Loose Leaf Notes

1. I recently read Joe a bedtime poem.  It was a new poem, ironically titled “When Sleep Plays Hard to Get,” which Joe doesn’t have a problem with.  “That’s brilliant,” he said when I was done.  I read him a second new poem, and when I finished, he was silent.  Or was he just speechless?

2. After a minute, with no response, I said out loud (to myself), “Was that one so good that it just knocked you out, or did it just put you to sleep?” A poetry overdose. We laughed about it the next day.

3. Margaret Atwood calls the element of surprise in a story, the pivot upon which the question of ”art” turns. ”Nevertheless,” she declares, ”art happens. It happens when you have the craft and the vocation and are waiting for something else, something extra, or maybe not waiting; in any case, it happens. It’s the extra rabbit coming out of the hat, the one you didn’t put there.”

4. Recently someone said “OK Boomer” to me and it reminded me when I was 7 years old and visiting my grandparent in Florida when someone called me a Yankee, a divisive term I hadn’t heard before and didn’t identify with.

5. According to THIS, “ok boomer” is an ageist catchphrase and internet meme that gained popularity throughout 2019, used to dismiss or mock attitudes stereotypically attributed to the baby boomer generation.

6. “Bacon is the best alarm clock,” I said after waking up to the smell of bacon Saturday morning.

7. My grandsons Bryce and Liam (11 and 9), recently slept over and made Joe and I breakfast in the morning.  I said, “You guys are so grown up now. I don’t have to take care of you anymore.”  Liam said, “We take care of you,” and I answered, “We take care of each other.”

8. “Your pie took the cake!” That’s what I wanted to tell my friend Wenona after having a slice of her pecan bourbon pie at Dogtown’s 4th annual Community Thanksgiving PotLuck last night.

9. From a promising first impression / to a string of false starts / It’s always a blind date / when sleep plays hard to get… Read the rest of this poem HERE.

10. When Scrabble and Scrambled Eggs are What’s for Breakfast- with whiffs and dancing gifs HERE.

11. Black Friday Holiday Message HERE.

12. When I grew up we had the “blue laws” (stores were closed on Sunday) but no “black Friday.”

13. Quantum Experiment Sees Two Versions Of Reality Existing At The Same Time- While science is the best tool we have to understand reality, the effects and limitations of the observers have been known for a long time. Relativity has shown that observers may not experience simultaneous events at the same time. Quantum mechanics tell us that observers influence their experiments. Now it appears that, at least at the quantum level, two different realities can both be real at once.  More HERE.

_________Thirteen Thursday