Here’s one of the most important things I’ve learned as a professional writer. If you are doing any kind of write up and have a quote included, no one objects if you make the quote sound better than what you originally received. In fact, the better you make it sound, the more apt they are to remember saying it exactly that way originally.
And the magpies join the family
As I fixed breakfast for the dogs, I heard the familiar knocking at the bottom of my porch door that tells me that the Stellar Jays are tired or waiting for me to bring out breakfast to them. I went to the door, bag of peanuts in hand, only to look down and find two magpies earnestly knocking their beaks against the bottom of the door. I guess they had a meeting with the Stellar Jays and decided to share the responsibility of getting my attention when I was late with breakfast.
My words of wisdom for the day
Every once in a while, every adult should play hooky for a day. It is an absolutely refreshing thing to do. Just don’t eat hot and sour Thai soup as part of the deal unless your stomach is really, really, really ready for it… no matter how good it tastes going down.
Levi and the nuts
How pathetically desperate for attention do you have to be to accept being referred to in all public communications, even those on bad entertainment “news” shows, as Levi, the father of Sarah Palin’s grandson. Shouldn’t a human being want more than that out of life?
Silence can be golden
You don’t hear much about hermits nowadays. I imagine that for many young people brought up amidst the instant and constant “in touch” revolution, the very concept of hermit is more foreign than the concept of a rotary dial. This thought occurred to me about sixty seconds after I narrowly avoided being hit by a woman in a car who was turning while talking on her cell phone. Since that took up one hand, she only had one left for the turn. This made her turn wide, very wide. So wide, in fact, that she came across her two lanes
Yet Hugh Hefner is free
Roman Polanski gets arrested for an admittedly heinous crime committed thirty years ago but Hugh Hefner, who is living with and bedding girls young enough to be his great granddaughters gets a TV show… what is wrong with that picture?
Things I should know better than to do
I didn’t have my glasses on. I saw a black spot in the bathroom sink. Instead of putting my glasses on to see what it was, I just bent my face down close to it. It was a bug. It jumped. I jumped higher. I definitely screamed louder. My heart rate may return to normal in a day or so. Moral to the story… put your glasses on to check little blurry black spots in the bathroom sink.
Sarah’s book
Wow. Palin’s book is already done and 400 pages long. As a writer, I’m impressed that she could write that quickly and that much with such limited material available. I wonder what size font they’re using?
Almonds
My two Senegal parrots like almonds. So each evening, as their treat, they receive one almond in a shell with their dinner. Since it is not always possible to find almonds in a shell here in Anchorage, I went online to find them. But every company I went to seemed to want to charge more for shipping than for the almonds… except for one company. They were reasonable so long as I bought a certain quantity.
I’m telling you this so that when I die and almonds in the shell are found stashed in every nook and cranny all over
Continuing with the anniversary theme
Thirty-seven years ago today I arrived in Barrow. Go ahead… say it… I am just this side of being older than dirt. But I wouldn’t trade the great times I had there and the great friends I made there for anything. To say nothing of how turned on I get when the temps hit fifty below and then the wind chill kicks it into even higher (lower?) numbers. God I love that weather. There is nothing more beautiful than the beach between Browerville and Barrow at midnight on a clear summer day with the sun rolling across the ocean, seals