Loose Leaf Notes

1. My New Year motto: 2026 and so much to fix.

2. Or: In one year and out the other.

3. We went to a soft opening at the Plum House Noodle Bar this weekend. The official opening is this Friday. Call 745-Plum for a reservation… Full story and photos at Floyd Times.

4. Purple was some of the light show color effects at our local Dogtown New Year’s Eve bash. Full story HERE.

5. Joe and I got Christmas presents from eachother that we had no idea what they were. He got two things that looked like hooked boomerangs in a box that read ‘Focus on seat gap storage box.” It turned out to be ‘seat clearance plugs’ for a car’s space between the driver’s seat and the console where stuff falls through and is hard to retrieve. I got a vintage tea kettle with a hole on the bottom and a hole in the front above something that looked like a distiller spigot. It turned out to be a repurposed birdhouse.

6. Purple Rain or Purple  Haze?

7. We’ve been listening to the Telepathy Tapes, “a popular 2024 documentary podcast by Ky Dickens that explores claims of telepathy, particularly among non-speaking autistic individuals who communicate through facilitated spelling, raising questions about shared consciousness, hidden abilities and the limitations of science versus personal experience.

8. “The morphic field hypothesis proposes that minds are systems of fields that are located inside brains but also extend far beyond them, just as the fields of magnets are both within magnets and extend invisibly beyond them, and as the electromagnetic fields of mobile telephones are both within them and extend beyond them. Minds are extended beyond brains in every act of perception…”  From Can Morphic Fields Help to Explain Telepathy and the Sense of Being Stared At? by Rupert Sheldrake

9. “The Telepathy Tapes podcast investigates a controversial yet compelling area of inquiry: observational reports of nonspeaking individuals with autism who appear to demonstrate telepathic abilities. As part of the project team, my primary role was to collect and analyze EEG data during these demonstrations. In addition to this technical work, I have personally observed five nonspeaking autistic individuals consistently achieve near-perfect accuracy on telepathy-based tasks involving randomly selected words and numbers. In each case, responses were spelled out using letter boards—with no physical contact from facilitators—and, in many instances, under testing conditions specifically designed to significantly minimize the possibility of conscious or unconscious cueing. This situation is not without precedent in the history of science. Consider savant syndrome, in which individuals—often with autism or other neurological conditions—demonstrate extraordinary abilities in areas like math, memory, music, or art, often without formal training. These abilities once seemed impossible to explain but are now recognized as legitimate expressions of atypical brain function and are actively studied. Dr. Jeff Tarrant, Psychology Today 

10. “While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.” -Herman Hesse

11. I’ve always liked purple. When I was 13, I paired this (left) blouse with a purple skirt and wore it a lot.  This was right before my left eyebrow and eyelashes and streak of hair went white (segmental vitiligo). The hairdo was called “the bubble.”

12. And the below one, taken some 40 years later is titled “I Call My Latest Halloween Get Up “The Real Me.”

13. On Dec. 10, Floyd Times released its first hardcopy — a Special Holiday Edition —for free to reach more county residents and make our mission clear: “To inform and connect the people of Floyd County and its surrounding region” and “to deliver local news to power civic engagement and highlight a wide range of community voices…” …Our goal for 2026 is to better what we’re already doing by increasing accessibility, adding more regular content, establishing a print schedule, and providing clear, comprehensive coverage of local government happenings, particularly throughout the budget season.

To do this — and to do it well — we need your help. Check out Floyd Times HERE and consider subscribing or donating to this local cause. ________Thirteen Thursday