Loose Leaf Notes

1. I could have gotten more points at last week’s Scrabble game with another play, but I went out with the word “WON” because I actually won the game and it was fun to play the word.

2. It’s been a long time since I won anything. In 2005, I participated in a poetry slam at The London Underground in Blacksburg and won $100! more than ready for some innuendo and comic relief with my poem Scrabble Lover. More HERE.

3. In 2008, I was one of three players from our informal group representing Floyd in a Scrabble Tournament to benefit the Literacy Volunteers of Roanoke. We took home first prize and each won a $50 gift certificate at Barnes and Noble! More HERE. 

4. Writing is my cottage industry. More HERE. 

5. This week’s Scrabble Scramble

7. Are people with dementia simply on a different dimension?

8. “Could the long-sought Theory of Everything be merely missing a component that was too close for us to have noticed?  Some of the thrill that came with the announcement that the human genome had been mapped or the idea that we are close to understanding the “Big Bang” rests in our innate human desire for completeness and totality.  But most of these comprehensive theories fail to take into account one crucial factor: We are creating them. It is the biological creature that fashions the stories, that makes the observations, and that gives names to things. And therein lies the great expanse of our oversight, that science has not confronted the one thing that is at once most familiar and most mysterious — consciousness.” Robert Lanza

9. “Undeniably it is the biological creature that makes the observations and creates the theories. Our entire education system in all disciplines, the construction of our language, revolve around a bottom-line mindset that assumes a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived on a very temporary basis. It is further assumed that we accurately perceive this external pre-existing reality and play little or no role in its appearance. However, starting in the 1920s, the results of experiments have shown just the opposite. The observer critically influences the outcome. An electron turns out to be both a particle and a wave but how and, more importantly, where such a particle will be located remains dependent upon the very act of observation.” Robert Lanza

10. My dad used to always say, “My home is my castle,” and now that’s my motto too.

11. Transplanting perennials is quite an operation. I use plenty of water. I dig down deep and try to avoid cutting the roots. Then I carry them carefully, place them in the pre-dug holes, monitor their vitals and watch for days to see if they took. Meanwhile my hands are covered in mud instead of blood. I hold them up like an operating doctor as I walk from garden to garden.

12. I heart gardening and Scrabble.

13. Check out THIS heart shaped stoplight that is intended to evoke positive feelings among drivers in Iceland.

________Thirteen Thursday