ROAD TRIPS

Our return from CA last MON was uneventful. We resisted the urge to play the slots during our layover in Las Vegas. Today we head to Omaha for a family reunion with our kids & grandkids. I'll probably do some REUNION ODYSSEY posts.

MENTAL HEALTH FRIDAY

"Embrace the upside of feeling down. First, realize that negative emotions aren't inherently bad--they can be useful. 'That ping of anxiety gets my attention & says, 'Hey, you need to focus on this,' says psychologist Ethan Kross, author of Chatter:  The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, & How to Harness It. If you need to deal with an immediate problem--say, reining in overspending--that call to focus is helpful. But negativity spirals into something harmful when a particular thought circuit just won't shut off. If you can't sleep because of it, feel physically stressed all the time, or keep rehashing the same situation, those are signs you need to employ tools to break the cycle . . . " Reader's Digest, March 2021

A CONVERSATION

One of my New Year's resolutions was to avoid useless arguments on Facebook. I may have broken that resolution. Recently I saw a post on Facebook that extolled the NYT for its journalism. My comment? "Journalism & NYT . . . Isn't that an oxymoron?" Archibald Campbell [Who in the world is that?] replied, "No. I know a celebrity billionaire politician told you to hate any media that didn't give a pro-trump, authoritarian line, but it is not the job of a free press to do that. So, I doubt you have a valid opinion on any of this, since you just believe what celebrity billionaire politicians tell you to believe." I took that personally, so I replied, "So do you believe everything the NYT tells you to believe?" I will try my best to ignore any subsequent comment by my good friend Archibald.

WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

We are totally caught up on our CBS shows, since we saw all the season finales, which included the series finale of NCIS New Orleans. We're still watching "Blacklist," which is pretty dark & intensive, so we started watching "Deep Space 9" on Netflix.

WHAT I'M READING

I finished reading "140 Days to Hiroshima," by David Dean Barrett, & learned a lot about the closing days of W.W. II that I didn't know. Then I finished reading "Isaac's Storm:  A Man, A Time, & the Deadliest Hurricane in History," by Erik Larson, one of my favorite authors. It details the 1900 hurricane that struck Galveston, taking the lives of more than 6,000. Since that piqued my curiosity about natural disasters, I'm now reading "The Big Ones:  How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (& What We Can Do About Them)," by Dr. Lucy Jones. 

DEPT. OF SHAMELESS JOKE-STEALING *

* Courtesy of Reader's Digest, March 2021

"Thanks to working from home together, some couples have learned quite a bit about each other:  Hearing my wife in meetings & it dawns on me that she uses personnel management techniques on me all the time."

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

"Real-life Tarzan lived 41 years not knowing women existed, ate rat heads." Drudge Report

TRENDING

"Life expectancy falls by more than year."  Ditto

"Trans runner ruled ineligible for Olympics." Ditto

"Lobster diver caught in whale's mouth. A commercial lobster diver who got caught in the mouth of a humpback whale off the coast of Cape Cod on FRI morning said he thought he was going to die."  Norfolk Daily News, 6/21

COVID

"Study finds anyone still wearing a mask at this point is probably just ugly." Babylon Bee

THERE IS NO PLACE LIKE FLORIDA

"Starbucks customer pulls gun over no cream cheese. An angry FL man pulled a gun on a drive-thru worker because they forgot the cream cheese with his bagel . . . "  Las Vegas Review Journal, 6/21

"Town accidentally sells water tower. A small town in (Brooksville) FL accidentally sold its water tower in a blundering real estate transaction."  Norfolk Daily New 6/21