Loose Leaf Notes

1. “It’s a bench. I feel like I’m in court! – Colleen to Joe, upon seeing that our neighbor’s swing chair overlooking our favorite mountain view was replaced with a bench.

2. The crocus circus has come and gone and now it’s time for the daffodils, which I have referred to in the past as yellow trumpets to wake tight-lipped tulips.

3. Pie is always newsworthy to me:  I heard that the students at Springhouse Community School – the project based high school that my husband Joe is co-founder of – celebrated National Pi Day by eating pie.  I think some math also got done.

5. I love that I don’t know what is happening HERE, but it reminds me of the Rotor that we used to ride on at our town’s amusement park, Paragon Park.

6. I’m nostalgic for pencils / that erased mistakes / that were chewed on in math class / and stuck behind my ear / Like a dime in a loafer / a class ring on a chain / or a pink spongy curler / mistakenly left in my hair … Read the rest of my poem Purple Ink HERE.

7. What happens when you give 100 homeless people cameras? See HERE.

6. A reader just reminded me that the word “talent” is hidden within the word “latent” and that they are one in the same.

8. Not all tears are the same as shown by photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher when during a period of loss wondered if her tears of grief were different than her tears of joy and started photographing them under a microscope.  The project, called the Topography of Tears, can be seen HERE. 

9. Neuroscience has revealed that humans use different parts of the brain when reading from a piece of paper or from a screen. So the more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards “non-linear” reading — a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having your eyes dart around a web page.  More from Your paper brain and your Kindle brain aren’t the same thing HERE. 

10.  Neuroscience also tells us that “if we don’t have a word for something, it turns out that to our perception—which becomes our construction of the universe—it might as well not exist. Our brains are pattern-recognizing engines, built around identifying things that are useful to us and discarding the rest of what we perceive as meaningless noise.”  Research also suggests that our ancestors did not see blue, not the Greeks, not the authors of the Bible and not other ancients.  Egyptians, who were the only culture that could produce blue dyes, were the first ancient civilization to have a word for the color blue.  – Listen to a very cool Radio Lab, Why isn’t the Sky Blue, HERE. 

11. In our Blue Ridge Virginia neighborhood even the view begins with a V.

12. See my four-year-old friend Fisher’s Rainbow Monster Googley Eye Cookie Birthday Cake HERE. 

13. You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.  – Mark Twain

__________Thirteen Thursday