including the darks of the skin of an orange pumpkin and the various colors of an orange pumpkin carved at differing depths.
" Silhouettes " a Haiku: ... An interesting photo of a pines? wooded cliff in the foreground with an indigo sky containing a moon glowing through an afar high fog... looking so much like a light centered in a crystal ball... the moon's reflection clearer in a like azure sea below bereft of fog.
" A Glimmering "... This was the original poetry entree that became transmogrified into " SNAFU-2 "... second in the SNAFU series that comes of starting the poem creation before 12:00 a.m. Eastern USA time and finishing after the same. During my 'tiles' play, the 'tiles' were changed in the ether but not in my JAVA window making for a condition neither betwixt nor between.
" My Ephemeral Love"(D&C 132:16) "... A recent lesson in the "Gospel Principles" book speaks of eternal marriages (Chapter 38) as being necessary for exaltation; and only in an eternal marriage may one receive a fullness of joy. D&C 132:16 refers to the LDS Doctrines and Covenants... a collection of modern day revelations, section 132, verse 16.
Ephemeral defined... after all, marriage in the "'til death do us part" sense of the word is but the blink of an eye in the span of eternity. What might a Latter Day Saint who has married "'til death do us part" (as opposed to a temple wedding by the proper priesthood authority) from without expect... hence my poem.
C'ya.
... digg.com
