Loose Leaf Notes

1. We’re all in with summer.

2. At the Small Town Summer Floydfest Sound Check Lucy Woodward and Charlie Hunter’s drummer Keita Ogawa presented a “Porkestra” with three squeaky pigs playing beats. Listen HERE.

3. Also at the Small Town Summer free concert in the park, everyone wanted to dance with little Riley, including me.  She had the moves and I think she was barely two.

4. My grandson Bryce will be taller than me by the end of the summer and my corn already is.

5. Everyone is Talking About Climate Change, But What are We Doing About it? Floyd Takes a Stand… “Floyd students at the Springhouse School made a video inspired by SustainFloyd’s personal climate pledge. It opens with a screen shot of the front page of the New York Times.  The headline: “Global Warming Has Begun, Experts Tell Senate.”  The year is 1988.” -Springhouse Community High School on WVTF public radio HERE.

6. “Helping to build a resilient local economy through agriculture, energy and education” read the SustainFloyd booth banner at the 3rd annual Floyd Energy Fest at Chantilly Farm. The daylong Energy Fest featured speakers, vendors and exhibitors, presentations on renewable energy and technologies, a tiny house tour and panel discussion, local food and kid’s activities, which included nature walks and cooking with solar cookers. – More on the 3rd Annual Floyd Energy Fest HERE.

7. I was thinking that my eyeglasses need windshield wipers because we just had a week of sauna-like weather and they keep steaming up, especially when I’m dancing.

8. Here we are with steamy glasses, cooling down after dancing to the Electric Woodshed at the Pine Tavern.  I call this picture “Joe’s got an afro.”

9.   My friend Katherine Chantal has a new book for sale on Amazon…. The Seven Gateways to Kindness: A Primal and Benevolent Blessing. Here is an excerpt from the introduction I wrote:  “From her Catholic upbringing – where God and the church are the almighty power on high –  to her rejection of the Catholic teaching of “Original Sin” in favor of “Original Blessing,” Chantal has, over time, embraced a personal “native spirituality.”  Her years of study in Asian religions, Goddess cultures, philosophy, Jungian psychology and indigenous people’s approaches to faith has led her to practices in mindfulness, herbal healing, women’s circles and rites of passage ceremonies, which she details in the book…”

10. Card sharks don’t bite HERE.

11. … Love has amnesia / when it comes to storms / My love is a boat / that has saved me – Read Streams That Find Their Way to the Ocean in its entirety HERE.

12. “There is a time and a place for everything. When the ship is sinking and you find yourself in a lifeboat, you don’t argue about where you want to go, you head for the nearest land. Further travel arrangements can wait until you’re back in civilization.” -From a Republican …Don’t mess this up for America – Democrats have one job in 2020:  Beating Donald Trump. Nothing else matters.  More HERE. 

13. “As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.” – e.e. cummings

________Thirteen Thursday