Saturday morning. Breakfast: tin of anchovies, enjoyed eating them one at a Time from the open tin, and a stuffed egg topped with an anchovy, along with my mug of hot & black.  Checked the osprey nest just now, looks like still just three hatchling chicks and an egg. That pics from yesterday. I watched and took one screensaver shot as the male bird feeds chick #3 while the mom bird feeds the other two. Our POD for today included walking through the farmers market at Under the Oaks Park next door but it sort of slipped away, so I took my furoForty and settled in to enjoy the morning from here, looking out across the Bay, over Shell "Island" and into the Gulf of X while I contemplate one of tomorrow's Bible readings.  All the farmers market vendors get their tomatoes from the same wholesalers who deliver tomatoes to the local grocery stories anyway. If you want a proper tomato you need to drive what my Weller grandparents called "up to Grand Ridge" to Jackso...

  Noticing, what? a mental dullness; maybe it has to do with whether I get up early and alert for my thinking Time, with a magic mug of hot & black Club coffee. It didn't happen Wednesday, up too late to do basic thinking that underlies writing even my nonsense. I wanted to write, but the mind wasn't there for it, and adding to it is a bothersome onset of imbalance even when sitting. Even when idly and lazily scrolling down and thumbing through endless and valueless short videos on Facebook.  Like, get a life, man, nomesane? A stack of stuff is here waiting to be read. Several books, Atlantic and New Yorker magazines are piling up. Smithsonian, I didn't even realize we subscribe to Smithsonian; speaking of, a crushing despair sets in about vile political machinations and I wonder whether it's just human nature, that every age of human civilization brings its own causes for hopelessness about the future of mankind, nation, world itself. At some point, I try to shift ...

We don't have a picture of my breakfast this morning, and, slowly one at a Time along with a sip of tap water or hot & black, I've eaten two-thirds of it anyway, so it's too late now. Six sardines, each with a smear of mustard on top. Didn't matter which mustard, ever-which-of-a mustard that first caught my eye in the refrigerator door, and this morning it was Grey Poupon.  My favorite is a German mustard, and there's a jar of it in there and a backup jar in the pantry because - - I guess because of having grown up during The Great Depression - - I don't like giving out of things.  There's also English mustard, another favorite. And the usual French's yellow mustard that you Americans seem to prefer. I like them all, including Maille, a French mustard that I don't have and don't need at the moment; but that's about it, pretty ordinary, I'm not into weird mustards.  On hamburgers I like mayonnaise, with maybe a little puddle of the Ger...

  Don't bother asking me for citations, I've long forgotten them, but I remember learning in theological seminary that Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), German theologian who wrote "On Religion: Speeches To Its Cultured Despisers," asserted, "in each of us there is implanted a sense of the infinite." To an extent, I might agree with him, but I'm more inclined to understand man's (okay, so shoot me) basis for religion as our fear and wonder of the unknown unexplainable that we see around us. Sun, moon, stars, crops growing (Baruch ata, Adonai Eloheinu, melek ha-olam; ha-motzi lechem min ha-aretz), threatening clouds, lightning, violent storms at sea, bizarre behavior, childbirth, life itself, death, death itself. Maybe especially death.  Repeated here many Times, yea unto way too much, I'm a fan of Steve Jobs' famed commencement address summary, Don't live someone else's life; don't be trapped by dogma, which is the result of o...

From Time to Time, and today, the 6th Sunday of Easter (Year C) is such a Time, the Sunday lectionary offers options about one reading or the other. This is such a Time because next Thursday, May 29, is Ascension Day. The lectionary framers give us the choice of either continuing Easter so to speak, or anticipating Ascension. Ascension is one of the seven Principal Feast Days of the church year; but, because it falls in midweek is often, not necessarily to say usually, forgotten, ignored, overlooked.  At any event, the two gospel choices for today are printed below.  Who makes the choice? The rector, or the preacher with the rector's permission; and the decision might depend on the preacher's sermon topic or on the parish plan for Ascension. The John 14 reading anticipates Jesus' imminent death followed by the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost soon after the Ascension.  In the John 5 reading, Gospel John tells about a healing sign (in John, the events that in th...

  No matter what seems, +Time was and is never a food blog. But my dietary preferences appall Linda enough that I think they may get the attention of other folks from Time to Time, so ... This is my Saturday breakfast after my walk in Oaks by the Bay Park just beyond the side gate of our garden here at HV. My thought at first was cheddar cheese and strawberry jam that I bought at World Market yesterday, but when I opened the fridge for the cheese, there was the remainder of a jar of sardines that a friend gifted me recently; the imagination sparked, saliva flowed, and off we went. A flour tortilla topped with mustard and cheddar cheese, toasted, then loaded with sardines, and folded over into a roll. Extra sardines on the side. With the mug of ice water it was excellent. I can feel a PPHT drop and nap coming on,  but after the nap, a mug of hot & black and a slice of whole wheat toast topped with cheese and strawberry jam sounds superb for a lazy, warm and muggy Saturday m...

A Dangerous Disguise for Anti-Semitism THURSDAY, MAY 22, 2025   Yair Rosenberg STAFF WRITER  The person charged with attacking an American Jewish gathering and killing two Israeli-embassy aides disingenuously invoked the Palestinian struggle as a pretext to harm Jews. A False Pretext (Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters) (Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters)   View in browser When Hamas stormed across the Gaza border on October 7, 2023, it knew exactly what it was doing. The group had  detailed   maps  of nearby Israeli military bases and forces, and quickly  overran  them. But the terrorist group did not stop there. Instead, Hamas advanced into civilian communities, butchering and burning whole families,  shooting children  in front of their parents, and  parents  in front of their children. Gunmen  executed  a grandmother in her home and uploaded the video to her Facebook page for friends and family to see. After discovering a music festival i...

  Things to do, places to go, people to see this morning. For one, drop Linda's car at Bay Town Tire for an oil and filter change because the car's computer keeps flashing that it's Time for an Oil Change even though the car has only been driven some three thousand miles since the last oil change a year ago. For another, the temperature is rising inside 7H because the air conditioning system isn't working, so phone A Superior to send a technician. Hopefully today, but what the Hell, when I was a boy growing up there was no air conditioning in Panama City except at the Ritz Theatre and J C Penny's department store; our house was cooled by opening the windows, all screened, and, in latter years, turning on the new 48 inch attic fan that drew a breeze in through every open window.  For now, Linda has the ceiling fans turning, so there's a breeze, moving air. And 7H is not exposed to the sun like an ordinary house, except for the one set of Bay front windows in the ...