Eternity?

Seeing the horizon when on the open seas can make you think about eternity.

Or falling off the edge of the world.

But this picture really does make something look like it never ends.

Just Dance

I was out to dinner last night with some friends. As we were getting up to leave, a song was playing over the restaurant's sound system that was fairly danceable. One of my friends turned to me and said, "I'll give you a dollar if you start busting a move right now."

I am nothing if not easily bribed. And shameless. So I started dancing. Busted a move, to be exact.

Not only did it surprise Amy, the friend who dared me, but the two teenage girls across the room were laughing. They didn't know if they should be embarrassed for me, but they were definitely headed down that path. Amy told me they were laughing and rolling their eyes, so I laughed and put myself in their shoes. "Oh. Em. Gee. Can you believe how ridiculous that lady looks? She's like, my MOM'S age! Ugh."

 I demanded my dollar, which shocked Amy, then on the way out, turned to the two girls and said, "She said she'd give me a dollar if I did it. How do you pass that up?" It probably mortified them even more that I addressed them directly, but we already know I'm shameless.

The whole thing reminded me of the dance dares that Ellen DeGeneres has been doing on her shows lately. This first one is with Emma Stone:



 And this one is with Kristen Chenoweth:



Go ahead -- dance! The worst thing that can happen is that some teenagers roll their eyes and act embarrassed on your behalf.

The upside is you might get a buck out of it.

(I gave the dollar back. It was worth way more than a dollar to see the surprise on Amy's face.)

He's Aliiiive!!!

Last night I found Thing 2 happily wandering around the living room. The cats looked at me like, "What IS that thing? And why can't we eat it?"

I scooped him up and put him back in his jar. I still couldn't tell if Thing 1 was alive or not. Playing possum or dead? I should have a better verdict tomorrow.

This morning Thing 2 was definitely still alive and kicking. Crawling. I refreshed their leaves and put them in the shade.

Hopefully I have more good news to report tomorrow.

Experiment

I asked my sister, a professional bugologist, to give me her expert opinion on what kind of caterpillars we were finding so ubiquitously in our back yard. (Specifically what it will turn into, not what it already is. I already know what it is: a black, fuzzy caterpillar.) She did what all good teachers (and sisters!) do: challenged me to experiment and see what it turns into.

So I "caught" one yesterday and placed it in a specially-made jar. In this case, a Welch's grape juice bottle cleaned out and with the narrow neck cut off so my hand can fit in to supplement his food supply, etc.

Then I went and got a second caterpillar just in case something happened to the first one. Truth be told, neither one were terribly lively so I wasn't entirely sure I was starting off with valid test cases. Also I have two very curious cats who like to investigate things in the house.

Here's the start of the experiment:

When I got home last night the jar was knocked off the piano and some leaves were strewn across the floor. One of the fuzzy little guys was on the floor and the other was MIA. I scooped him up and put him and the leaves back in, but didn't know if he had survived or not. There was plenty of bug poop in the jar so I know they had done well up until the point the kitty hurricane disrupted their lives.

A little while later I found Thing 2 crawling across the floor, despite my fears he had turned into a cat toy. He was very lively this time around so I put him in the jar and put the whole kit and caboodle in my room out of cats-harm's way.

This morning there was only one left in the jar. I hope it didn't crawl out and get squashed by me in the middle of the night.

Since my room stays fairly dark during the day I put it out on my front step this morning. Now I'm worried:
*That a bird will be delighted by the free breakfast;
*That he will roast in his plastic home and I will have a bug BBQ on my hands;
*That he will escape. Can't really blame him for trying after the trauma I've put him through e past 24 hours.

Hopefully I figure out how to raise a healthy caterpillar soon so we can see what kind of a (probably) moth he is.

Potential

There are dozens of these caterpillars in my back alley. I presume they have fallen or been blown out of the largish tree. We find them crawling around in the concrete road, with no food source within miles (for them, at least). We try to rescue as many as we can (which reminds me of the story about the baby turtles washed up on shore and one lone person is walking along the beach picking them up one at a time throwing them back into the sea. Someone says, "There's no way you can save all of them; why bother?" To which the rescuer replies, "It makes a difference to this one.")

We did some serious investigative research (Internet search engine) and think they're going to turn into a giant leopard moth. Which makes me laugh. For now they're all cute and fuzzy and I feel quite charitable trying to rescue as many as I can.

But come July I'll be beating them off me as I try to race them into the house.

Niceties

A friend of mine said something on Facebook a week or so ago that was delightfully profound. I commented and told her so, and she said I should be on Twitter. I had a chance to talk to her about it on Wednesday and she said again that I should get on Twitter because she loves my own profound one-liners. (Her words, not mine. I may think I'm profound but would never say so out loud. That would take all the humility out of it!)

She said that her own goal on Twitter was to just find one positive thing each day and tweet that. I thought that was a fantastic idea.

I started thinking about what I could tweet. I have a lot of thoughts in a day -- it was just a matter of weeding through them to choose the most worthy ones.

And I realized that not only do I not have a lot of thoughts I need to share with the interwebs, I really don't have a lot of positive thoughts. But I don't think anyone else does either. Or maybe that's just my Facebook friends. There are plenty of status updates, but not really a lot of positive things. Kind of like the evening news. I wonder if it's a societal thing to think that it doesn't matter or it's not news-worthy unless it's negative. Well, maybe not negative, but not positive.

That's what I've been thinking about this week. Every time something happened this week I'd think, "Oh, I'll tweet that!" (knowing full well that people don't really care about my every thought. Or maybe that's because I don't care about other peoples' every thoughts so I think the same thing applies in reverse). But when I held that thought up to the "keep it positive" criteria, I realized that very little that happened, or more specifically -- very little of the commentary that I thought about what happened was positive.

So that's my goal -- to be more positive. It's not easy, at least for me. And I don't really think of myself as a negative person. Realistic, yes. Cynical, no. Sarcastic, definitely. Room for improvement? Absolutely.

I believe that as continue to (internally, at least) narrate the events of my life and strive to become more positive in that commentary, it will influence the rest of my life as well.

Tranquility

This is a picture I took on the temple grounds yesterday. The title of this post can have multiple meanings.