The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. ~ Oscar Wilde
Three Questions, February 25, 2025
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?
There were some really amazing flowers on my walk today. And there were these bushes that were full of blue flowers that smelled absolutely amazing.
What did I learn today?
Today I learned about all of the tests that need to happen before my heart surgery and that the criteria for getting out of the hospital will be the ability to comfortably walk at least 200 feet.
What made me happy today?
Actually a lot. First I scheduled the date for my open heart surgery, tax day, April 15th, so I hope my surgeon had a good tax year. I also had a lovely pizza for dinner and finally, I ran into one of my old students today and it was wonderful.
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?
Saw some really amazing close up shots of birds online today, it’s a really different perspective to see something like a cardinal close up.
What did I learn today?
Today I read about the Athena mission heading to the moon. A really cool unmanned mission that will use a number of different components include the hopper (named after Grace Hopper), a rover and a drill to find and analyze freshwater on the moon.
What made me happy today?
I suffered through three weeks of having my entire schedule disrupted and forcing me to get up early every day and it was incredibly inconvenient. Well today, I got to use the new washer and dryer they installed in my apartment while finally being able to have a work from home day.
What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens in New Orleans, goes home with you.~ Laurell K Hamilton
It’s ok to just be happy
I’m someone who gets the one-time nature of our life and how quickly it goes by, honestly it’s horrifying to me that I’m a senior citizen. And much like when I asked my 80 year-old granny how old she felt in her mind, I’m still a teenager in my head in many ways. As such, I feel the need to make the most of the time I have, to make my life matter and so when I find myself on my couch just watching movies or shows I have a tendency to get angry with myself for wasting time. It is important though to take time to relax, we can’t go and go all of the time, we burn out. And unfortunately my job is extremely stressful and frustrating so there are far too many times when I just need to check-out in order to stay sane. But I have a hard time with not making that time productive in the larger sense.
This past weekend an old friend and I were catching up and we were wondering if this might not be the craziest time to be alive. There certainly is a lot of madness in this world right now. Enough so that I’ve decided to move my surgery up, a combination of the normal high-level of stress, the extra stress of the current madness and lots of uncertainty around my job. Feels wise to take care of my health issues as soon as possible.
So with all of the madness in our lives and in the larger world it can seem like maybe it’s not ok to be happy, to take time for ourselves, to laugh and enjoy life. And while all of these bigger things are certainly urgent, it’s important we maximize the amount of happiness in our limited time here. So as such, we (and that includes me), need to be ok with taking some time just to do things that make us happy.
One of those things for me is cooking. I fell in love with New Orleans the very first time I was there. I have often said it’s the first place that I ever visited where I felt at home the minute I got there. I’m comfortable in New Orleans, even in the insane summer heat and the rainy winter days at Mardi Gras parades. I also love the food there. At Cochon, their rabbit and dumplings may be the best thing I’ve ever eaten, eating that dish there is a blissful experience for me.
I also love to cook and fusing my love for New Orleans and my love for cooking, one of the things I do is make homemade gumbo. It’s been a learning experience making a roux from scratch is more art than science. I’ve gotten pretty good at making a decent roux and while I don’t eat onions I sub scallions into the mix. Starting with the trinity (onions, peppers and garlic) and a good roux, dumping in andouille sausage, chicken, a little celery and seasoning and then letting it cook is a wonderful experience. I love the process of making the roux, of chopping, cutting and the smell of it all simmering on the stove. I’ve gotten pretty skilled at making a tasty gumbo and it’s almost perfect, what’s missing is good okra. I just can’t find good okra in a grocery store where I live in California. So it’s damn good but I want call it New Orleans quality without the okra.
Taking the time to make a gumbo from scratch definitely puts me in my happy place and the best part, then is that I get to eat it, for a WEEK! So find time to do those things that make you happy, forgive yourself for not being productive for a time, it’s important we take care of ourselves, we need to have happy days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
There is a place in America for diversity of views and opinions. I may cook my gumbo differently from you, but that does not make mine better. I may just use different ingredients. Politics has gotten so spicy, and we need to cool it down some. We may find that your recipe for gumbo is just as good.~ Donna Brazile
Three Questions, February 21, 2025
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?
A gorgeous bowl of homemade gumbo. I get better and better every time I make gumbo and tonight’s was fantastic.
What did I learn today?
I learned today that there is balance in the universe, I’m allergic to cats, I found out today, some cats are actually allergic to people.
What made me happy today?
What made me happy tonight was making homemade gumbo and a great dinner. I love gumbo and I’ve been making it for years, and I get better and better every time. Tonight I made a great batch of sausage and chicken gumbo, paired it with a shrimp cocktail and finished it off with some yogurt with dark chocolate and cinnamon a wonderful dinner.
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?
It was the first day this year that truly felt like spring, so the day was the most beautiful thing I encountered, sunny, warm and lots of flowers in bloom.
What did I learn today?
Asteroid near misses with Earth are not a rare thing, but YR4 is getting big press as it now has a calculated risk of 3% of hitting us. This is the highest ever rated percent chance of hitting Earth. It’s a decent sized asteroid, what they call a city killer. What I learned today, is that it also has a 1% chance of hitting the moon instead of Earth, that’s just nuts. Eight years and lots of observations will absolutely change those odds, but very interesting.
What made me happy today?
Today I got a call from an old friend I haven’t spoken to in some time, a very happy conversation.
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?
Walking out of my office today after four straight hours of meeting, a bright, sunny blue sky was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
What did I learn today?
That the review of old mission data shows that Callisto, a moon of Jupiter, likely has deep oceans underneath an icy surface. Cool because that increases the chance that the planet has life.
What made me happy today?
I made a really fabulous gnocchi in Alfredo sauce for dinner, it was heavenly.
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?
I looked up as I was driving off campus today and saw the most unlucky snake ever. You see, it’s just barely become warm enough for a snake even to be out. My guess is that this one was literally just coming out of winter hibernation to sun on a rock when he got snagged by a red tail hawk.
What did I learn today?
Based on the Human Freedom Index the top 5 freest countries in the world are:
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?
While on my walk I saw the most ridiculous and beautiful thing. It was a chihuahua, with a green and red sweater vest and little pink booties. The poor thing looked both embarrassed and starved for attention. I tried to pet him but his owner thought the dog was in the way and yanked him along.
What did I learn today?
That medicine has advanced far enough that they pulled an infant out of the womb, operated on it and removed a spinal tumor and then reinserted the infant in the womb and it was later delivered via natural birth.
What made me happy today?
While at the dentist, bet you didn’t see that coming, the dentist told me her whole staff looked forward to me coming in because I put everyone in a better mood.
Mysteries once thought to be supernatural or paranormal happenings – such as astronomical or meteorological events – are incorporated into science once their causes are understood. ~ Michael Shermer
Three Questions, February 18, 2025
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?
Well, it was the first day back to work, after vacation and honestly I spent the day buried in my office. The most beautiful thing I saw was nothing, but the beauty of the three questions is it forces you to seek out beauty. So I Googled, show me something beautiful in nature and boom, hundreds of gorgeous images to look at and admire.
What did I learn today?
Today I learned about Dighton Rock, it’s a rock with some mysterious drawings that don’t have a clear origin story and was found in Dighton, Massachussets.
What made me happy today?
What made me happy today was getting through my first day at work back from vacation, getting home, putting on warm comfortable clothes and bundling up on the couch. I look forward to watching a movie and crashing.
Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything. ~ Octavia E Butler
Happy Saturday Sci-fi Films
So I’m an older guy and when I was a kid Saturday mornings meant Saturday morning cartoons. Of course it included the basics originally, Looney Tunes including Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Foghorn Leghorn and even Speedy Gonzalez. Of course I was a little kid in the late 60’s and early 70’s so that also meant Syd and Marty Kroft and their acid trip Saturday morning fantasies, Signund and the Sea Monster, HR Pufnstuff (I mean come on puffin stuff), The Boogaloos and my personal favorite Lidsville (check out the opening video). But I was a bowler and Saturday morning was when our youth bowling league happened so most of my Saturdays were spent at the lanes and I’d get back home Saturday afternoon. And Saturday afternoons meant Sci-fi and Horror movies.
So given the time period it meant a huge load of Godzilla, King Kong and all of the other crazy monster movies of the the 50’s and 60’s. It also meant a heavy dose old science fiction movies on rotation. So this meant The War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Them! There were a lot of radiation monsters in films back then. There were also some really magnificent classic films like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Forbidden Planet and Fantastic Voyage. I loved these movies, they led me into reading science fiction and I became a science fiction junky as a young kid which then turned into me being an avid reader in general. I owe a lot to those old goofy old science fiction movies.
Recently, I was online and someone mentioned the Day of the Triffids and this was absolutely one of those Saturday morning sci-fi features. I remembered the film but honestly hadn’t seen it for literally 40 or 50 years. So a bit of nostalgia hit me thinking about it and I found it online at Tubi and watched it. It was awesome and terrible all at the same time. It’s obviously never been remastered so the video quality was awful. It definitely has the standard campy features of an old sci-fi film and some cheesy effects. But it was also awesome, and it hit me it was a definite parallel to a Romero zombie film. If you like campy old sci-fi films, definitely worth a view. For me, it brought about a bit of nostalgia and happy memories from my childhood. So go find an old film that does the same for you and have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
The Ministry of Happiness 