Tiny art contest

 I wanted to draw a white cup with green tea in it. Oh boy! is it hard to paint a cup.

A pet

 Just like we bemoan the childhood days lost of our little children and their acts, its true of puppies too, they grow fast. 3 days and 3 weeks in.

A pet tunes us to the farmer schedule of beginning with cleaning up and feeding in the morning. In Japanese class, we learned a lesson that esa is pet food and the mom calls on the son to wake up early and feed the pets.

A Short History of Technology: From the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900

 A short history of technology

General knowledge

 Wealth building and gratitude

http://www.lmschairman.org/2017/11/the-psychology-of-military-incompetence

 

The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

How good are you remembering the titles of a book? While reading it or having juct come across it. I have been looking for this book as "The Perfect Rain" or "The Great Rain".

The language is so beautiful. It has me inspired to follow the land and the river on google maps.

Through the land description, you also get a sense of the history of the land and the people who influenced it. It is amazing how far reaching Muir's influence is. Pen is mightier than the sword. Indeed!!

Funny take on Winthrop Glacier naming as a tourist perk of the yore.

Ironically The Canoe and the Saddle by Winthrop is a northwest book like this.

"fish that is synonymous with the land"

Resource towns

"I wonder.. if the river.. will become a tame centerprice of the next Western theme park"

fathometer

Kachess - More Fish

 

Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone 

summary

video

 

                                  Contrapposto: A Novel

"Chaos outside, order on your paper"

Japanese

 All the word forms

 

The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion

Recently I came across the term neutral habit while looking up about the benefit of something.

Subjectively satisfying vs objectively good ways of value responding presented in the book, reminds me of that anchoring.

Truth, good and beauty reminded me of six great ideas book on philosphy by Adler.

Walking underneath the eucalyptus tree in the afternoon, I found bleached leaves on the soil and what a dead checkered butterfly (at that time I did not know its name) but I showed it to my friend and as we were walking on, I wondered if I should have taken a picture of it and I knew I would write about it but only should I let my writing speak of it or go back and take the picture. After few steps, I forgot about it but when my friend had to cut the walk short, I had an opportunity to go back to the scene and take a picture, wondering if the wind took the dead butterfly to an unfindable spot. With the pitcure in tow, I did not have to mention that the butterfly was dead. Like the author said, beauty makes a claim on us.

"Courage was now muscle memory".

Learning Chinese

 https://x.com/jegaevi/status/2038941698584141883/photo/1

The Landscape of Inner positions

HSK

Periodic table

This also reminds me of the two things related to language that I need to investigate:

1. Studying technical matters in a language is different - eg sciences 

Here in the periodic table, the characters include metal or gas in the name, making the assimilation of the knowledge different.

2. When you lose your grip on a language and you are unable to argue in it, you feel frustrated.

Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text

 Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text

https://ramaseshanchandrasekaran.substack.com/p/modern-computing-and-ancient-india

Birds of America: Poems by Chera Hammons

 

Birds of America: Poems by Chera Hammons

The book begins witha poem on killdeer. If you are a birdwatcher, then you will understand the stories behind the birds, their calls, the place they call home that needs rebuilt every once in a while and sometimes overpowered - an owl's nest before that was actually a Cooper hawk's nest. In an Eponymous poem which follows the structure of

 "Before the catalog the art came... Before the art, the wire came.. Before the wire.."

You get the drift, nothing in nature stays the same, there is dark history of nature and Audubon.

"Our mistakes, buried in plastic bottles

                will abide much longer than our mourning" - Conservation List

"we dont know all that we are missing yet" "Every extinction has to start somewhere"

Humans role in coexisting with nature - "There would be no one to ruin anything or save it" and vice-a-versa in a curved bill thrasher's mischief.

The poems are not just observations of nature, but ironies of whom nature chooses.

"It matters how we are left" leads into erasure poetry which at once can be seen as found poetry too. You can feel that tension of human expectations in the migratory life between birth and death.

In search of meaning and hope, poet Hammons takes us down the path of finding it in nature.

Virgil Chinese poetry

 https://antigonejournal.com/2023/11/virgil-chinese-poetry/

retirement

 how-to-turn-a-1-million-nest-egg-into-a-lifetime-income-machine

america-road-to-a-diy-retirement

Values and socialization

 Why does he do that? Understanding abusers

To Be an Anchor in the Storm: A Guide for Families and Friends of Abused Women