I'm Just Visiting This Planet

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. The force of character is cumulative. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance If ‘the voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks,’ then it is more genuine to be present today than to recount yesterdays. How would you describe today using only one sentence? Tell today’s sentence to one other person. Repeat each day. I am overwhelmed by my responsibilities and feel that I'm not up to the tasks that face me.

I’m participating in the Trust 30 Challenge in honor of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 208 th birthday-you can learn more here . Here’s today’s prompt and my response: We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live. 1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes. 2. Write the story that has to be written. I just learned that I have fifteen minutes to live-fifteen minutes! What’s my story? First I tell Anne how much I love her and how my life has been enriched just by being around her, and how lucky I am that she has chosen to spend the last almost 28 years with me-that I am a totally different person because of her, more creative, looser and more "myself” than I ever would have been without her. Then I call my father and thank him for all the gifts he has given me; my persistence (some might call it stub...

Just when I thought I knew "everything" David Pogue proves me wrong. My favorite trick from his Thursday column is the ability to create a web receipts file and a pdf from an on-line receipt --who knew? Certainly not me!

I've been on a bit of a movie jag lately. Saw " The Fighter " this past weekend, and " True Grit " the weekend before that. Two excellent movies, and I'm listening to Arcade Fire 's The Suburbs-aren't I hip? ---------------- Now playing: Arcade Fire - Modern Man via FoxyTunes I'm preparing for the Academy Awards, I even have my very own ballot! And unlike other years, I've seen 70% of the movies nominated for best movie. I don't think I can sit through Black Swan, no matter how good Natalie Portman is, just give her the Oscar and be done with it. I didn't like Winter's Bone-too slow, too sad, too bleak for me. And Toy Story 3 might be a Netflix Instant Play one of these nights. Hey, I think I like Arcade Fire, and if I bought the mp3 from them, instead of Amazon, I'd saved $1.50! Oh well, it's only money. See you at the movies!

We took a trip up to Amherst this December with Vicki and Kristine to visit Emily Dickinson's house , on the occasion of her birthday . Since we were celebrating her birthday, I thought it would be fitting to also visit her grave , so we did that, too. Unfortunately this would be the last birthday celebration of this type at the house, since the anonymous benefactor has decided to reveal himself and stop handing out roses. Here's an article from December 19, 2010 from The Boston Globe: For the love of Dickinson A young man’s love of Emily Dickinson’s poetry blossomed into a tradition almost as mysterious as the woman herself. Now the anonymous donor of roses to celebrate the poet’s birthday has unmasked himself. For the past 13 years, James Fraser, a retired physicist living in Acton, has bought roses to commemorate the poet’s birth on Dec. 10, 1830. During the open house at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst held on the Saturday closest to her birthday, roses hav...

Anne and I took a day off and went to The New York Botanical Gardens to see the Emily Dickinson's garden exhibit. It was fabulous-the videos on the web site show how the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory was transformed into this wonderful replica (albeit in minature) of what Dickinson's garden might have looked like. I especially liked the way her poetry was connected to the flowers and plant life-look at this one. I also loved the flowers: foxglove, snapdragon, marigolds, peas-look at these: the picture doesn't really do them justice. These are called "Schizanthus", poor-man's-orchid-this particular type is called Angel Wing's Mix-how's that for a name? According to Wikipedia , this plant is in the nightshade family. The foxglove were absolutely stunning-look at the photos below. And in addition to the poetry there were little "factoids" about the plants-things like when they were introduced to America, and what the plants meant in Victor...

Hard to believe that our wonderful week in Virginia Beach is coming to an end. We've biked, hiked, taken a garden/house tour, rested on the beach and eaten at Waterman's four out of five dinners (or something like that). Last night I dreamed that I was too tired to go back to work-wonder what that means!