Yet another perfect Northwest Florida Gulf Coast winter morning - - 67°F 90% humidity wind SSE 13 mph low clouds fill the sky, Anu Garg's word for today is "sneakernet" which I've done many times in changing data from computer to computer without knowing there was a word for it, and Garg's thought for the day is Janis Joplin saying "O n stage, I make love to 25,000 different people, then I go home alone."  Born in 1943, Janis would have turned 80 today, but she died of a heroin overdose at 27. If you didn't know or don't remember Janis Joplin or Kris Kristofferson or Ray Price, and "Bobby McGee" and "For the Good Times", I have to let that be your problem, not mine. It's okay, I can't stand your generation's music either! ++++++++++++ In our gospel reading for this coming Sunday, Jesus has just been baptized by John, acclaimed by God, and then led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where he was tested by the devi...

  This morning we have our six-monthly visit to the skin doctor clinic, which, I don't know about Linda, will leave at least me with various zapped spots on my head and arms itching and turning red, and maybe some smell of burned flesh, nomesane?  The doctor is always curious about the birthmark on my face, but my mother told me it was the first thing she noticed about me after I was born, so counting time in the womb,   I've had it about eighty-eight years  and it's never changed. The doctor might love to cut it out, but neither I nor my medical insurance company would like that, so it ain't no way. Coffee in my Xmas mug this morning: Lucky Goat that came with the mug. We thought it was whole beans as the bag says, but when I opened the bag to grind, it turned out it was grounds after all, had, as intended, been ground when purchased. Nice cuppa. Neither my +Time blog nor this morning's blogpost are food columns, but here goes anyway, and as I finish and l...

Here I sit gazing out my window across St Andrews Bay into the last darkness before dawn on a chilly mid-January morning, progressing through extreme old age, with pretty much nothing left to do in life that I want to do except think, ponder, contemplate, decide nothing, and maybe jot some of it down like journal or diary entries in my +Time blog that, ever since starting it more than a dozen years ago, I call "my nonsense". And don't bother "correcting" me about whether the period full-stop goes inside or outside the quotation marks, I know the rules, both English practice and absurdly inconsistent American practice, and I vary and apply them inconsistently, partly to suit myself, partly to jerk the chain of any persnickety reader; what's your problem?! In my life's Time I've been, vocationally and avocationally, fish house worker, student, food service worker, naval officer, amateur astronomer, adjunct professor, consultant; and clergy member that...

Our gospel reading Sunday, 15 Jan 2023 was John 1:29-42, John the Baptist acclaiming Jesus the Lamb of God, and Jesus calling his first disciples. The first chapter of the Gospel according to John (below, scroll down) is one of my favorites for Bible study in a group. It is absolutely loaded with fascinating "points" to jot down for discussion; a flood of that thought washed through my mind this morning as we read and heard a section of it in church, and I was thinking to make enough of a blogpost of it to continue the thought.  Retiring again, by degrees, I miss group Bible study. I miss leading, teaching, mentoring our adult Sunday school class. I miss even more leading the midweek Bible study classes we had for years at Holy Nativity and, before that, at St Thomas by the Sea. Probably most of all, I miss the EfM classes we had at Trinity, Apalachicola and years later at Holy Nativity, St Thomas by the Sea, and St Andrew's. Bible study, thinking, raising questions, voic...

  Living at Azalea Trace, a retirement community that she helped establish in Pensacola, EG, my father's sister Evalyn (yes, it was spelled with an "a", which my persnickety spell-check refuses to accept; and her name was Evalyn Godfrey Weller, which is why we called her EG, the Godfrey was her mother's maiden surname, but I have no idea why Evalyn with an "a") used to speak to groups at "the Trace" about helping deal with aging loneliness by opening what she called one's Treasure Chest of Memories. Which for most all of us is filled with stories from our different places and Times of life.  Mine certainly is, stories major and minor, big and little, significant and obscure, stories known throughout the family and stories, memories, known to us alone, or to just one other person and that one perhaps dead, stories to tell and stories so private and personal that they are beyond ever sharing with anyone.  Ever since my living experience of the ob...

This is The South -> practically everyone I know has and loves guns, firearms, rifles, pistols, shotguns. Mostly to hunt. Some love to collect. Others for protection "just in case". I don't know how it is for boys anymore, but for me growing up was all about guns, playing Army with Americans against Germans* and Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, every boy had cap pistols and little red rolls of caps to shoot in them.  Next to chemistry sets, guns was the page I most drooled over in the toys section of Sears & Roebuck Catalog. I remember the Christmas my beloved grandmother gave me the double-holster set I had so coveted and begged for, although by then it was Wartime, metal was in short supply and the pistols were not the cap guns I wanted and anticipated, but a new type of faux plastic that was so brittle they broke in two, both barrels broken off by the Day after Christmas. It didn't work anyway: not finding a double holster set, Mom had bough...

Perhaps, or maybe even probably, from being born during and growing up in The Great Depression, I acquired, and have held onto, an odd food ethic. Don't waste food. Eat everything on your plate. Don't take more than you can eat, and finish all you take. In a restaurant, if there's food left on my plate, ask for a go-box - - in my Time, a "doggie bag" even though there was not even a pretense that it was for the dog, IDK, maybe there was some social aversion to seeming "cheap" - - or "poor" - which the wandering mind surfaces a family story that I've told here before - - in the mid-to-late 1940s when my father had returned from maritime service during the War and was restarting his wholesale seafood business, and could not get the new trucks he needed, he bought two very good and suitable trucks that had been Army ambulances, a 1937 Chevrolet, then a 1937 GMC (a flathead six that he said was an Oldsmobile engine but might have been Pontiac) ...