You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six. ~ Yogi Berra
Three Questions, February 17, 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?
While on my walk in San Francisco today I watched a four or five year-old boy holding his two year-old sister’s hand and teaching/guiding her to walk around the edge of a flower planter. It was a really safe situation but was obviously new, scary and exciting for her. Watching him take really good care of his little sister and giving her this exciting moment in life was really beautiful.
What did you learn today?
Today I learned about a really cool concept called a coalescence cascade for water drops, it’s this concept of drops hitting water, bouncing, then popping into smaller drops and repeating. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch.
What made me happy today?
This was easy, my first good, real pizza in three weeks.
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. ~ Voltaire
Three Questions, February 16, 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?
Saw a beautiful picture online today of a really magnificent sun dog. It’s one of my favorite meteorological phenomenon. It’s when there are a pair of suns in the sky to either side of the sun. They occur as a result of ice crystals in the sky and the sun’s halo showing at a specific angle.
What did I learn today?
Today I learned about, Granville T. Woods, born to free African Americans, held various engineering and industrial jobs before establishing a company to develop electrical apparatus. Known as “Black Edison,” he registered nearly 60 patents in his lifetime, including a telephone transmitter, a trolley wheel and the multiplex telegraph (over which he defeated a lawsuit by Thomas Edison).
What made me happy today?
I made some really amazing steak burritos for dinner, they made me happy.
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god. ~ Aristotle
The Importance of Happy Places
It’s important to have happy places, places you can retreat to when you need to recharge yourself. These places can be big or small, can be major adventures or minor step backs for a minute to breathe. It’s important to have small places you can fall back to for a few minutes or a half and hour to just breathe. For me, there’s always a pizza place in my life where I can hide away and eat a really good pizza and have a coke.
It’s always good to have those intermediate places if you can, for me right now and one that has been a place for me for a very long time has been both Monterey and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, particularly the jellyfish room.
Monterey Bay Aquarium
I’m an ocean junkie from way back, as a kid I was absolutely fascinated by the Jacques Cousteau specials on TV. I would come to love snorkeling and being on the ocean. I wanted to become a marine biologist like a million other people. I trained to be a fresh water biologist instead and would eventually end up doing some marine fisheries development work at one point in my career. I also take every chance to be around whales, whether that is basic whale watches or adventures in Baja with Grey Whales.
On my very first trip to California I went to Monterey because it seemed like a really amazing place. In fact it was everything I had hoped and the aquarium blew me away. I vowed to live there some day, it took fourteen years but I lived in the Monterey area for three years, it was amazing. Currently I live ninety minutes away so it’s become my intermediate retreat.
One of my bigger happy places has become the Mojave Desert. I lived there for a couple of years and really fell in love with the desert. I would often retreat to Anza Borrego State Park and it for a time became my runaway place for my hardest time each year, the week between Christmas and New Years. Recently I discovered a Nevada State Park in the Mojave, Valley of Fire State Park and it’s become my new go to winter hideaway.
The thing about happy places is there restorative value. These need to be places where you can simply be, and therefore can be yourself, free from judgement and deadlines and the expectations of others. Preferably places where the phone can’t ring or if it can, places where you’re absolutely comfortable turning it off. The jellyfish room in the Monterey Bay Aquarium is such a special place for me. Watching the jellies swim is absolutely mesmerizing, and for a few minutes on this last trip I had the room to myself, no humans to interrupt my experience and it was absolutely exactly what I needed. I followed that up with a trip to the Mojave, not my usual, but a couple of days at a hot springs spa. What was perfect about this stop was that I had a hot springs tub in my room, so I could fill it up and just soak in my room with some music playing low, it was amazing.
I truly needed some time in my happy places, I needed to wind down from humanity. It hasn’t brought me all the way back to level, but it has helped tremendously. I hope you have the opportunity to get to one of your happy places soon my friends, they lead to happy days. ~ Rev Kane
Happiness held is the seed; Happiness shared is the flower. ~ John Harrigan
Three Questions, February 15, 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?
Even after thirty years of living here I’m still surprised by how early spring hits. The most beautiful thing I encountered today were all of the flowers currently blooming.
What did I learn today?
Odd fact, Japan and Iceland have the world’s lowest homicide rates.
What made me happy today?
A simple thing, a sunny day, nice temperatures and blooming flowers on my walk.
Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. ~ Dalai Lama
Three Questions, February 14, 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?
Today the most beautiful thing I encountered was talking to the Smoochy Monster, my cousin who has suffered from traumatic brain injury. She is without a doubt one of the most loving little wiseasses to ever live and talking to her is wonderful.
What did I learn today?
Today I learned that female manatees will adopt an orphaned baby manatee, as if they weren’t already cool enough.
What made me happy today?
I had potato gnocchi for dinner, something I rarely eat and it’s a real special treat for me.
Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet. ~ Roger Miller
Three Questions, February 13, 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?
I was posting pictures from my most recent trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and several of the pictures were really amazing.
What did I learn today?
Today I learned how far away we still are from having fully autonomous driving cars. I was driving through a big rainstorm and I have a fairly new car so it has all of the new fancy safety features including collision warning and automatic breaking. At one point when the rain was dumping the car beeped, it beeps way to much, and the dash said, “no eyesight, cameras non-fucntional,” and the light for no collision control came on. Soooo, until we can actually build a car with cameras good enough to see as well as the human an eye in the rain, we’re not there.
What made me happy today?
What made me happy today was the sun breaking through the clouds as I arrived at my hotel. Would have been a whole lot happier had it done that on the drive instead of dumping rain for three hours.
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’m a sunset junky, the sunset over the desert tonight was gorgeous.
What did I learn today?
A silly thing, the difference between a hobo and a vagrant, basically a vagrant has no means to support themselves and a hobo moves for work. And yes, I’m re-watching season 1 of Reacher.
What made me happy today?
Today I went out for a big breakfast, and since I rarely have bread at home I never have toast anymore. I truly can’t remember, before today, when was the last time I had some toast. So while breakfast was wonderful, the thing that really made me happy was toast with jelly.
The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea. ~ Karen Blixen
Three Questions, February 11, 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?
The post sunset over the Indio Valley. Something I learned a long time ago and then saw in print in the Bridges of Madison County of all places, is the how to shoot sunsets. People give up too early, the sun breaks the horizon and they go inside. Some of the best sunset photos I’ve ever shot were taken after the sun was gone and you get the long blue light screaming over the horizon fighting the darkness and dancing with the last bits of red and pink in the sky. Tonight over the mountains that frame the Indio Valley that’s exactly the sky I got to see.
What did I learn today?
Today I learned that some Polish salt miners had better lungs than other miners. So a doctor believed it was the healing power of the tiny salt crystals in the air. This has led to spas and hippies everywhere creating and extolling the virtues of salt rooms, and especially Himalayan Salt rooms. Well, I’ve been struggling, I’ve runaway, I’m at a spa so right after this post I’m going to go sit in the Himalayan Salt Room and breath deep the flecks of airborne sodium-choloride crystals. Yes friends, I’m pulling out all of the hippy cards in the deck!
What made me happy today?
I had a plan, come to this spa, watch the Tennessee/Kentucky basketball game after check-in, get a massage and soak in a hot spring tub. It all initially went to hell, I checked March not February apparently so my reservation was for a month from now, I’d made the massage appointment appropriately but then they connected it to the reservation and moved it. I got the room worked out, but have lost a day, got the massage re-booked and finally got to the room, no TV, game isn’t on my app. Honestly, I almost broke into tears from the shear consistent volume of losing I’ve been experiencing over the last month. But I dug in and found a way to get the game on my laptop using a free trial on a sports app.
So what made me happy today was a mix of things all wrapped up in a lovely package. Watching the game (my team lost, nothing’s perfect I guess), getting the best massage I’ve had in 10 years (Sarah at the Azure Palms Spa in Desert Hot Springs is amazing!), soaking for thirty minutes in my private hot springs tub and eating a lovely, snacky dinner of a salad and vegetables. And the slightest hope that maybe this voodoo curse of a life I’ve been leading lately might just start turning around.
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 jellyfish room in the Monterey Bay Aquarium
What did I learn today?
That the Catholic priest and missionary Junipero Serra was responsible for a ton of the first reported visits by a European to many places in California including Monterey. The park across from my apartment is named for him.
What made me happy today?
One of my absolute happy places on earth is the Monterey Bay Aquarium, but specifically, the jellyfish room. This morning, getting to the aquarium early, I actually had time at many of jelly exhibits all alone, it was glorious.
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. ~ John Steinbeck
Three Questions, February 9, 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?
Today I was driving on the Pacific Coast Highway, the most beautiful highway in America. I love driving this highway especially on a sunny day like today. There’s so much beauty, the waves, the sun gleaming off of the ocean. I drove by a Cooper’s Hawk floating perfectly still on the air, lonely Egret’s hunting in the shallows and kite surfers rider waves.
What did I learn today?
Polar bears often do not show up on infrared cameras, this means they are nearly perfectly insulated. I read a fascinating article about the research to figure out why and it turns out that polar bear grease is nearly a perfect insulator. These animals are so incredibly cool in every way.
What made me happy today?
My brother posted a photo of him when he was about 18 months old. I was 15 when he was born, I helped raise him. The first four years of his life were an incredibly turbulent time in my life, I’d put a gun in my mouth and tried to kill myself the year before he was born. By time he was four years-old I had left to go to college, failed out of college, become an alcoholic and an addict and entered recovery. Through all of that madness, he was the happy little center of my crumbling world, no matter how bad it was for me, being with him was always happiness and joy. Seeing that picture today took me back there for a time.
The Ministry of Happiness 