Some months ago, that intellectually stimulating Smells From the Carpet suggested that I should change my blog's appearance.  I suppose he had reached the sensible conclusion that snazzing up the place might inspire some fresh posts.  Now I have noticed the opposite to be true--as the place has been rearranged and redecorated from that old drab blank canvas, I've felt less drive to put something new here. 

I am more likely to just switch things around, and with a new month it's time for a new look.  I'm sure CarpetGuy will love this new look.  Let's see what kind of posts result, shall we?

Jean, get off of 20six, and get back to work.

School is not the place for blogging.

After checking on a thought that was in the back of my mind, I see that it's been a year to the day that I first wandered onto this site and started rambling.  Some things have been moved around, put into the back of the closet, and brought back out again, but mostly the place has just been left to meander in whatever direction it would without a lot of thought from me, and I think that's pretty obvious.

My showing up on 20six wasn't random; there was a reason I started blogging here.  The original goal was met and then some, and then I ended up getting a lot more from the experience, more than I really could have imagined.  It's true I was a person of rather limited imagination, or perhaps an unexercised imagination, but this place has certainly exceeded anything that even a far more ingenious person would have expected.

So today I'm saying "Thank you" to anyone who's reading this, everyone who's read it in the past year, and mostly to me, for having the blip in sensible thinking that made me come here in the first place.

Recently my family has broken out in a rash of doctor’s appointments. I have been driving my children around for weeks now from one place to another, and my patience with the patients has been growing, or rather shrinking much like a hospital gown; you wish it was generous to back you up, but there’s a big gap where you least want it.

The nice thing about having an emotional palette is that you can move from blue onto other colors, you don't have to have blue all over the place all of the time.

That blue Monday was the result of quite a lot of things, but it's Thursday, and there are other tones to the day today.  When I was bumbling around with my first cup of coffee this morning, waiting for the day to sort itself out and show me what it was made of, I discovered that there are some definite bright tones happening, a welcome sight for my weary receptors. 

For some reason my birthday came to mind.  I posted about it that day, and today I went back and read that post looking for the part that was trying to reach me through the early morning mental fog.  The post is a normal one for me, long wordy thing, but I found the part I wanted.  It refers to something my friend Judy had read about parents and teenagers, and why they find it hard to understand each other.  I adopted this wise parenting information for a different purpose.  

 Here it is:

If a person’s view of the world is represented by a pie graph, a young person’s graph will show a very large proportion of dreams and a small slice of reality.  A more mature person’s pie will have the opposite, nearly all of it will be reality and the piece representing dreams will be a very narrow sliver, if there are any dreams at all left to show.fficeffice" />

 

This year I’m going to work on that pie of mine.  I am going to spend more time dreaming and hoping and less time reviewing reality.

 

Years and people are works in progress.  I think I'd better get on with it, while the blue stays just a small part of a more well balanced composition here.

Today's broken bits:

one china coffee cup

one glass plate

one saucer