General

General — 5 Comments
26
Sep 05

Chiggers

After a weekend of playing around in the bucolic Oklahoma countryside I am absolutely ate up with chiggers and bug bites.

Statistics:

Four fish caught. Two big beautiful crappie (pronounced croppy), one orangey perch I hooked in the side of the face, and one nice green bass with row upon row of sandpaper teeth. Crappie have large eyes and love to fight swimming back and forth very fast. The bass was more like a heavyweight, just trying to pull off the hook and get away. Fishing is all about the anticipation and imagining what’s under the surface because most of the time you’ll get a strike for every 25-30 casts. That has been my recent experience, but then I’m quite the novice angler. There are few things better than being out in the morning and getting your hook in the water.

Three bowls of ice cream with chocolate cake in Corningware bowls. I am spoiled, but it was at least for a good occasion this time: Jody’s dad’s birthday.

One greenish yellow box turtle caught. I almost kept him, but I envisioned getting tired of it and letting it go, so I put him back on his way in the cow pasture since box turtles are territorial and need to guard their domains. I wanted to carve my name in his shell just like my great grandfather used to do , but I didn’t have a knife on me, as usual. Apparently, my great grandfather would carve his name in the shell of every turtle he found, and his neighbors would call him up on occasion and say, “Hey Frank, I found one of your turtles.”

At least five naps on the couch while reading my book.

Spotted one large bull frog, the size of a serving platter, half-submerged in the cow pond at LeHigh. They look strangely human when they get that big. We planned a tentative frog-gigging expedition for later that night, but Walmart doesn’t carry the necessary implements for spearing enormous frogs at night.

asides — Comments Off
26
Sep 05

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Good finance blog. Neville’s Financial Blog. This is a kid I can relate to.

Arabic and Islamic themes in Frank Herbert’s “Dune”

Fiona Apple reemerges from a six year hiatus. I might buy / download her new album. I liked the leaked tracks I heard.

Singer D’Angelo seriously injured in car crash.

General — 3 Comments
21
Sep 05

Slow it down

Someone made a good point during a Toastmasters meeting recently that resonated with me. The topic was about good advice someone once told you. One guy told a story about how his father had once given him the simple advice to slow down. It really made me think. It’s so easy to get yourself set in a fevered pitch where you’re just zooming past all the important thinking and contemplation you need to do. Not to mention all the important details essential to living a happy life, like thinking about other people, and taking care of small but important responsibilities. How often do you just sit and think?

I overload myself with commitments on my time and energies so much so that I rarely have time to decompress. I fill my environment with activity and noise to drown out the internal noise, but I should try to calm down my own thinking. How do you do that? If you can slow down your thought processes, you should calm down. Try to narrate your experience in your head like “I see the moon is bright tonight. I hear crickets. I smell moisture.” I find this calming and it helps slow me down.

asides — Comments Off
19
Sep 05

Letter Never Sent

Chiggers

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Slow it down

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New ‘remaindered links’

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the old stuff