Lost and Found

I found this chair in someone's trash the other day, sanded it down and reupholstered it. It's not beautiful but I like it and it was free!

You can help keep garbage out of landfills by using things again and again.
~ Margie Burton

Panera

I think people that have a brother or sister don't realize how lucky they are. Sure, they fight a lot, but to know that there's always somebody there, somebody that's Family.
~ Trey Parker and Matt Stone

The Dawn

Yesterday is but a dream, tomorrow but a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this day. Such is the salutation to the dawn.
~ Sanskrit proverb

Tai Chi in the Morning

Eight forces sustain creation:
Movement and stillness,
Solidification and fluidity,
Extension and contraction,
Unification and division.
~ Ueshiba

Soaring

People who soar are those who refuse to sit back, sigh and wish things would change. They neither complain of their lot nor passively dream of some distant ship coming in. Rather, they visualize in their minds that they are not quitters; they will not allow life's circumstances to push them down and hold them under.
~ Anonymous

Running

When people ask me why I run, I tell them, there's not really a reason, it's just the adrenalin when you start, and the feeling when you cross that finish line, and know that you are a winner no matter what place you got.
~ Courtney Parsons

Translucent

I didn't technically take this today but I was practicing editing in Photoshop and decided to post it instead of taking a new one.

The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit, till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
~ Annie Dillard

The Arboretum

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
~ William Blake

School's Out!

The water is your friend. You don't have to fight with water, just share the same spirit as the water, and it will help you move.
~ Aleksandr Popov

Live

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
~ Mary Oliver

Progress?

My running trail has changed quite a bit in the last few months and I'm not sure I like it.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
~ Charles Baudelaire

The Beautiful in Nature

The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.
~ Gustave Courbet

Return of the Native

All the we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
~ Edgar Allan Poe

Zen Continued

Day two - You can see the pond on the right and there will eventually be an edible garden in the spot where the large boulder is. We also need to buy a special zen rake to get the beautiful designs that are supposed to be there. This will be much easier than mowing the lawn/weeds...

Knock on the sky and listen to the sound.
~ Zen Saying

Zen

The weekend project... putting in a zen garden. I'll post the finished product tomorrow.



The purpose of Zen is the perfection of character.
~ Yasutani Roshi

Yardwork

Gardening requires lots of water -- most of it in the form of perspiration.
~ Lou Erickson

Reflections of a Sunny Day

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
~ Albert Camus

Morning Mist

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it "the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the mist”.
~ Edgar Allan Poe

Organization

The first of my summer projects got started today. It's got a long way to go but it's a start.

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
~ A.A. Milne

The Door

It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
~ Bilbo Baggins

Flawed

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them...”
~ Annie Dillard

The Party

The track record of horror films tells you maybe Hollywood should just release horror movies to be successful. I can't think of a more consistently performing genre at the box office.
~ Paul Dergarabedian

End of the School Year Haircuts

What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade.
~ Gertrude Jekyll

The Blob

E's birthday party is this Saturday and he'll be showing as many old horror flicks as he can find. He requested green jello to represent The Blob...

Kate? It's Dr. Hallen, I'm still at the office... something's come up, I need you back here right away. No you've got to come back, Kate, there's a man here with some sort of a parasite on his arm, assimilating his flesh at a frightening speed. I may have to get ahead of it and amputate. No... I don't know what it is or where it came from.
~ The Blob, 1958

Numbers

True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Dissection

The biology final for E took place today. I'm glad I don't have to ever do this again. It wasn't fun 25 years ago and it doesn't look like fun now!

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
~ Mark Twain

Finding Nemo

The submarine ride at Disneyland opens again offically as the Finding Nemo ride on June 11. We got a sneak peak tonight. Definitely head and shoulders above the old ride.


It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
~ Walt Disney

16!

It takes a long time to grow young.
~ Pablo Picasso

Windblown

We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things... but there are times when we stop. We sit sill. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.
~ James Carroll

Breakfast

'When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,' said Piglet at last, 'what's the first thing you say to yourself?' 'What's for breakfast?' said Pooh. 'What do you say, Piglet?' 'I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?' said Piglet. Pooh nodded thoughtfully. 'It's the same thing,' he said.
~ A. A. Milne