Sunday Afternoon Stories

  Hi everyone,   It seems we've circled back around to Monday again. Ain't it funny how time marches on? In a sense we are all time travelers, but we only move forward and never back. And even then, our travels take us forward at a pace so slow that we hardly notice any changes.   I was sort of thinking about that while laying in bed early Sunday morning and thinking about the latest Tom Hanks movie I had watched Saturday night on my huge television, streamed into my home by the latest technology. My grandfather would have thought it was useless magic that we can watch Hollywood's latest from our armchairs with only the push of a few buttons and agreeing that we will pay Amazon for the pleasure of watching.   The trouble was that the movie was not exactly good. It wasn't horrible and I made my way all the way through it. Of course I did, I paid 20 bucks to watch it - which is less that I would have paid had I gone to see it in the theater.   Shoot, I don't know ...

  Hello everyone, Again, we woke this morning with cold, wintry weather. All I'll say about that is that I'm glad I got that college degree and have a job that is inside. Some of you may or may not know that in a previous iteration, I was an HVAC guy. I hated days like this because I was never in a place that was warm. On the plus side, customers were always happy to see me arrive. Now, I have a chair that matches my trunk and a trunk that matches my chair and while my doctors say that sitting all day isn't doing me any good, I'm happy to be indoors. Where I'd rather be is on a warm, sandy beach somewhere drinking a pina colada, maybe getting caught in the rain with a lover who is not into yoga and has half a brain. I kid, of course, mostly because that song really confuses me. It's about a guy who is in a relationship but he is looking through the personal ads for a new lover. (For you kids that's an old timey way of meeting people in order to date,...

  Good (cold) morning everyone,   I hope everyone is someplace nice and warm this morning. A look at the thermometer shows that it is a nice brisk -7 degrees here in the greater Metropolitan Edgewood Area. That's pretty dang cold, but at least it is a dry cold. Wait. That doesn't make much sense, but you hear it all the time when referring to the heat.   We in New Mexico complain a little too much about the weather. The same storm the sprinkled a couple of inches in my yard is now wreaking havoc across the rest of the country and we whine a bit about having to stay indoors for a day. (And having to clear out the driveway.)   In truth, I'm going to keep complaining about the cold and the snow and the heat and especially the wind, especially to those friends of mine who don't live in New Mexico. I don't want them to get the idea that the weather is actually very pleasant most of the time and that we don't have to worrying about hurricanes and massive snow storms t...

  The art of benign happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things. - Henry Ward Beecher At the beginning of the year, I got myself a little desk calendar that has an interesting fact for every day. Today's is that racism is bad for your health. On the back of the calendar pages as you rip the previous day off are other little tidbits, which is where I go the quote above. I thought I'd share it with you because this morning in particular it seemed very fitting.   I think I've talked about New Year's resolutions before and how I see them as a goal for the year. A big one for me this year is to stop smoking. I know I can do it because I've done it before - one time for more than two years. Why I ever start back up, I'll never know. (Or maybe I do and I just don't want to admit it to myself.)   So, I'm on my third day without a smoke and I'm pretty much on edge. For those who have never had this habit, the first week of ...

  Good morning everyone,   I'm a little early today. I'm trying to force myself into a new routine and I'd rather be back in bed.   I'm finding as of late that I tend to be more contemplative in the early morning. When I'm like that, I find the best thing to do is write. So I've been rolling out of bed and firing up the computer and letting my imagination funnel down into my fingers.   I also tend to make more mistakes first thing in the morning, but I guess that's what editing is for. I'm not going to bore anyone with what's rattling around in my contemplative mind other than to say that I'm working awfully hard to stay away from politics, religion, the nature of love and finding meaning in my place in the universe. There are no conclusive answers this morning, so I looked up Tuesday.   I suppose Tuesday must be about the most underrated day of the week. It's not Blue Monday and it is not Wednesday. (I promised some time ago that I would not...