Virginia Breeze

Here’s my first list for the New Year. It’s all about What You Should Not Do in the coming days. It’s about making good use of the opportunity we have been given to start over again and make fewer mistakes.

One. Don’t think that you should start taking cold showers in the year ahead. Why would you even want to try this? Especially since I tried it for you last night and someone almost had to call the rescue squad.

So this is what happened when I turned the wrong handle in the middle of a nice, hot shower. A signal was sent out to the pipes somewhere to shift gears and bring in the icy waters from Lake Michigan. About two seconds later small chunks of ice started flying out of the shower head and hitting me between the eyes. At this moment my body in an instinctual attempt to save itself tried to climb out of the shower through the back wall of the shower stall. Fortunately it did not try to go out through the glass because it might have succeeded. And then I would have been tattooed with glass as well as ice particles.

All of this was over in a couple of seconds and I was finally able to turn the water off. Someone once suggested that cold showers were good for something. That person was joking.

Two. Avoid staying up all night. Because the next day strange things will start happening to your brain. It has been trained to turn off for six or eight hours every day. And it really gets messed up if this doesn’t happen. Sometime during the next day it will decide go offline without your permission. And that could mean trouble if you are in the middle of something important.

There is only one way that I know to stop it from disconnecting on its own after about the 35th hour. Sit at a desk and put your head down. Rest it lightly on your arms and give it the impression that you are sorry about treating it so poorly. Immediately it will cry for joy and head off into dreamland. But before it can get there you need to remove your arms and start banging it with a good deal of force on the table. Do it three or four times but not hard enough to actually crack your skull and expose the little bag of tricks hiding inside. Just shake him up a little and make him worry about something else besides sleep.

Proceed onward until you are ready to go to bed.

Three. Don’t delete important files in your computer. Why would you want to do this? Especially since I also tried it for you this morning and nearly gave myself another heart attack. I was trying to delete unwanted plugins from my blog and accidentally deleted something called “www”. Suddenly files were racing downhill as if some miscreant file eater with green teeth and a long tail had just invaded their space. And they wouldn’t stop! Eventually I had to shut off the program. Then I went back to my blog and this is what I found: Four very short sentences and a lot of white space. So I clicked on one of the four very short sentences and this is what I found: Nothing.

Fortunately some very wise person at my hosting company had advised me earlier to start backing up my blogging stuff in the cpanel. It’s pretty easy to do. And guess what? I uploaded a file and everything came back. Nobody was more surprised then me when this happened.

One thing I have learned in the last six months is to never have hopeful expectations when you click on something. Always expect to come face to face with Lucifer who will be smiling as he holds up all your credit card numbers and your birth certificate. Because you will not be disappointed when you come face to face with a blue screen or a white screen or a purple screen full of rain.

You will be relieved and continue on down the road in this paved with pixels purgatory that we have created for ourselves.

So these are a few helpful reminders for the coming year. There are more but we can save them for another time. Just remember that I care about what happens to you. I don’t know who you are but you seem like a nice person.

Cheers and Happy New Year!

Today I feel gratitude for all of the beauty in this world. Beauty is something that is difficult to define. But we know it when we see it. And it is all around us. When I was young I used to live in the working class neighborhood of Dorchester, Massachusetts. Actually I lived in several different neighborhoods over a period of five years. Near our humble apartment there was a park. In the spring the blossoms would come out. And in our window there were flowers. One day a child was born and she was ever so beautiful. Her mother was beautiful too.

So we were very poor and surrounded by some pretty run down living arrangements but we still surrounded by beauty. Remember the movie Birdman of Alcatraz? A small bird is a very beautiful thing. And beauty sometimes seems more intense when surrounded by things that are not beautiful.

Now I have the opportunity to take photos and try to capture some of this beauty that exists around us. And share it here. But the point really is for us all to be reminded that it is part of life and something that will help us through the day. You may find it in the face of a coworker or the bottom of a stream. It may surprise you in the eyes of your pet or the laugh of a child.

It is all around us and it calls to us to enjoy its presence. Because it is here for us.

And we should be grateful for this.

When I was a teenager up in a little town in Central Massachusetts we always watched the Boston Patriots play on Sunday. Football was not the refined sport, science, art, industry, (fill in your own word) that it is today. It was more like what you would see on Saturday down at the local high school. The players were a lot bigger of course but they slogged around in the mud at times and they didn’t have all the fancy equipment.

Last night the New England Patriots reached a place where only one other team in the history of the NFL has gone. And they did it against a Giant team that exhibited a tremendous amount of spirit and was determined to keep them from reaching their goal.

As I said a couple of days ago that it is Spirit that wins football games. All of these guys are good. The coaches are good and any team can beat any other team on a given day if the stars are aligned in their favor. And if they are sky high with enthusiasm and motivation to play well it can move things in their favor.

And the Giants almost did beat one of the two best teams in the history of this sport because they didn’t rest their players or worry about getting hurt. They will take that knowledge into the playoffs and it will help them a great deal. How would they feel if they had lost 30-6? Also they knew that if they were going to do well in the playoffs they would have to play the Patriots again. So like a prize fighter they spent a few rounds trying to take them down a notch or two. And they did well. I expect they may play again this season.

If the Cowboys have any sense they will do the same thing when they play the Redskins today. I don’t expect that they will. And I hope they don’t because the Redskins are one of my two teams. Like the banner?

We will see shortly whether the Cowboys are ready for a team with a lot of spirit and willingness to leave it all on the field. The Redskins have been through a lot this year. And they are not going to be “resting” later today. You really can’t rest this time of year because the playoffs are on Baby!

They started last night.

It’s calling me too. Where do I go to find it?

http://behindlens.blogspot.com/2007/08/jog-falls.html