40 Days of Lent: Day Eleven

I'm listening to Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suites performed by Yo Yo Ma. Ma recorded them twice. I'm listening to the first recording and I can say without hyperbole that it is one of my favorite pieces of music, if not the favorite.

I just found my copy of the cd after not being able to find it for a couple of years. My apartment isn't messy per se, but my books, dvds and most of my cds are not in any real order. Every so often, I would search throughout the apartment, look at every shelf slowly, rummage carefully through my piles of cds in search of this album.

Yesterday was not a great day and I was carrying the residual stress this morning, which meant fruitlessly arguing with people in my head. On my way to my computer, I looked at a shelf that I've looked at a thousand times over the last few years...and there was my Bach cd. It's like a little zen parable: you'll find something when you need it but not before. Perhaps the invisible gremlins I live with or my sentient apartment recognized I needed a pick me up and decided to return the cd. Whatever happened, I am happy right now. I could listen to these pieces forever and never tire of them.

40 Days of Lent: Day Ten

Overheard while walking to work this morning:

Toddler Chatterbox: ...so that means there are three people in my class with broken phones.

Father: Mmm.

Toddler Chatterbox:  Daddy, do you want to know who they are?  It's Anna, Sasha and Jack B.

And on and on the kid went, speaking in one long unbroken sentence.  I wish I could have heard more.  It would have been worth being late to work.  I especially liked the fact that the kid is learning pattern recognition, finding a common thread between otherwise unrelated phenomena.  I hope I cross paths with this kid and his father again, if for no other reason than to see if the list of broken phones continues and reaches epidemic proportions.

40 Days of Lent: Day Seven

40 Days of Lent: Day Six

Edward Gorey Tarot Cards

Oh, this is just too perfect.  Two things I love that go great together.  If ever I get another tattoo, it might be an image by Gorey. Perhaps one of these.

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/edward_goreys_tarot_card_set

Thanks to John Nelka for alerting me to this.

40 Days of Lent: Day Five

From Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways.

40 Days of Lent: Day Four

Some of my recent postings on Facebook that deserve a permanent home here:

My boss is planning on going on a tour of old homes in the UK this spring. The tour is being organized by a gentleman whose last name is Savage. 

I've been taking great pleasure in writing memos and creating calendar items with subjects like “Savage Tour of British Houses” and “Trip to England with the Savages.”

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I guess it's time for a trip to the optometrist, perhaps a new pair of reading glasses. Tonight I read the passage "just before I left for Boston, he asked me to contact him on my return" as "just before I left for Boston, he asked me to contact him on my rectum." 

Yeah, sorta changes the meaning of the sentence.

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For the past couple of months, I've been meeting a group of people on Tuesday nights to play movie trivia at a bar. Yesterday, a number of us went to see "Paddington" with one of our group bringing his wife and their young daughter. It was the first time she had been to a movie theater. 

I'd like to think when she gets older and someone asks her what was the first movie she saw in a theater, she'll say "Paddington. I saw it with my mommy and daddy...and eight of daddy's friends."

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I'm one of the few people at work this afternoon and I notice that we don't have any water on our floor. Not from our faucet in the kitchen, not in the toilets in the bathroom. Yuck.

So I head downstairs to ask the maintenance man if the building has shut off the water prematurely for the holiday. He tells me no - there is water on some of the lower floors but with barely any pressure. The problem isn't within our building but outside. Perhaps the water has been decreased by the city, or as he puts it in his thick eastern European accent, "the State."

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I was all set to leave work for the day but then Pandora began playing "The Killing Moon" by Echo and the Bunnymen. 

So it looks like I'm here for a few more minutes at least. 

It reminds me of when I was a kid and my father would drive my sister and I to school. If there was a song playing on the radio that we liked when we arrived at school, we would sit in the car with the engine running and radio playing until the song was over.

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This is today's weather forecast on Yahoo.  Should I be worried?  How do I dress for this?

40 Days of Lent: Day Three

So my Lenten resolutions are the same as they usually are: posting something on this blog for the 40 days, and no cursing.  I gave up cursing for Lent and yes, I'm not doing so well.  What happens is that each time I curse, I either think or say "oh, shouldn't say that.  I gave up cursing for Lent."  I don't think I curse that much but it has proven to be more difficult than I anticipated.

Writing on this blog has proven tougher than expected, too.  To wit: I don't really feel like I have anything to say.  The discipline of having to post something online every day is the goal but actually having something worth sharing is a challenge.

So expect no insight and lots of pictures I found on the internet and liked.

Cheers!

(and thank you to everyone who has told me how much they like these posts)

40 Days of Lent: Day Two

40 Days of Lent: Day One