I wrote this as a comment to my last post and then realized it was good material for a post on its own:
My cousin Sam does amazing photography with a digital camera and a scanner.
He somehow arranges the flowers on the scanner and perhaps covers it
with black cloth to get an entirely black background. His mother is an incredible gardener, so he always has beautiful flowers to photograph.
I'm lucky enough
to be on his distribution list for interesting photos that he takes.
He's also a mailman and he carries his camera all the time, so he gets
great shots of flowers, dogs, birds and other strange stuff along his
route. I'm partial to Golden Retrievers and there must be one on his route because it shows up occasionally.
The other day a guest was heading out for lunch and he said, "We're off to see the wizard." Which, of course, resulted in a song popping into my head and staying there for hours. And what was that little gem? "Come out, come out, wherever you are, and meet the young lady who fell from a star," in that high-pitched quavery voice of Billie Burke. I've seen her in other movies, and that voice is really annoying, except in the role of Glinda, the good witch. There, it fits.
What do you do when you have a song stuck in your head? Try to force it out with a different song, of course. What did I come up with? The "Hokey Pokey." Gah!
I was just reading one of my new favorite blogs, The Dry Spot. He was talking about having "when it says, Libbys, Libbys, Libbys on the label, label, label..." stuck in his head. Great. When I go to bed, I'll have that one carousing through my few remaining gray cells for the duration of the night.
When our guest returned from lunch, I asked if he happened to bring me back any brains. I had meant to ask him to get me some, seeing as how he was off to see the wizard and all, but I forgot.
We're eating breakfast outside every day, which is really nice with all the birds and flowers.
Even as recently as last week, I would arrive to make the coffee at 7:00, and it would be 59 degrees. I would open the windows and the front door, and we would have cooler breezes. We didn't have to close up everything and turn up the air conditioner until early afternoon.
This morning it was already 70 degrees at 7:00 a.m. By 10:15 we had to close the windows and the air conditioner was starting to run. It was 77 degrees and 59% humidity, which to people here is getting to be dang uncomfortable. Wimps. They should try living somewhere where it gets to 95 degrees and 98% humidity. A number of places east of the Mississippi come to mind.
Q: What did people in the southwest do in the days before air conditioning? A: Not much.
I've had two occasions recently where someone I know is having a little problem with ethics. Not only did they not consider what they did was unethical in the first place, but they still couldn't understand how it was unethical when it was explained to them.
Ethics all goes back to that sense of right and wrong. Either you have it hammered into you when you're a kid or you never quite get that lesson, so ethical behavior becomes a gray area, sometimes even fades into nonexistence.
And it has to start when you're very young. Each situation builds on the previous ones so you can start filling in those gray areas and learn to figure out yourself why something is right or wrong. It takes loving, patient parents to explain why what you did was wrong, not just "because I said so, that's why."
It takes strength to stick to the moral high ground and do the right thing, even when it costs us something. The tough part is not letting those little "fudge" incidents creep in. A little cheating here, a little lie there, a little fudge now and then. The next thing you know, you can't see the path any more. The best way is not to start at all. As someone once told me long ago, "I don't have to worry about getting caught at something, so I can sleep at night."
Be honest. Do the right thing. If something feels wrong, it probably is. Simple, right? Is it really that hard to be ethical?
Generally speaking, the harder a job is to do, the more the person doing it should get paid. If being ethical is hard work, I need to get paid more.
Happy birthday to my mother today, who is now in the hospital recovering from knee replacement surgery. Dad said everything went very well. Six weeks from now she gets her other knee done.
When I was talking to her over the weekend, I commented about her birthday "present." She said it was better than last year's anniversary gift, which was a root canal.
As I look ahead at my own life, it gives me something to look forward to, eh?
While driving around today doing errands, we heard a radio commercial. It didn't really get my attention until I heard that "these diamonds are made in the U.S."
Eh? The last I knew, we don't have any diamond mines in this country. Maybe not even in this hemisphere.
Then it went on to talk about diamonds in blue, pink and yellow. Oh, I get it, they're manufactured diamonds. Now, those can be made in this country.
And what's the name of these spiffy gems? The Conscience Collection. I guess these diamonds don't involve extremely hard manual labor of poor Africans to mine them or the wars over the mines, or the money, ah, always the money, isn't it?
The website is kind of a hoot and really expands on the whole non-exploitation, environmentally friendly theme.
My parting comment was that they may have a tough time with the radio ads because lots of people can't even come close to correctly spelling "conscience."
Lutherans are a pretty low-key bunch. Except for Martin Luther himself, who made a great show by nailing his theses on the church door and starting the whole Protestant movement, Lutherans don't really go in for big dramatic displays. I've often joked that the term "evangelical Lutheran" is an oxymoron. A rousing sermon that prompts loud "amens" from the congregation will send a Lutheran quietly heading for the door.
In spite of their religious background, a bunch of Lutherans have actually become famous. Here's a great song video exposing a few of them. Be sure to have the sound on.
I've been floundering in negative space lately: I fired a housekeeper, we had some difficult guests who caused both damage and aggravation, and we spent nearly every available minute in May working to clean up the mess left by last year's association board.
Everyone talks about the bad things that happen, the idiots and incompetents in the world, right? We call it "venting," so we can get it out of our system, maybe have someone lend a sympathetic ear.
But it seemed that the more I said things out loud, the more all the negative stuff compounded. It feeds on itself and simply gets bigger.
So today I resolved not to say anything negative out loud. That's not to say I didn't think a few negative things. But I just wanted to not say negative things out loud.
And you know what? I felt better all day. I tried to stay neutral about things in my mind or at least say, "oh, well, we'll have to work on that a little more."
It's like the scene from The Birdcage where a dancer in rehearsal says "I don't get it." Robin Williams goes on to demonstrate the range of choreographic interpretations the dancer can use, cavorting and displaying his wide range of impressionistic talents:
"You do an eclectic celebration of a dance! You do Fosse, Fosse, Fosse! You do Martha Graham, Martha Graham, Martha Graham, or Twyla! Twyla! Twyla! or Michael Kidd, Michael Kidd, Michael Kidd, Michael Kidd, or Madonna, Madonna, Madonna! ... but keep it all inside."
If I can keep that mental image, I can even giggle about it, which will help me be more positive about keeping it all inside.
What in the world was I reading? I found a note I had made from a book I was reading for the following:
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle:
"The act of observation will ultimately affect the thing being observed."
The Wikipedia entry has to do with quantum physics, and I know I wasn't reading about that. Well, maybe it was mentioned in some oblique way.
I was probably thinking about the statement as it might pertain to just about anything else--business, politics, whatever. Doesn't everyone behave differently when they know someone is watching?
I wrote this as a comment to my last post and then realized it was good material for a post on its own:
