I wrote in a previous post about my identification with Teddy Roosevelt’s poor vision and his utter amazement when he got his first pair of glasses. I’d be interested to know how his vision problems progressed as he got older. Since Benjamin Franklin was the inventor of bifocals, I’d assume that TR at least had that feature available to him. And there were some primitive contact lenses as early as the late 1800’s, although it doesn’t appear that he ever wore those.
future
A Partially-Consumed but Worthwhile Book
Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved
I heard about this book from an episode of “Fresh Air Weekend” that kept me sitting in the parking lot of a restaurant recently and made me decide that I must get hold of it immediately. So I used one of my Audible.com credits to get the audiobook, thinking that I’d love it as much as I had the interview. I was going to plunge into it and not emerge until I was finished. It was going to be great.
Well, not so much.
I managed to get through about half of the audiobook, finding myself less and less willing to get back into it. Finally, yesterday, I started it again and then thought, ‘I can’t do any more of this.’ I may or may not go back and listen to the final couple of chapters, but I’m done with the ongoing story.
Another Life Lesson from PBS’s “Victoria”
I wrote back during Season 1 of this fabulous series (are you watching it? Whyever not?) about how one scene made it so achingly clear how quickly time passes, with moments of utter joy being over in a . . . well, moment. Season 1 ended with the birth of Victoria and Albert’s first child, Vicky, and now we’re about two-thirds through Season 2, with three of their nine children having been born and two more episodes to go. Both Jenna Coleman (Victoria) and Tom Hughes (Albert) are continuing on for season 3, for which all of us fans are very grateful. Over all of the scenes looms the specter of Albert’s death, which we all know is coming when he’s only 42, after he and Victoria have been married for a little over 20 years. All that passion, all that rivalry and head-butting, all that love—all gone. And Victoria left to live on as a widow for 40 years, double the amount of time she spent as a wife.
How Did My Time-Tracking Week Go?
I wrote last week that I had signed up for the Laura Vanderkam Time-Tracking Challenge for 2018, in which participants were asked to log their activities for one full week, 168 hours. I’m happy to say that I stuck to it for the full week this year (having almost immediately dropped out last January) and also thoroughly enjoyed reading Laura’s daily updates (link is to the first day’s post; you can then read the rest if you’re interested) on how she spent her own time. I used my fun app, toggl, which I’ve written about several times, most recently last week, and this morning I had a neatly categorized weekly report, all ready for me to look at and then send on to Laura. I managed to record a total of 167 hours and 22 minutes, so only a little bit of time fell through the cracks. How did I do? Here are some highlights:
A Clear-Eyed Look from the Inside–and the Outside
This book is the third one I’ve read since last fall about our current political landscape. I wrote a post about the first one, Matt K. Lewis’s Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections (and How It Can Reclaim Its Conservative Roots)
Just Keep Plugging Away
Hurtling is the word, dear friends, hurtling towards 2018. I’m reminded of how I felt several years ago during a five-day visit to New York City. We took the subway quite a bit, and the rushing by of the trains seemed a metaphor for now quickly our precious vacation time was passing. That image returns to me often: So much to do, so many goals to be accomplished, and so little time.
But once in awhile I step back and inhale loudly. I remind myself that what really
Ignore the Fear—and Press on to the Finish Line.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before:
My psychology is very weird.
Or maybe not. Maybe you’ve had this experience too: You’re chugging along, making real progress on a project, and then you think, ‘But what will I do with myself when this is finished?’ I used to say this about our various landscaping endeavors at our house in Virginia. What would we do on Saturdays when we got all of that stuff done?
Where Will Your Month Go?
Sometimes I think that this blog wouldn’t have many entries if I didn’t do so much cribbing from other sources. Gretchen Rubin is a big crib, but another one is Laura Vanderkam, whom I’ve mentioned before. She’s quite a gal; I last wrote about her in this post about downtime. In addition to her quasi-daily blog posts she also sends out a weekly newsletter that sums up her week or gives ideas for the week or month to come, appropriately called “A Week’s Worth.” (The link is to the signup form.)
“So we beat on, boats against the current. . .
. . . borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
This closing line from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald came into my head Saturday night as I walked out of the building after the final performance of the Cherry Creek Chorale’s wonderful fall concert. Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I very much dislike the novel itself. I can’t stand Daisy and don’t have the slightest idea why Jay Gatsby would carry a torch for her and even take the fall for her.
The Joy of Tackling a Big Project
My current Big Writing Project (BWP) is the finishing up of my commentaries on Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana for publication. I’ve been using the writing software Scrivener, as everybody who’s anybody says it’s magnificent. Well, I’d been finding it magnificently hard to use, to be honest. The final step in my project was the addition of images, and Scrivener just wasn’t cooperating. Until, suddenly, it was. I’m not sure what I did, but I think I had somehow created a table where I didn’t want one, and Scrivener was stubbornly following the