This is the second day of the garage sale to benefit the Winnsboro Center for the Arts, and response from the community has been great. One of the things I especially love about living in a small town is the willingness of people to work together for the common good; at least most of the time. We owe a special thanks to Vic Clark, the owner of The Clark House here in Winnsboro, for letting us use one of his empty downtown buildings to host the sale. The Clark House is a beautiful B&B, and if you ever wind your way through our neck of the woods, it is a lovely place to stay.
I read in the newspaper a week or so ago that the U.S. Geological Survey is revising the Seismic Hazard Map for North Texas to include quakes believed to have been caused by human activity. Two North Texas quakes have been linked to fracking, and nationwide quakes and tremors have increased significantly in recent years, also tied to the oil and gas production processes.
So, instead of perhaps reconsidering some of those processes, we’re just going to be better informed about the consequences?
It was quite a surprise to read an article by Jennifer Weiner last week about her grandmother’s experience in an independent living facility that has a community dining room. Nanna, as Jennifer calls her grandmother, liked her room and the classes she could take at the center, but she had a disappointing experience in the dining hall. The other ladies would not let her sit with them. When she approached an empty chair, they told her it was taken.
Oh my gosh. Flash back to middle school anybody? I wondered if those ladies were my characters from Friends Forever all grown up. In her article, Jennifer made the point that mothers keep telling their tweens and teens that all the bad behavior in middle school and high school will all pass. That it’s just immaturity that makes girls be catty and mean, but Nanna’s experience, and others like her in group homes, says otherwise.
That is so depressing.
So I think it is time for some fun. Since I do so much ranting about the absurd things people say, I found this meme that someone posted on Facebook appropriate. When I shared it there, a friend accused me of dissing the government.
Me? I’d never do that.
Now for today’s Friday’s Funnies. This first one is from Zits by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman. In the first three panels we see Jeremy and his dad, and Jeremy is narrating a little story: “My Dad’s gastrointestinal system is a force of nature. His gut emits sounds and gasses found nowhere else in nature.”
Dad has a bemused look on his face while his gut goes ‘gurgle, blurp, squeen, pff, foo’, and the story continues. ” My mom says it’s been like this since he turned forty.”
In the last panel, Jeremy is opening a window and his mother is spraying air freshener. “At least I think she said ‘forty.'”
Jeremy looks at his mother, “Is that with an ‘o’ or an ‘a’?”
Next from Luann by Greg Evans: Luann is in one of her college classes and the professor announces, “The lecture for today is ‘The Birth of the Digital Age.’ But before I begin, I have a question.”
In the last panel we see a lecture hall full of students with a myriad of electronic devices. Luann has pen and paper in front of her. The professor asks, “Can any of you write – except for Miss Degroot?”
Writing Wisdom
“Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.” – Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Powers of Two
That’s it for me today. Have a wonderful weekend.