Sunday, March 17, 2019

A Penny For My Thoughts



Introduction

I have decided to grow a blog-entry where I can share thoughts that are mostly in the form of embedded items from various places.

 How long do I plan on growing this blog-entry?

God willing and the creek don't rise...through my 70th birthday, which will be taking place on December 12, 2022...



I began building the framework for this blog-entry early in March of 2019 but laid it aside for awhile to tend to other things.  It is now Sunday, March 17 (St. Patrick's Day, no less!), and have now resumed working on it.

A lot of things have happened since that time, and I'll be going into them in the time to come.  For now, however, here's a thought I created a few minutes ago, this being a little before 8 PM with the present time being a little bit after the same...


One of my projects for the time ahead is to share various ones of my old photos online and tell the stories behind them.  Some of the photos were taken over 100 years before I was even born, but I was blessed with parents and other family members who shared the stories with me.

The photos in the collection below aren't from a personal collection, but they're still very enjoyable to go through, as I hope that my own collections will be to even perfect strangers who might stumble upon them while surfing the Internet.


I'm also in the process of writing my memoirs and putting them into a collection. Go here to find out more about that.  Because I'm doing this between doing a lot of other things, this will be getting done faster at times than at other times.


Remembering Senator Birch Bayh...




This story will really bless you!!!
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It's heading towards the end of St. Patrick's Day, and I'm now ready to grand-open this blog-entry.  Here's to the time ahead...


Note: I have no idea what story I was talking about that never got shared for some reason.

All I know is that it's now Saturday, March 23, and I'm. obvious haven't been impressed with the behavior of Twitter today, though I see some signs that it might be righting itself.

We can only hope...

MEOW!!!
 



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Stay tuned for more...


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Friday, March 1, 2019

SOTU Memories & Musings


It is now Friday, March 1, 2019, at a little bit after six-thirty in the morning, and I'm getting ready to post this blog-entry I had almost gotten finished yesterday with only one hyperlink, one graphic, one video, and a title other than "Working Title" to add to it before clicking on the "Publish" button.

I ended up taking a time-out for a little bit when my computer (mouse problems and related issues) was showing me its contrary side.

Long-story-short:  I ended up closing my eyes for a few minutes rest and going out like a light until this morning.

Back to my story -- which is that (on Thursday, February 28, 2019) I received a notification from Facebook that I had memories to view.


One of those memories was a status report I wrote just before going into the living room to watch Donald Trump's first State Of The Union Address. There had been people on both Facebook and Twitter  who were asking via status reports and Tweets if anybody were going to be watching him give his address.

Several people indicated that they had better things to do than watching him run his mouth.

Even though I hadn't been all that impressed with his job performance so far, I still wanted to open both my heart and mind to at least hear him out.

At the time, I felt as if I was about to come down with the flu -- and I would turn out to be right about that -- so, it was very tempting just to stay in bed; drink plenty of fluids; and keep working on personal projects on my desktop computer that is on a table directly east of my bed.

However, I also felt it was important to watch the 2017 SOTU Address.

Before I went in to watch it, I left behind this status report:

I live a couple of blocks from a train track. I think I hear a train-wreck happening, but sound's coming from my TV instead of the track...

Later (after I had returned to my bedroom/home office), I found this comment left re: my status report:

I don't understand what it is you don't like so far???????

In response, I wrote:



At the time I wrote this, I hadn't really gotten in on the speech but was about to go in and watch it.

Anyway, when I watched it, I was actually favorably-impressed -- initially. Gone was the guy who looked as if he should be wearing a toga and playing a fiddle, and there was somebody who was actually speaking my language and sharing my dreams.

Just when I was actually starting to wonder if I might have been wrong in my thinking about this guy, I began to notice little hints that he was (as Peter, Paul, & Mary once sang about how to get mainstream radio to play certain messages expressed in Rock 'n' Roll Music) laying some subtle messages between the lines.

Like did you notice that all of the brave families he recognized had their loved ones killed by people with Middle-Eastern-sounding surnames? The families, of course, had American-sounding names. 

None of the terrorists who robbed these grieving families of their loved ones had American-sounding names (e.g. McVeigh, Nichols, Purinton).

Also, the Donald Trump I watched a few hours ago (initially) seemed like someone who had taken a complete 180 from the Donald Trump who had been acting like the brat who had been talking and acting as if he barely understood the seriousness of his job description-- that is: somebody who had been, instead of having a clue, acting like the school bully/dogfight trainer who got some kind of kick out of turning classmates/dogs against each other and watching the results.

The interesting thing about this appearance of a complete 180 was that it was never explained. St. Paul let people know that what they were now seeing in him was the results of his surprise encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus.

In other words, he had seemed to go from madness to sanity. Was this a case of his having a Jeckyl-Hyde personality -- and which of those personalities was going to be the outstanding one during his time in office?

He had gone from, for example, wanting to do away with funding to special education and mocking people with disabilities to giving public kudos to a young lady with enormous challenges.

He had also gone from the filthy-rich guy who believed in exercising the power of eminent domain re: both the little old lady whose home sat on land he coveted and various younger women who had private parts that he wanted to fondle to someone who wanted to respect and empower us.

Anyway, before his speech was over, there were signs ( the most obvious one being how every single person who had stolen loved ones from the sympathetic characters he was honoring had a Middle-Eastern name) that he was still up to his same old tricks and that what he was presenting to us was like the stench of a post-cabbage-sauerkraut-and-beer-dinner BM being temporarily masked by a spritz of cologne.

In short, he talked the talk last night and told us what we wanted to hear -- but my concern is whether or not he'll actually walk the walk.

We shall see what actually happens in the time ahead...


It has now been two years since I listened to what he had to say and wrote down my feelings re: the the experience.

What's my take on the situation today?

My take is that I couldn't even BEGIN to imagine back then the real-life soap opera unfolding before us now.

I would like to close by recommending a thoughtful reading of THIS_ARTICLE  written by JOHN_PAVLOVITZ. If you agree with what he and I have expressed in our writings, please share what we've written with others.