Good better best to be out of the alphabet cone - - and better best nice nicer nicest to sit here on StAndrewsBay watching Ikan Leban 583x94 pass a stone's throw from 7H window leaving port loaded with wood pellets, making for Tyne UK.  Where Life is Good. I wouldn't want to miss this moment of it, or this day of Belovedys coming from Tallahassee for an overnight.  Sadly, funeral for Eleanor Ann Sale Smith at StJohn's RC this morning, we are sad not only for Mandeville and family, but for us, the gash her death makes in 1940s and 1950s memories from Cove School, Bay High, college and weddings. Yes Life is short. But Life is Good. For all that, RSF&PTL. T

Okay for a Friday morning, cuppa black early, check the weather on TV, looking more than less hopeful for giving it a miss. Rattling, it's inevitable and part of the price of being home where half every year is Hurricane Season.  Suck it up or move - - to Tornado Alley - - or California where the wildfires rage: well do I remember watching fire race down the near side of the mountain closest to our San Diego neighborhood as ash and sparks and cinders drifted over, settling on our wood shake roof and we loaded both cars with valuables prepping to leave on a moment's notice. Maybe the hurricanes, eh? Nice morning, breakfast outside on the porch, maybe first time since October 2018. Raspberries, blueberries and another cup of black. Plan for supper tonight at Alice's, salad and fried oysters. What with slowly deliberate reading so as not to miss a bit of it, finished Churchill and the Boer War, which inevitably brings back Major Hoople, wife Martha, and ...

Any number of times here, I've mentioned Charles LaFond and his blog The Daily Sip. It's all good, exactly my kind of spiritual blog, no religious smugness, none of the militantly entrenched religious Certainty that is the Greatest Sin, having brought about some of humanity's most monstrous evils. Artist, potter, LaFond is a disaffected (he might not like or agree with that adjective) Episcopal priest. Charles and Kai-the-dog, whom, who knows, he may have named from Greek simply to indicate "me And the dog", though I don't know that. In fact, I know almost nothing. Next then on my list would be Fr Richard Rohr and his daily meditation, with his unsmoky but by no means impious, and pragmatic Franciscan theology. Mainly Charles though. I'd love to have his writing gift, but I'm content to read him and just think "yep".  Also an Episcopal priest, retired but by no means disaffected, I wonder why Charles is so. Something must have been quite p...

On my way through Tallahassee, from home in Apalachicola, the first Friday of November 1993, I jammed on brakes as the pickup truck in front of me unexpectedly stopped for the changing traffic light. Too late in the drizzling rain, I skidded on the wet pavement and slammed into him as the hood of my car came up in my face and the transmission rose into the seat beside me. Little or no damage to the pickup truck, but my car was ruined, totalled. Running a few minutes later than intended, I had been, obviously foolishly, rushing to get there before school let out, to pick up Nicholas and take him home to Apalachicola for the weekend.  It's not necessary now to reassemble my revised weekend, delays, car towing, car rental, only to recall the emotional trauma and jump-out-of-my skin mental state that pierced my soul and held on for months during which driving, and even riding in the front seat of a car, was an unnerving trial. I don't know how long it took me to return to a new ...

Anyone who has, as have I, left the youngest and last Belovedy to leave home at college far away to start her freshman year knows the anguish a parent feels, beyond anguish, it is outright grief because the mind knows the raising and all that, the parenting is basically over and done and the empty nest syndrome ensues.  It can be, was for me for months, a nightmare I sometimes thought I could not possibly survive. And it's generational, again as I've reported here before, I well remember September 1953, receiving a letter from my father telling me that my mother had cried all the way home after they dropped me off at North Hall, University of Florida in Gainesville. I was, by contrast, euphoric, ecstatic, totally oblivious to my mother's pain until my father's letter came. What goes round comes round though, eh, and the karma hit me in August 1990 and August 2011. The first time, I thought I'd never live through it; the second time I knew that, having made it with...

Morning not at first to my enjoyment, early up and off to the skin shop to have my left ear and forehead zapped, no cutting this time. Then, having fasted except for black coffee, round the bend to what has become one of the two most efficiently run outfits in town, Gulf Coast Medical's Diagnostic Center. Arriving at 8:30, blood drawn and out the door with a small cup of black less than fifteen minutes later. In the past that would have taken all morning.  The other max-efficient outfit, and they also go overboard with courtesy and kindness, is the Bay County tax and title office at the county office building on 11th Street. Kudos. All in sharp contrast to the U S Postal Service, which I've whined about here before and they're getting worse and worse and the employees more and more entitled: to the wall with the lot of 'em obscenities, USPS, the world's best example of the virtues of free enterprise. Breakfast this morning. From the diagnostic center, ins...

Perfect songs! We have perfect songs this morning! "I come with joy to meet my Lord". "Praise the Lord, rise up rejoicing". "Jeremiah was a bullfrog" - - run up to Number One top of the charts by Three Dog Night, and one of the best selling singles of all time, the kids’ song “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” was actually written “Jeremiah was a prophet” but nobody liked it so Hoyt Axton changed it. Jeremiah was a bullfrog? No, Axton was right, Jeremiah was a prophet: The word of the Lord came to me saying, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,  and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations." Scripture, and preaching, sermons that are meant to open scripture, should give you an opportunity to let God speak to you as God spoke to Jeremiah - - an opportunity to find yourself in the Word of God; even if the preacher stirs your mind to ramble off on some tangent. (Otherwise, without the Word, we...

Twelve games, opening tonight in Orlando. In my Time at UFlorida, Miami was on our regular schedule, that and the Georgia game at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville were our two fierce competitions. Below: some links to good articles, including don't expect to see Miami back on regular; and Alabama, seems to me as usual but that's just me, doesn't have the world's toughest schedule this year either; and regarding Florida's two cupcake games this year, links to see who Towson and UTennesseeMartin are. Finally, observation from fivethirtyeight that the golden age for Florida's three main football teams has passed; but then what the hell, everything changes and even Alabama isn't starting the season at Number One, that's the CLEMSON TIGERS. Alabama couldn't last forever even if it seemed like an eternity, but surely'll be back at #1 before the season's half over. There was an era when the NY Yankees dominated major league baseball too, but nothing l...