August 1, 2008
I was trying to explain meditation to a friend the other day, and I found myself struggling. She asked how I quiet my mind in meditation, and I said, well, I am not always successful, but that meditation gives me a set time to practice. She asked what it was like, I said it varied. [...]
July 26, 2008
What better to do on a rainy day in Nova Scotia than to knit socks? Janet gave me this lovely yarn from Baadeck Yarns for my Birthday - Colinette Jitterbug 100% merino wool. Of course, I went for the fuschia to blue colorway, alizarene. I followed the free simple sock pattern on the yarn’s label, [...]
July 22, 2008
My in-laws are celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary.
True to form, they wanted to celebrate together with us: their daughter and their son and daughter-in-law. After a little bit of discussion, they decided on the location for the celebration - Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. It’s a fitting destination, the family camped here together often. Prior to [...]
July 21, 2008
I first heard about The Happiness Hypothesis from twitter, from @zappos tweet on having finished it, to be exact. I was especially interested in the premise of this book–a look at ancient wisdom and modern psychological research. Jonathan Haidt carefully reviews 10 ideas that have been threads in ancient wisdom and have been addressed in [...]
July 19, 2008
I took the VIA Signature Strengths test at authentichappiness.com (test is free, but requires registration on their site). Here are my top 5 strengths. The one thing that stands out to me is that my top strength in this survey is gratitude. Since I have been intentionally cultivating gratitude this year, I wonder if I [...]
July 8, 2008
I have had a meditation practice for several years now. I’ve been daily on weekdays for some time, long enough now that I think I might be addicted to it. This isn’t a bad addiction, a compulsion I need to shake, but it is interesting to notice my dependence, especially on something that has sometimes been [...]
July 7, 2008
Last week, in the middle of a workday, I got a call about a death in the family. I was shocked and sad - Somboun, the guy who died, was young, in his thirties, my husband’s age or so, and seemed in full health. He slipped away in his sleep, without warning.
I was busy, out [...]
July 2, 2008
I had some fun playing around with word clouds from my own twitter streams. Here’s a kind of random comparison of my tweet cloud from two applications - tweetclouds.com and tweetstats.com.
My tweetcloud seems pretty biased towards recent tweets - see “staycation”? I only said it once, just recently. looks like I retweet a fair bit, [...]
July 1, 2008
Low tech flight of a homemade airplane. Kinda scary, kinda thrilling. Wish I could see the plane. Found via Kottke’s remaindered links.
June 29, 2008
Everyone complains about bridesmaid’s dresses. I’ve bought some pastel tiered wedding-cake-esque “wonders” that immediately went into the “for Kiwanis” pile after the event. But I did get one dress, for my sister’s wedding, that has become my go-to dress for formal events and weddings since.
My sister is a pragmatic woman. When she got married, 11 [...]
not particularly objective musings on odds and ends - Dunrie Greiling, Ann Arbor, MI 48103