Eat dessert first

Have you heard the saying "Eat dessert first"?  One day I ate Greek yogurt for breakfast, along with what was left of a blueberry muffin from our Café.  Both taste sweet, and I remember thinking, "I'm eating dessert for my first food of the day today."  But Greek yogurt is supposed to be healthy with those probiotics.

How can a school classroom being welcoming of all of its students be a violation of district policy?  Anne at My Head Is Full of Books shared a controversy (and a video) about a poster like this one (saying that EVERYONE is welcome) that has gotten a school teacher in trouble.  People are asking, "What kind of country are we living in?"  Click HERE (or HERE) to see an interview with the teacher.

National Walking Day

National Walking Day is every year on the first Wednesday in April.  That's today, so here is a question for you to ponder while you walk:  Would you rather walk through a city or through the woods exploring nature?  I'd have to see whether the sun is shining or it's raining.  I enjoy walking outside when there is not too much pollen in the air.  I use a Rollator, so I no longer walk in the woods, as I once enjoyed.  Just keep walking to stay as healthy as you can.

It's April again

Although I haven't been posting these monthly calendars in a long time, I'm still receiving the daily Action for Happiness texts on my phone and monthly calendas like this on my computer.  Today, I decided to share it again, so here it is.  Click to enlarge it, so you can read what it suggests we do each day.  You can find previous monthly calendar suggestions by clicking HERE.

A book and a dozen things I'm grateful for

Grateful: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks ~ by Diana Butler Bass, 2019, sociology, 256 pages

We know that gratitude is good, but somefind it hard to sustain a life of gratefulness.  Bass takes on this “gratitude gap” and offers up surprising, relevant, and powerful insights to practice gratitude.  She explores the transformative power of gratitude for our personal lives and in communities, showing how we can make change in our own lives and in the world.  She says gratitude as a path to greater connection with others.  It’s time to embrace a more radical practice of gratitude — the virtue that heals us and helps us thrive.

What am I grateful for today?

1. I'm grateful for my friends.
2. I'm grateful that my eyes are not as itchy as they were recently.
3. I'm grateful that I can walk to our Café without going outside at all.
4. I'm grateful for sunshine.
5. I'm grateful for blue skies, when they come.
6. I'm grateful for the Clean Speech St. Louis booklet, which this year trained our brains to be grateful.  It's why I ordered the book above.
7. I'm grateful that I can read and explore the world of ideas.
8. I'm grateful for the friend who forgot to meet me for lunch in the Café yesterday, wondering if and when she'll remember.
9. I'm grateful for my bed when I want to nap mid-day.
10. I'm grateful for my easy chair in the corner, where I can blog or read while sitting beside my window.
11. I'm grateful for that window, where I can see the world go by, as people walk or jog or carry home bags of groceries.
12. I'm grateful that I can close my door and be alone.  (I am an introvert, though some don't quite believe me because I'm friendly.)

Musing on Monday

This is obviously NOT my own phone, since it cannot take a photo of itself.  It shows how I count my steps each day.  Even though I'll be 85 in a few days, I've walked about 1.5 miles a day this year and slightly more last year.

How did it get to be Sunday again, already?

The Stranger ~ by Albert Camus, translated from French by Matthew Ward, 1989 (first published in 1942), literary fiction, xxxvi pages of introductory information + 117 pages

This is the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach.  Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life.  I have read this several times, but I'm ready to read it again.

Here's what I have posted this week:

1. On Monday, I posted about names of places, HERE.
2. On Thursday, I wrote about my dream of words, repeated over and over, HERE.
3. On Friday, my book beginning was a repeat of a book I now hope to actually finish reading, HERE.

Well, it appears I haven't done much blogging this week, doesn't it?  Maybe in the coming week, I'll do more blogging.

Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

Beginning again

Beginning

"Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen"

Here's a secret you should know about mothers.  We spy.  Yes, on our kids.  It starts at birth.  In those first months we spend twenty-three hours a day trying to get you to sleep, grateful you aren't yet verbal because at some point we run out of lyrics to the lullabies and start singing "Hush little baby, don't be contrary,/ Mama's gonna have a coro-nary."  And then you finally doze off, and what do you think we do?  Go read a book?  No, we stand over your cradle and stare, thinking, God, those little fingernails.  Those eyelashes.  Where did this perfect creature come from?

Small Wonder ~ by Barbara Kingsolver, 2002, literary essays, xvi + 269 pages

I have already shared the first lines of the first essay in this book a few months ago, HERE.  But I never got around to actually reading the whole book.  So this time, I opened the book in the middle to an essay entitled "Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen" and used that one.  I'll read it first and then the rest of the book, which has twenty-two essays about nature, family, literature, and the joys of everyday life while taking a look at wars, violence, and poverty in our world.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts

Book Beginnings on Fridays.