“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” ― John Lubbock
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Archive for May, 2026
By No Means
Posted in Other, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, Thoughts on May 22, 2026| Leave a Comment »
To the Billionaires Among Us
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, Fiction, poem, Thoughts, work, writing on May 21, 2026| Leave a Comment »
Hmm. Maybe writing after reading the news isn’t a great idea? Or maybe it is.
To the Billionaires Among Us
What will you do?
When the skies pour fire onto cracked and desolate earth,
tornadoes skip from your first mansion to your third yacht
and hail plays paddy whack with your bones?
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What will you do
when the oceans rise and the gates fall,
and there is nothing left to consume
but yourselves?
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But What Does It Smell Like?
Posted in Science!, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, space, Writers, writing on May 20, 2026| Leave a Comment »
The Surprising Truth About What Outer Space Smells Like
Some space veterans seemed to find this scent quite pleasant. “It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent of describing the palate sensations of some new food that ‘tastes like chicken.’
Yes, these are the things I find interesting about space. Not the math (with apologies to all my math teachers ever) or the physics (with apologies to all the classes I never took), but the lived experience.
When I’m thinking about a story and need to ground the reader, this sort of information is useful. What would it feel like, what would it taste like?
What would it smell like?
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It’s Never Too Late
Posted in Other, tagged creativity, inspiration, Thoughts, #365Ways, #365Ways2026, do good things on May 19, 2026| Leave a Comment »
I find this inspiring:
“You don’t do good things because you are a good person. It’s the other way around. You become a good person by doing good things.” — Rutger Bregman
It shows you the path, and tells you that it’s never too late to walk it.
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A Little Bit of Heaven
Posted in Other, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, song, Spring, Thoughts on May 18, 2026| Leave a Comment »
“A little flower that blooms in May
A lovely sunset at the end of a day
Someone helping a stranger along the way
That’s heaven to me.”
— Sam Cooke
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Tools Come in All Shapes and Sizes
Posted in Other, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, inspiration, Thoughts, Writers on May 17, 2026| Leave a Comment »
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.” — Rebecca Solnit
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What’s for Dinner?
Posted in Food and..., Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, food, inspiration, InterestingAndUnusualOrganizations, Thoughts, writing on May 16, 2026| Leave a Comment »
I like reading interesting nonfiction, not least because it’s a great source of ideas for stories. I ran across this oddly fascinating article a while back:
Italy’s undercover pizza detectives
…the AVPN intermittently dispatches secret pizza agents on espionage missions to clandestinely spy on the restaurants.
Excellent title!
In related news, I might be hungry.
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What Will You Save?
Posted in Other, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, adulting, confession time, poetry, that was hard, Thoughts on May 15, 2026| Leave a Comment »
I have a confession to make. I recently found myself in a position I never expected: burning books.
The experience was disturbing at a gut level, at least to me. But it made sense. And we didn’t burn everything.
Allow me to explain.
We were in the process of cleaning out a house and needed to sort through decades worth of material. There were a lot of interesting memories involved, woven across continents and generations.
There was a lot of random stuff too.
In this case, the “random stuff” included a lot of dictionaries.
Out of date dictionaries, falling apart dictionaries, duplicate dictionaries, dictionaries that would be picture perfect examples of what organizations mean when they put up notes that say, “Thank you for your donation. No dictionaries, please.”
So we were stuck. If we tried to donate to a library or second-hand store, the books would be sent straight into a landfill. (I get the appeal of pretending that they would be shipped to a nice farm upstate, but there was no happy ending, and foisting a problem off on someone else doesn’t mean it’s not still a problem. It was still hard, though!)
We were warned. Fair enough.
So instead, we decided to be warmed (heh).
The house had a wood stove. It felt wrong but there we were, burning what was once of value but was now at best trash.
Sad, yes. But as we learned in the Day After Tomorrow, there are books, and then there are whole shelves on tax law (for example).
And we didn’t burn everything.
There were many other books, interesting journals, photos and letters and keepsakes that still spoke to both the past and the future.
Like a poem from French Surrealist Paul Éluard, which was published during World War Two and became a hymn to freedom.
“Liberté… J’écris ton nom”: Eluard’s poem and the Cambridge UL Liberation collection
Translated, it begins:
On my school notebooks,
on my desk and the trees,
on the sand on the snow,
I write your name
On every page I’ve read,
on every blank page
Stone blood paper or ash
I write your name.
The poem was published outside of Vichy-controlled France to evade censorship. British pilots dropped copies into occupied territory to encourage the Resistance. And we found a copy that had been transported from (we’re guessing) a charming museum shop in France to a quiet corner of Canada decades after the war, its pages still bright with color and intensity.
Reminding us what was lost, and what was won.
A lot falls by the wayside of life. Receipts, old bills, dictionaries. I have a history degree and I haven’t met a bit of ephemera that doesn’t interest me, but I also believe that we shouldn’t keep everything.
Life is short. I don’t want the past to bury me before my time.
Still, the dictionary dilemma was an unusual case. Not everything should be returned to the fire.
My typical solution? When dealing with items I no longer want that still hold memories I’d rather not lose, I take photographs. Then I can pass those items on without losing the stories that made them precious.
Choosing what to keep and what to remember is an art in itself, a way of curating what we value in order to make our lives, and our futures, better.
When it’s your turn to decide, what would you sacrifice? And what will you save?
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Keep Dreaming
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, creativity, Thoughts, Writers, writing on May 14, 2026| Leave a Comment »
There’s always a dream within a dream within a dream. — Dolly Parton
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Do Your Best
Posted in Writing on May 13, 2026| Leave a Comment »
“This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.” ― Gabrielle Zevin
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