The Older You Get, The Smaller The Birthday Cake

 

Here's an ugly truth for you. The older you get, the smaller your birthday cake becomes. It's some weird law of diminishing returns. Used to be there'd be leftover birthday cake for days...now, well, now this will be gone within the next 10 minutes.

What You Have To Do What You Can Do

Not everyone who picks up a pen 

                           Is going to write a best-selling novel

Not everyone who starts working with clay

                           Is going to create a remarkable statue

Not everyone who strums a guitar

                           Will compose a memorable song

Not everyone who works with a brush 

                           Will paint an exceptional picture 

But you have to try 

      You have to use what you have to work with

You have to learn to do the best you can

      You have to accept what nature has granted you

And play and work and study and nurture

      Your gifts are yours, for your enjoyment

A Sunset Beyond

Filling the dusky blue sky with ribbons of magenta

As though a whisk had been dragged over a palette of scarlet

Tinged with the blue of a drunken sailor's patois

Fueled by the distraction of a petulant coquette

Orange and tangerine streaks along the horizon

Entangled like the seagrass that writhes underneath the waves

Brilliant spikes of citrine yellows

Reaching out as if to establish a view

That enchants and beguiles; broken glass 

Silvered as a mirror but without reflection

Treating the mind as well as the eye

Leaving reason and rationale in a sinner's cell

And creating an inexplicable desire to praise

Nature and all it's myriad mystical powers

To bequeath such a sight for all the world to enjoy

When You Live In The Rocky Mountains But You Miss The Life Aquatic

 

New Neighbors In The Old Neighborhood

   When you move into a new neighborhood it takes awhile to settle in and get to know the people you now live among. 

   Before I moved into my home I scouted out the neighborhood thoroughly. Not that I was paranoid or anything, but I wanted to be sure I wasn't moving into a pit of despair, you know, like the neighborhood I grew up in.

   All the residents of the neighborhood seemed to be friendly, and everyone seemed to take quite a bit of pride in their homes - no overgrown jungles sprawling out onto the sidewalks, no rusty old cars in the front yards resting upon cinder blocks, no half-fallen fences or abandoned, boarded up houses. It all looked good on the outside and as luck would have it, everyone of my neighbors turned out to be good on the inside too.

   It's been 25 years since I moved into my house and what's happening now is a changing of the guard, so to speak.

   A lot of those neighbors I have known for years are retiring, and quite a few of those retirees are selling their homes and moving to where retirees move, mainly Florida and Arizona.

   Which means new neighbors are beginning to appear...and so far, all of the new residents seem to be just like the old neighbors - friendly, pet walking (and cleaning up after), lawn-caring-for types that are fitting in seamlessly. 

   We'll just have to see how they feel about the summer block bar-be-ques and parties - hope they're good to go for those.

  

Delightfully Amusing & Refreshingly Revealing

   Every so often I get on a website purporting to be a news service that has more clickbait features than actual current useful news features.

   Which was at one time a source of annoyance for me but somehow has morphed into a source of not only entertainment, but of a refreshing source of reassurance as to hope for the future.

   Yes, yes, that statement begs for an explanation, so I will explain away.

   See, the clickbait features would be annoying due to false advertising of the contents and/or the purpose of the feature. For example, I would read the headline of one of the features, something like, "The Dark Secret That Hollywood Doesn't Want You To Know!" and, my curiosity being what it is, I would click on the feature with the expectation of learning something new and interesting...and get an 18 page story that bombarded my eyes with ads for useless crap just to read on the last page that the dark secret was a rumor of dubious veracity that was probably lifted from one of Kenneth Anger's books and just about anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of Hollywood had known about for years.

  And that was true for a large boatload of features of that ilk; "Twenty Historical Facts That Were Swept Under The Rug", "Ten Forgotten Financial Scandals That Shocked The World," "32 Facts About The Space Program The Government Doesn't Want You To Know," and so on and so on...all of which would reveal themselves (eventually) to be well-documented, well known, not shocking or secret stuff that was pretty much a waste of my time to read.

   So, you know, very disappointing and very annoying.

   And, yeah, it was my own damn fault for continuing to click on the clickbait features after the first one proved to be a waste of time, but dagnabbit, it is very difficult for me to resist minutiae and/or trivia..it's like heroin to me. 

   Then one day a thought hit me...that, while these little clickbait features were definitely annoying, they were also a little bit of an interesting insight into the world and minds of the very young internet users and content creators.

   That insight being that there is a lot of information out there that is not well-known to millions of younger people, and that these same younger people are curious about the past, and that these same young people are willing to do the research to discover new (to them) and exciting (to them) information about things they are curious about, whether it's the history of entertainment, politics, inventions, literature, social mores, etc., etc.

   So that, when it finally sank in, changed how I looked and read the clickbait features - cause I still look at and read them despite how much I really don't want to...resistance is futile.

   Now when I click on one of those features I go into it with a different approach, something akin to a "Now let's see what the those crazy young whippersnappers have learned today" attitude, which usually results in me finishing the read with an more satisfying "Wow, someone still cares to delve in the history of...whatever, that's cool."

   Which is way better than my old attitude of "What moron doesn't know that, what a waste of my time!"

  Or at least it's a better excuse for me to use for wasting my time, in any event.

  So, all you clickbait content creators, keep on keeping on with sharing your new discoveries, but please, try to limit your condemnation of previous generations missteps and triple-check your sources.

   

Thousands Of Every So Often Chances

I take a lot of photographs with my phone

On the off chance that I might get one

Just one

Exquisite picture

It's happened once or twice