Pain

Ah, the coffee. So good. And I’m not even a coffee snob. I don’t have a grinder that I like and so I rarely do beans. I take my coffee straight from the Folgers can and put it in a bare bones basic Mr. Coffee machine; the $17.99 brewer. Black. No clock. My only concession to frills is the ‘gold’ filter I use and not the paper ones.

And I’m awake and needing some coffee this morning after suffering through some vivid and unpleasant dreams. And I have to attribute these phenomena to the book, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. I finished it last night; overwhelmed. Yesterday, I said it was a great book and that’s still true, but I must add that it is also a powerful book; very powerful. Fiction? Non-fiction? It reads like non-fiction and that may be why I had the scary dreams.

I’m taking stock of my blogging world this morning. I need to condense; to minimize and become lean and mean. I have too many blogs and only one is getting the attention it deserves from me. So I’m going to walk away from my gardening blog, my food blog and my racewalking blog. The family history and the personal history blogs will continue as they were…eventually. Change is good and I’m all about change!

Today, being Sunday, I should take a rest from the news of the world and just look at the stuff I really like; maybe even do some Stumbling.

How about some quotes to start the day? My Google homepage delivers these for me each day and they are the second thing I look at when I open the door to the internet. First, the headlines to get my blood and ire flowing and then the quotes to regain some perspective.

• No one gossips about other people's secret virtues. - Bertrand Russell
• Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
  - Oscar Levant
• A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top . - Unknown
• Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible. - Stanislaw Lem
• Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy. - Ernest Benn
• If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.
  - Professor Irwin Corey
• Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining. - Jef Raskin
• Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own. - Sidney J. Harris
• Character is what you have left when you've lost everything you can lose.
  - Evan Esar

Speaking of quotes, “…freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority.” OK, back to painful reality with this link to that quotation from a 1994 speech by R. Giuliani. The mayor. The presidential candidate. And if you want additional pain, move on to the speech itself, here. What is it about conservatives? Are they really from another planet? Here to take over our world?