Loose Leaf Notes

1. For me, as a virus long hauler for 40 years, “spring fever” is a real thing. As the temperature and sap rises so does my low-grade fever.

2. As a wallflower, I don’t talk to walls, but I do talk to flowers. I tell them they’re pretty and that they make me happy.

3. Reveille: Shrill daffodil / Bright yellow yell / A trumpet / for tight-lipped tulips

4. Everyone who posed at Allister’s birthday photo booth was numero uno for a few minutes. See HERE. 

5. My dad, whose birthday was on the first day of spring, had two answers for ‘how are you?’ The good day answer was ‘I got out of bed. I’m ahead of the game.’ The bad day answer was ‘It’s a rocky boat.’

6. “People live at the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

7. Every experiment is affected by the experimenter and nothing is one thing or the other. Recently I was thinking how I can never see my own face, only its reflection and wondered if how I see the world is only my projection through my limited instrument, eyes etc. The artist Gauguin said, “I close my eyes to see.” I do too, or sometimes squint. Check out Quantum Physics explained in five minutes HERE.

8. This call may be monitored / This call may be dropped / from a landline sinking / on an iceberg floating / as the planet unravels / like a spool of thread / and you can’t move the needle / or pull the frayed edge through… More from Don’t Hang Up HERE.

9. “A day of spring appeared out of nowhere, trees blooming in the park, a troop of tiny kiddos roped together with teachers fore and aft, sociable dogs, and yellow daffodils in bloom, though I’m not a botanist, and maybe they were begonias but to me they’re daffodils because begonias sound like pneumonia and so Wordsworth and Herrick wrote poems about daffodils. Let’s just assume that’s true.” Garrison Keillor

10. I call the above photo “Ringing in the Spring.” It was taken in 2018 but could have been Saturday.

11. I “facelifted” the first photo here from Allister’s mom, which means I copied and pasted it from her Facebook page because her shot came out much better than mine.

12. And I wrote this on St. Patrick’s Day in 2013: The closest I came to wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day was brushing my teeth with my green toothbrush and drinking a stinging nettles infusion.

13.  I consider St. Patrick’s Day my blog anniversary date (17 years!), which is part of the reason it’s green and why my blog profile picture was taken in Glendalough Ireland and shows me with a shamrock pinned to my Irish sweater. More HERE. 

____________Thirteen Thursday