Not Half Bad

Remember that your life can be what you make it, and I try everyday to make even those tough days 'not half bad'!

Happy Friday to you all! 

Enjoy each day with a smile and a healthy dose of laughter!

My Heart in a Cutie

Oh happy day to you my friends.  Yesterday my cutie orange was smiling at me to be eaten, which is better then finding my heart in a potato chip (so they say).

Can we all say hooray for healthy winter-time snacks?  Yes. Yes we can!

True Talent

This morning I would like to share with you a small piece of art that is by my truly talented Mother. Albeit the photo is a little out of focus, as my phone camera does not like low light, but the art and drawing skills shine through.

Safe travels Mom and keep drawing, you have a fabulous gift. See you in the spring.

Solar Powered

Hooray for gaining January daylight even in Anchor-town. Here is the Fairbanks ~ Anchor-town comparison.

Anchorage
Sunrise 10:07 am
Sunset 4:05 pm

Fairbanks
Sunrise 10:43 am
Sunset 3:13 pm


I do miss home but I am solar powered after all, which by the way I owe thanks to CJ for coining the phrase solar powered to our well-being persons. 

High five Friday my friends! 

Enjoy the weekend ahead.

The Age of Adaline

This is a sweet and gentle movie of love and hope, and well worth spending a January evening watching. 

The Age of Adeline

Good Advice from a Cousin of Mine

I, Polonius

Written by Douglas Dalrymple

I’m comfortably into my early forties now. My son will soon be a teenager and my daughter is only a few years behind him. Their pending sub-adulthood has got me cataloging any bits of advice I would offer them. Like tedious old Polonius in Hamlet, a father wants to pass on a wise word or two before Act 3 arrives and he finds himself stabbed to death behind an arras.

The well-known trouble with advice is that while everyone wants to give it, no one at all wants to receive it. This is doubly true of advice dispensed by parents. And yet, while there’s little to justify the offering of unsolicited advice to peers, forcing advice on our children feels like a duty. Therefore: too bad, kids. A father’s prerogative will not be denied.

Do not trust your heart. What you may think is your “heart” isn’t really your heart. What most people call their heart is simply their capacity for desire, the acquisitive longing they feel at any moment for one object or another. This false heart is a fickle chatterbox and it lies a lot. Your real heart is that essential but unknown something that makes you yourself rather than someone else. Its job is not to guide you. In fact it has no job at all, as far as I can tell, and it has nothing much to say. But that false heart that’s always whispering inside? Most of the time it will not lead you anywhere worth going. Now, if you want something and there’s no decent reason to deny yourself, by all means proceed. But don’t imagine your heart is guiding you to it.

Don’t trust your head either. The life of the intellect may be enriching and civilizing, and logic is a wonderful tool of the mind. Do not disparage these things. But do not imagine that they will guide you infallibly. Grappling mentally with the world is a form of shadow boxing. You risk nothing in it. That’s part of the intellect’s utility, but always remember that the contest is false. The intellect may inform your most important choices; it should never absolutely determine them. There is an idea of a lion that lives in your head, and there’s another lion – an actual lion – that lives in Africa. Only one of them can kill you.

It’s okay to be a fox rather than a hedgehog. There’s an old fable about a fox and a hedgehog. It exists in many versions but it started with the Greek poet Archilochos who said that while the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one important thing. Isaiah Berlin borrowed this idea and decided there were two types of people, hedgehogs who are intellectually guided by one over-arching idea or interest, and foxes who wonder about a great number of things and test them as they explore. Which of these you will become is in part a question of temperament, but I want to recommend the life of a fox. It seems to make for happiness, and I think it has served me well. My gloss on the old fable: “To be broadly curious is better than to be singularly passionate.”

Don’t solve your problems. When you have a problem that irks you and proves difficult to solve, set it on a shelf in your mind and turn away from it. Go out to see a movie. Have dinner with friends. Read a book. Sleep. Don’t do these things as a means to solving your problem, but for themselves. The solution will present itself at some point when you are no longer actively looking for it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve let go of solving a problem in the evening and woke the next morning to find the answer floating in the air above me.

Be a drinker. I don’t mean that you ought to plunge headlong into alcoholism, but teetotalism is nearly as bad. Moderation is key. A drink (and sometimes two) in the evening with dinner or in the company of friends is a natural sacrament, a way of expressing gratitude for all that is good and happy and blessed in life. A meal prepared at home with care and shared with family or friends has the same quality.

Leave things unsaid. Words are actions in their own right, and they have their own inevitable consequences in the world. There’s a time for speaking, but there’s little value to speaking in ignorance, vanity, cheap sentimentality, or from a sense of what others around you want to hear. And while emotions are sometimes tested and proven by words, they are also ennobled by silence.

Know the value of rotten things. Life is full of things that get spoiled: personal relationships, civic and religious institutions, moral ideals, just to name a few. Don’t let this distress you or eat away at your soul. Remember that only things which are good to begin with can be spoiled, and only the very best things are susceptible to really outrageous corruption. When you discover that something you love has been corrupted, don’t imagine that you loved foolishly. The corruption is the thing that needs to be got rid of. The corrupted thing itself needs rescue or rediscovery.

Keep your great-great-great-grandmother’s cedar chest. What I mean is, don’t discard things simply because they’re old or unfashionable. This goes for ideas as well as objects. It’s true that certain bigotries are better left behind, but as a general rule you will find that the old things which are still with us are with us still for a reason, and the new things that are promoted now and then to replace them are ill-considered, of poor quality, or merely designed to enrich or empower someone. People are tempted sometimes to imagine the past is a thing from which one should be free. This is both impossible and undesirable. Human freedom is like language. Language allows for infinite variations of expression, but only when certain rules of grammar and syntax are observed. Knowing and accepting your place in the story of your family, your nation and your culture is not a burdensome constraint; it provides you with a grammar of personal freedom.

Remember that all categorical statements are false. That’s a self-defeating proposition, of course. But I do want to warn you against indulging too freely in generalizations and broad judgments, particularly when these are directed at other people. As human beings, we’re very good at abstraction and generalization. It’s a trait that has served us well, but we don’t know when to stop. We’re tempted to apply categorical judgments to others in ways that do little justice to the circumstances and choices of their individual lives. Now, the truth is that you can’t avoid generalizing, and exercising judgment is necessary. But remind yourself that generalizations have a power to kill. Real lives are lived in particulars.

Flee from righteousness. Righteous is one of those slippery words. If by “righteous” you mean “just,” well, I don’t mean to dissuade you from acting justly. I do mean to warn you against too firm a belief in the righteousness of your own convictions or actions, and to warn you in general against righteous outrage, righteous anger, and joining righteous causes. True righteousness is something like the Sasquatch. Rumors of it are common enough, and it may be walking out in the woods somewhere, but don’t expect to see it with your own eyes. When you feel a sense of righteousness well up inside, ask if you aren’t simply granting yourself a license for bad behavior.

Go small. Ambition is something that most of us feel at one time or another. Fame, wealth and power are dangled before us like steak before a lion. They bring out the fangs in people. I don’t mean to discourage you from a desire for achievement. To do an honorable thing excellently is its own reward. If fame, wealth or power come to you as a result, fine. But remember that your capacity for contentment does not expand with the scope of your ambition. Family, a few friends, a shelf of good books, a hearth and perhaps a little garden is, in fact, more than enough to provide you with all the happiness you will ever be capable of enjoying.

In Your Life

In your life, do what you find empowering. Find a passion to drive yourself forward to create, live, breathe, and love. It might not be what you started out to find. It might be a totally different path from where you started, and that is okay. As long as you carry love in you heart and kindness in each step.

Strange Winter Day

It is a strange winter day here in Anchor-town for this Alaskan.  This is not winter to me.  Hope your Tuesday is a fine and normal day.

Happy New Year!

We are all traveling through the same time and space. Relish each moment with love for each other and joy in your heart.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas

A Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night! Sweet dreams of candy canes and sugar plums.

Love and joy to all near and far!

Superstition Wilderness Arizona

Enjoy warm thoughts and tons of love this holiday season.

Tons of love and blessing to all my friends and family, every one of you is so very dear to my heart!  

Wishing you and yours the very best. Today. Tomorrow. Always!

High Five Friday for Fluffy Clouds

High five Friday for fluffy clouds, and day dreaming of being in a place that makes you happy, and for being surrounded by those you love.  Where is the place on earth that makes you the most happy?

Have a great Friday my friends and a great weekend!

Dad's Wise Words

"Be careful with who you think you want to be and choose wisely. As once you are that person it is harder to change".

Dad's wise words to his teenage sons.

Zinburger ~ Gilbert Arizona

When you are in Gilbert Arizona stop in for an early supper at Zinburger's for a tasty burger and the truffle fries! Yummy!

Be Still and Carry Love in Your Heart

14 Days Until Christmas

Fourteen days until Christmas. Time to enjoy hugs from family and be thankful for all the joys in our lives, large and small.  Each has value.  Each has weight.  Share the love and kindness with your fellow man each and every day!

The Pork Shop ~ Queen Creek

When you are in Queen Creek Arizona make a stop into The Pork Shop, you will not regret your purchases.  Be sure to pack plenty of their meat sticks when you go out on a long hike, because when you run out it is all you can think about during the long hike back.

Beauty in the Desert

There is beauty in the desert. In fact beauty is everywhere.

Happy Wednesday my friends.

Share the love!

Big City Rivers of Invisibility

San Francisco Plaza Quito Ecuador 

"As long as the Oise was a small rural river, it took us near by people’s doors, and we could hold a conversation with natives in the riparian fields. But now that it had grown so wide, the life along shore passed us by at a distance. It was the same difference as between a great public highway and a country by-path that wanders in and out of cottage gardens. We now lay in towns, where nobody troubled us with questions; we had floated into civilized life, where people pass without salutation. In sparsely inhabited places, we make all we can of each encounter; but when it comes to a city, we keep to ourselves, and never speak unless we have trodden on a man’s toes. In these waters we were no longer strange birds, and nobody supposed we had traveled farther than from the last town."

Robert Louis Stevenson words from Inland Voyage still ring true for me in Anchor-Town.  The drawback for nice people living in the big city is that we pass by everyone else without a notice or a care.  We are invisible at times as Mr. Stevenson states, 'unless we have trodden on a man's toes', so true some days in this new town, still.  I am fighting long hours as I continue to try to change the big city effect in my day to day work environment.  Keep wishing me luck!

High Five Friday for Our Galapagos Movie

The long awaited release of my latest movie creation is over.  It is just over 39 minutes long and might take a bit to buffer on YouTube for smooth watching. Hope you enjoy the show and your weekend head!