Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.~ Hosea Ballou

Three Questions, December 13, 2024

You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!

What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?

The most beautiful thing I encountered today was an image of Watkins Glen State Park. There’s an image I keep encountering of one of the gorges at sunset, waterfall tumbling off of the rocks, a really, really beautiful place.

What did I learn today?

Often when I have paperwork to do I listen to podcasts, one I really like is called the Rest is History. So today I started a six part story on WWI, the Great War. I learned some truly disturbing things about how Kaiser Wilhelm grew up. Turns out his arm had been seriously injured as a child. To help heal it, they would plunge his arm into the fresh killed corpse of a wild hare. His parents also used to stretch his head in a kind of reverse vice. Finally, he continually had pus oozing out of his ear until his early 30’s. Is anyone shocked this dude turns out to be one of the villains of the first world war?

What made me happy today?

It’s been a long week at work, in addition to a ton of work, there was also a whole lot of peopling every day this week. As I wrapped up work at six on this rainy, cold Friday I just really wanted a hot bowl of soup. So I stopped at the grocery store and at home made a pot of tortellini soup for dinner, it really hit the spot and made me happy the work week was over.