Beauchemin Lumber Yard

Beauchemin Lumber https://www.beaucheminlumber.com/ is so great. Not only did they let me bring my dog into the lumber yard, they cut the wood for me so I could walk home carrying it.

Bruce Malter

Remember to turn your clocks back 1 hour on Sunday at 2:00 a.m. People in Virginia will turn their clocks back 50 years. 

Bruce Malter

utterly and hopelessly

“For people to be in the state of mind where they are utterly and hopelessly detached from reality opens up very dangerous possibilities for what that individual may do going forward,” Holt said. source

Jung

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people. 

Carl Jung

Kurt Vonnegut

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." 

— Kurt Vonnegut

Shake Off

 I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. 

Anne Frank

Jack Dann

 For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I'm surprised where the journey takes me. 

Jack Dann

Cow Burps

There’s a simple fix for the emissions in cow’s burps: Just give them a little seaweed

One dairy cow burps the same amount of emissions as a car. Seaweed can cut that in half.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90691267/theres-a-simple-fix-for-emissions-causing-cow-burps-just-give-them-a-little-seaweed

I tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.

 Nina Simone

You've got to learn to leave the table When love's no longer being served

You've Got to Learn

You've got to learn to show a happy face
Although you're full of misery
You mustn't show a trace of sadness
Never look for sympathy 

 

You've got to learn although it's very hard
The way of pocketing your pride
Sometimes face humiliation
While you were burning up inside
Facing reality is often hard to do
When it seems happiness is gone

 

You've got to learn to hide your tears
And tell your heart life must go on

 

You've got to learn to leave the table
When love's no longer being served
To show everybody that you're able
To leave without saying a word

 

You've got to learn to hide your sorrow
And go on living as before
What good is thinking of tomorrow
Who knows what it may have in store

 

You've got to learn to be much stronger
At times your head must rule your heart

 

You've got to learn from hard experience
And listen to advice
And sometimes pay the price
And learn to live with a broken heart

 

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Charles Aznavour / English Lyric / Marcel Stellman / Original French Text And

You've Got to Learn lyrics © T.R.O. Inc.

Nina Simone

The pressure of show business is on all the time and show business is a fickle business. Whatever is popular now - that's all that counts. I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I'm doing and why.

Nina Simone

Bathrobe Lady

"It's bathrobe lady," I said. "She always stands out on the sidewalk in front of her apartment in her burgundy bathrobe smoking cigarettes and ranting into her cell-phone."

"Is she a racoleuse?" My friend asked me when dropping me off.

"A prostitute? No. She just treats the sidewalk as her front porch."

Dancing with Ghosts

I absolutely loathe holidays because everyone is dancing with their ghosts, mirages, broken promises, dashed expectations of holidays past, including me. There is no cure except swimming, writing, reading, baking or taking a long walk. This too shall pass.

John Thorne

Traditionally, Matt and I get Chinese takeout for Thanksgiving, a holiday I actively dislike. Despite its name, Thanksgiving is really the Family Holiday. Even Christmas pales beside it: that day's focus is on giving and receiving even more than togetherness. Strangely though, being alone on Christmas is to be almost hauntingly empty; you feel like a ghost. But being alone on Thanksgiving is rather wonderful, like not attending a party that you didn't want to go to and where no one will realize you're not there. At Thanksgiving, you gather with your family and stuff yourself with food as if it were love—or the next best thing —then stagger back to your regular life, oversatiated and wrung out. Christmas, however, creates expectations that are never met, so you leave hungry and depressed, with an armload of things you didn't want and can't imagine why anyone would think you did.

-John Thorne

Fernando Botero Quotes

• “When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.”
  

  -- Fernando Botero

• “Art is a spiritual, immaterial respite from the hardships of life.”
  -- Fernando Botero

• “An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.”
  -- Fernando Botero

• “I describe in a realistic form a nonrealistic Reality.”
  -- Fernando Botero

• “Man needs spiritual expression and nourishing... even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves.”
  -- Fernando Botero

• “A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty. And man needs spiritual expression and nourishing. It's why even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves. Man needs music, literature, and painting-all those oases of perfection that make up art-to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.”
  -- Fernando Botero

• “I'm a tireless worker; I don't consider painting a work, it is not an obligation, I do it for pleasure; I haven't found anything that amuses me more than painting.”
  -- Fernando Botero

• “A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty.”
  -- Fernando Botero

• “I work more now perhaps because I know that there is so little time left.”
  -- Fernando Botero

• “Sculptures permit me to create real volume One can touch the forms, one can give them smoothness, the sensuality that one wants.”
  -- Fernando Botero

• “Man needs music, literature, and painting - all those oases of perfection that make up art - to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.”
  -- Fernando Botero

• “In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.”
  -- Fernando Botero

• “I create my subjects somehow visualizing them in my style. I start as a poet, put the colors and composition down on canvas as a painter, but finish my work as a sculptor taking delight in caressing the forms.”
  -- Fernando Botero

• “I often think about death and it saddens me to leave this world and not be able to paint more. I love it so much,”
  -- Fernando Botero

• “The richness of an artist is the fusion of influences that have shaped his life and work.”
  -- Fernando Botero

Botero Documentary (Trailer)

https://www.vimooz.com/2020/05/07/botero-definitive-documentary-on-popular-artist-fernando-botero-gets-virtual-release/

Hydrate, Hydrate, Hydrate

 Keeping a healthy weight is a worthwhile goal at any age. As you get older, it can get trickier.

You might not be burning calories like you did when you were younger, but you can still take off extra pounds.

The golden rules of weight loss still apply:

• Burn more calories than you eat or drink.
• Eat more veggies, fruits, whole grains, fish, beans, and low-fat or fat-free dairy; and keep meat and poultry lean.
• Limit empty calories, like sugars and foods with little or no nutritional value.
• Avoid fad diets because the results don't last.

There are some other things you need to do if you're over 60 and want to lose weight.

1. Stay Strong

You lose muscle mass as you age. Offset that by doing strength training. You can use weight machines at a gym, lighter weights you hold in your hands, or your own body weight for resistance like in yoga or Pilates. Keeping your muscle mass is key to burning more calories, says Joanna Li, RD, a nutritionist at Foodtrainers in New York.

2. Eat More Protein

Because you're at risk for losing muscle mass, make sure your diet includes about one gram of protein to every kilogram (2.2 pounds) of body weight. "Protein also keeps you full for longer, so that helps with weight loss efforts," Li says. She recommends wild salmon, whole eggs, organic whey protein powder, and grass-fed beef.

3. Hydrate, Hydrate, Hydrate

Drink plenty of water. Sometimes, thirst masks itself as hunger. As you get older, you may not be as quick to notice when you're thirsty, Li says. She says you should get 64 ounces (2 quarts) of water a day. You can drink it or get part of it from foods that are naturally rich in water, such as cucumbers and tomatoes. If you're not sure if you're getting enough water, check your urine: It should be pale yellow.

4. Outsmart Your Metabolism

Eat more small meals and snacks, and don't go much longer than 3 hours without eating. "Because your metabolism is already slow, if you're starving yourself, it just gets slower," Li says. You may need fewer calories than you did when you were younger. Ask your doctor or a registered dietitian about that. "If you're eating the same way you did when you were 25, you're definitely going to be gaining," Li says. source

The Thought Police Keep Trying

 Oppression and control at Texas libraries.

NIGHTMARE: books have become a battlefield in Texas

Ethel and Lucy must save the children of Texas! Open bakery with back room secret banned book libraries! (become bootleggers of literary prohibition). A noble cause!

Dream

I was going to work for ALFORNO'S again.

I told the owner Joanne that I made a recording of opening and closing the little drawers on Crozier's birds eye maple tool chest. She knew him too. During the interview to be a server I wasn't wearing a bra, so I covered my chest so I wouldn't jiggle. Everyone on staff kissed me hello. Julie Fischer was there. I remembered how much I love restaurant work.

Driving on the highway there were motorized hay bales going the wrong way. What the hell? "Oh, it's the end of the parade. Been there! They're all feeling like get me outta here!"

Run for your Life!

The neighbor's leaf blower blared under her bedroom window. She grabbed a pair of clean blue jeans out of the middle drawer of her oak dresser. As she jammed her foot into the leg of her pants she felt a ball of cloth caught. Underpants. Clean. She laughed.

She had to hurry and escape the annoying sound. "Sparky, let's Go!" they ran out the door and ran and ran and eventually arrived at the pond. When she imagined that it would be safe to come home she turned around and they walked back. 

She always needed silence to think but she needed the city to stimulate her imagination.