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Thoughts on the Song “Against the Wind”
A couple of days ago, while we were playing cribbage, Sena asked me who sang the song “Against the Wind.” I offered a name, which later turned out to be wildly wrong. It bugged her so much she got up from the cribbage game and went to the computer to look it up. Of course,…
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Thoughts on the GuideLink Center Incident
The attack a few days ago by what was most likely a mentally ill person on staff at the recently opened GuideLink Center in Iowa City reminded me of what may appear to be disparate views by mental health professionals on the link between mental illness and mass violence perpetrators. The GuideLink incident involved a…
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Do You Get the Zoomies or the Zennies?
Does your pet dog, cat, or sloth ever get the zoomies? We don’t have pets; I just read about animals getting the zoomies the other day. It’s an interesting phenomenon. Right after a bath, a dog might race around the yard, getting all dirty again. They look like they’re having great fun and veterinarians say…
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The Kindness of Strangers in a Parking Lot
This is a post about how easy it is to forget where you parked your car in a big parking lot, say at the grocery store, and ways to help prevent it. This sometimes attracts the kindness of strangers, which is puzzling because it’s not very clear how helpful they can be in this situation.…
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Update on James Alan McPherson Park Memorial Plaque
Sena suggested we send a message to Iowa City Mayor Bruce Teague inquiring about the proposed memorial plaque to James Alan McPherson, Pulitzer Prize winning author and longtime Iowa Writers’ Workshop faculty member. I can remember only one other time in my life that I wrote a letter to an elected official. I wrote President…
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Skimming the Parks
We took a walk on the Hickory Hill Park short Loop and the James Alan McPherson Park. We’ve lived in Iowa City for 34 years and walked only one other Hickory Hill Park trail. That was several years ago. Just before you start the short Loop, you can read a poem, The Morning by W.S.…
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The Little Mundanities of Life
Sena says I need to write about some mundanities, so I will. She says the mundane things in life are important. She told me about an episode of The Waltons she saw years ago, which emphasized the importance of life’s little mundane things. I looked for the episode on the web, but couldn’t find it.…
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The Cigarette Waltz
A couple of days ago we heard a ballet called The Cigarette Waltz by a French composer, Edouard Lalo, on one of the Iowa Public Radio (IPR) classical music programs. The announcer told a little anecdote (most of which I didn’t hear) about the saying “Smoke‘em if ya got’em” which he traced to the World…
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Invasion of the Pregnant Man Emojis!
I just saw a pretty funny story in the news about an old guy who was not allowed to donate blood at a Scotland blood bank because he refused to answer a new questionnaire asking whether or not he was pregnant. I thought that was uproariously funny. Then I read the rest of the story…
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Be Kind
We went for a walk on the Terry Trueblood Trail yesterday. It was a nice break from reading the news. Sena wore her shirt which has printed on it, “be kind, be nice, be love.” She got a compliment about it. We saw a lot of birds, including Tree Swallow nestlings in the nest boxes…
