Some Thoughts In The New Year

Haven't written much so far this year. Kerry and I have both been sick since the day after Christmas. He's finished his antibiotics; I still have three days to go. I'm just glad we got this over with before our China trip.

New subject: My brother Richard has a friend named Stan who has a blog. Stan probably writes the most thought provoking entries of anyone I know who blogs. His topic recently was are you a "baker" or a "cook" in your approach to life. If you think about it, bakers have to follow the recipe quite closely. They need to be more detail oriented. Cooks, on the other hand, can play around with a recipe. These are the people who say that a recipe of theirs never turns out the same way twice. I've decided that I'm a "cook". I made corn bread yesterday, which really showed me that I'm not a baker. I sorta measured the ingredients. "Sorta" would never enter into the vocabulary of a baker.

New subject: The subtitle of this blog is "The simple life is best". With each passing day I believe that more and more. One of my great delights this morning was checking my garden to see signs of bulbs emerging. I found lots of them. Also pulled a few weeds. Then I walked out to the road to get the New York Times. On the way back I checked out our fig tree that we may have killed last summer due to 100+ temperatures. I noted the level of water in the irrigation ditch; it's higher because it rained last night. Then I spent quite a while watching the lower pond. As I suspected, the muskrat is back. Drat. Those little guys are impossible to get rid of, and they love to dig tunnels in the banks of our ponds. Last year one side of the pond started to give way thanks to this furry little creature. Our neighbor Steve came with his dozer and mended the breach before we lost too much water. Steve has moved on. The drug police found a meth lab in his wood shop. That put a quick end to his life on Fruitvale Road.

For those of you who have known me for a long time you are probably amazed that I have come to enjoy the simple life. Ten, fifteen years ago I couldn't get enough activity stuffed into one day.

Last subject: Got a card from a cat-loving friend with the following on it: "Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.