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.
Spring is nature’s way of saying, ‘Let’s party!‘ ~ Robin Williams
Three Questions, February 8, 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 is the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
Even after thirty years of living in California, having grown up on the Northeast, it always surprises me how early flowers bloom. Today on my walk there were flowers everywhere, yellow flowers on lawns, bushes bursting in purple, it was gorgeous.
What did I learn today?
That the Milky Way smells of raspberries and run. A probe several years ago detected the chemicals in a cloud of gas in the Milky Way that are the chemicals responsible for the smells of raspberries and rum. An aspect of a science fiction story I read once that took me by surprise was two astronauts landing on an alien planet remarking on how terrible the planet smelled and then discussing the different smells of different planets. A really interesting aspect that we don’t think about.
What made me happy today?
After a couple of weeks of having to be up early every day I’m exhausted. So today I got to sleep in, it made me incredibly happy.
When we think of classic American desserts, we tend to imagine apple pie and ice cream. However, the most classic American dessert of all might be the chocolate chip cookie. ~ Homaro Cantu
Three Questions, February 7, 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 know it’s a bit repetetive but another rainy day finally broke this afternoon and the sun came out of beautiful blue skies with fluffy white clouds.
What did I learn today?
One of my favorite candies, Smarties are actually made with repurposed gunpowder pellet machines that were surplussed after WWII
What made me happy today?
I remembered someone had gifted me some chocolate chip cookie dough, so what made me happy today was celebrating my first day of vacation with some fresh baked cookies.
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. ~ Carl Sagan
Three Questions, February 6, 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?
It was my parking spot, empty when I returned home from work late. I’ve been in a battle over the spot, a neighbor has insisted in parking there and I thought for sure I’d be walking in the rain tonight, that empty spot was a beautiful sight.
What did I learn today?
The spy satellite Corona in 1960 shot 3000 feet of film of the Soviet Union, in order to get the film back to the US government, it tossed the film canister from space in a capsule. The capsule had a heat shield, a chute popped out and then a plane caught it with a fork on the front of the plane. Pretty amazing.
What made me happy today?
Today I finished three probationary employee reviews and happily all of them are doing great and are now permanent employees.
My weak spot is laziness. Oh, I have a lot of weak spots: cookies, croissants. ~ Anthony Hopkins
Three Questions, February 5, 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?
After several days of rain, the most beautiful thing I saw today were bright blue skies on a sunny day.
What did I learn today?
I ordered some girl scout cookies, Samoas, when I got them they weren’t called Samoas, they were called Caramel Delights. I wondered if they changed the name so I looked it up. Turns out there are several different baking companies that make the cookies. Only one of them has the trademark for the name Samoas, so the cookies on the west coast don’t come from the bakery with the trademark, sooooo Caramel Delights. Just a little different, not dark chocolate, milk chocolate and a little less coconut. Still tasty as hell.
What made me happy today?
Again connected to the rain, since it wasn’t raining today I got to walk outside today. Even though it was a brisk forty degrees out, made me happy to be walking outside.
The Ministry of Happiness 