Loose Leaf Notes

1.  My 2 year old Grandson Liam didn’t fall far from the tree.

2. The county of Kildare in Ireland means “Church in the Oaks” in Gaelic.

3. Best line heard at the recent TEDxFloyd on the environment:  “Your home is not Las Vegas. What happens in your home doesn’t stay there. When you waste energy and use energy inefficiently it affects all of us.   ~ Billy Weitzenfeld, director of the Association of Energy Conservation Professionals

4. After another blogger asked me what form I wrote THIS poem in, I went on a search to find out.   In the past I have called my short poem persuasion “mutant haiku,” and I’m not one for following forms, but after she asked I looked to see if there was a more standard descriptive term.   The closest I could find was a quatrain, a four line poem. Quatrains can also be used to refer to a four line stanza. They appear in numerous forms and can be seen from the poetic traditions of a variety of ancient civilizations such as Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and China.  Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems are quatrains, usually rhyming on the second and forth lines.

5. My short poems could also fall under the category of newer genres, such as micropoetry or twaiku, aka as twitter poetry.   Some could be lunes (American haiku), which makes good sense since so many of my poems are about the moon.   

6. While watching dramatic dance video clips from the recent OneStoplight Variety Show, like THIS one, I noticed that my head and shoulders kept moving with the dancer, the way my mouth used to open for my babies when I fed them baby food with a spoon.

7. I became a blood sister with the land where I live when I was clearing some brambles and pricked my finger on a thorn.

8. “There’s the you that you present to the world and then there’s the real one and, if you’re lucky, there’s not a huge difference between those two people.” David Sedaris

9. David’s explanation on how he came to name his new book, “Exploring Diabetes with Owls,” which makes perfect sense to me:   I was signing books a couple of years ago, and I was signing for this woman who wanted me to write something specific in the book.  I just picture every book winding up at Goodwill, and I don’t have a problem with that, but I don’t want someone at Goodwill opening one of my books and then seeing an inscription that says: Keep laughing. I would never write that in someone’s book, right.   And I would never read a book in which somebody had inscribed keep laughing. So this woman wanted me to write to her daughter: Explore your possibilities. And I said, well, I’ll keep the word explore. And then I wrote: let’s explore diabetes – then I thought I’m not done yet – with owls. And then I thought: That’s the title of my book. So that’s where the title came out of. And I’ve got to tell you, I’m so pleased with it as a book title. I love hearing other people say it.

10. I posted this photo of the April full moon on Facebook with the caption: One of these glowing balls of light is the moon in downtown Floyd last night.

11. The moon has its ups and downs.

12. Another great line, spoken at Floyd’s first TEDx came from Jason Rutledge, who has a passion for forest restoration and is a horse logger: “Horses are renewable. Nobody ever woke up and found a baby tractor in the barn.”  Watch some of the TEDxFloyd HERE.

13. Storing nuts the woodpecker way HERE.