Friday, March 27, 2026

Rows of...?

A really difficult meme for this Sepia Saturday, because they look like bombs. As a pacifist, I have nary a photo of any warlike ordinance.

Rows of things? I'll be off looking for something similar now... be back later!

1973 Flight Attendants, Pan Am (10 years after my class)

At the Community Clay Studio

M. C. Escher at the Columbia SC Art Museum

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“Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.”

Henry Beston - The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod, 1828.

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Babylonian cuneiform numerals

One of the earliest known number systems, developed around 2000 BCE.

Babylonians used a base-60 system (called sexagesimal), unlike our modern base-10 system.

They built all numbers using just two basic wedge-shaped symbols:

A vertical wedge = 1

A corner wedge = 10

By combining these, they could write numbers from 1 to 59.

Originally, Babylonian numerals had no symbol for zero

Examples
1 = one vertical wedge
10 = one corner wedge
23 = two corner wedges (20) + three vertical wedges (3)

Babylonians didn’t have a special symbol for “100” or “1000.”
They always built numbers out of 1–59 chunks, then used position to scale them by 60.

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So how did they write 100?

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We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story. Brian Doyle

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My personal whine with new oxygen devices:

Last Wednesday I picked up a second and third version of portable oxygen devices. I was thrilled that by going to their office I got plenty of instruction and more than adequate trials of the devices. Worth the gas to drive there and work with a technician rather than a driver who just delivered things. The first portable oxygen device was heavy and didn't work well.

Later I had tried using the home machine (which sits in front of the wall mounted air-handler unit) while changing the sheets on the bed. In the past this was a daunting task leaving me exhausted halfway through. I finished the job, and then started coughing. Took off the canula, and continued to have trouble getting a breath with the coughing. This lasted several minutes when I wasn't sure I'd live to see the next one. I considered what might have caused it. And it happened several more times when I was just sitting watching TV...horrible coughs that left me exhausted!

You know already that I've had trouble with black mold growing (they call it mildew) in the walls of my apartment, especially in the bathroom. I now have auxiliary fans that dry it out after each shower. But sometimes the air handler in the bedroom has spit out little flecks of black as well, and in the past I got a new filter, as well as had the unit cleaned inside by the maintenance man. I checked the filter and it looked ok, but the filter is on the intake of air, not that which is blown out by the air handler's fan.

This is a brand new unit, and you can see a lot of particles of dust including the little black flecks. I used it with my C-Pap to sleep for about 4 nights...but never knew if I was supposed to or not, and come to find out the Dr. wanted me to use oxygen when I'm walking or doing tasks, not sleeping or sitting!

I had asked the delivery driver when he set it up last Thursday what kind of air filtration it had. He showed me the intake louvers, and said if they get dusty, just take a paper towel and wipe them off. I assume there's some filtration system inside the louvers, after all, this is breathing equipment!

And I'm sorry to keep on giving all these details of my thinking processes, but when you think this cough is your last breath, you (I) seriously think of what's causing it.

My thought was that maybe some little black particles, or even dust, might have come through the 25 feet of tubing. Or maybe it was just oxygen itself that triggered something. Was this asthma again?

It was easy enough to use the albuterol puffer (rescue inhaler) after the coughing fit had subsided...but no way while it was happening. Just getting any in-breath at all was what I was focused on.

So I'm asking my Dr. about asthma. And I'm not using any of the oxygen devices for now.

And fortunately today (Thursday) I was able to walk over to the laundry room with 2 loads in my cart, and go back two more times and bring my clean clothes home...without coughing. And only a bit out of breath...which is why I was originally getting the oxygen. I await a note from the Dr. on the patient portal!

I guess the apartment manager needs to also see these shots of the little black flecks coming out of the air handler. That will be my next action.

Thanks for letting me whine. Would you like cheese and crackers with that? Me too!

Thursday, March 26, 2026

Continuing spring inspired vases

I started going through files of my vases I've made. Here are a few to share here...just to enjoy springtime!

Geranium inspired

North Carolina triliums

I saw my first Swallowtail butterfly (not a Monarch) on Sunday at Lake Tomahawk! Couldn't capture a photo as it was pretty fast.

By Rachel

Sharing with Floral Friday Fotos and Michelle's Thankful Thursday

I donated this large vase to an auction to raise funds.

Then there's a face vase!

A pitcher serves often as a vase

My Texas roots still appreciate Blue Bonnets

A series of tiny celadon vases

A tiny bloom, no bigger than my phone

A lemniscate on a black, white and grey vase. For a wedding present.

I was honored to have my vase included in the publicity, middle of top row.

I did do a series of "O'Keefe style poppies" on various pieces.

When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.

MAYA ANGELOU

Rainbows are gay space lasers.

That's why they're not straight.

Oliver Markus Malloy @ommalloy

Thanks to Cloudia’s post.

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On Wednesday as I drove home on I-40 eastbound toward Black Mountain, I passed under two overpasses covered with various first responder vehicles with all their lights flashing...probably 8 ambulances on one, and the other at Swannanoa had this flag. They were honoring a former Fire Chief who had recently died. The procession in his honor was probably coming toward me from Black Mountain, so I didn't see it as I turned off the highway.

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Just this and that

"The impossible union of spheres of existence is actual- And the fire and the rose are one - The light is still at the still point of the turning world - The point of intersection of the timeless with time - The life of significant soil"

TS Elliot quotes on Susan Seddon Boulet's art.

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That one neuron connects to about 7,000 others. Your brain has 86 billion of them. Do the math and you get somewhere around 100 trillion connections inside your head. More connections than stars in 1,500 galaxies.

And each connection point is way more complicated than anyone expected. A Stanford lab found that every single connection contains about 1,000 tiny switches that can store memories and process information at the same time. So your brain is running roughly 100 quadrillion switches right now, while you read this sentence.

The wild part is the power bill. Your brain runs on 20 watts. That’s less energy than the light in your fridge. The world’s fastest supercomputer needs 20 million watts to do the same amount of raw calculation. A million times more power for the same output.

We’re still nowhere close to understanding how any of this works. In October 2024, a team of hundreds of scientists finished mapping every single connection in a fruit fly’s brain. Took six years and heavy AI help. That fly brain had 140,000 neurons. Yours has 86 billion. Google and Harvard also mapped a piece of human brain last year, a speck smaller than a grain of rice. That speck alone contained 150 million connections and took 1,400 terabytes to store. The lead scientist said mapping a full human brain at that detail would produce as much data as the entire world generates in a year.

A tiny worm had its 302 brain cells mapped back in 1986. Almost 40 years later, scientists still can’t fully explain how that worm’s brain keeps it alive. Your brain has 86 billion of those cells, each one wired to thousands of others, each wire packed with a thousand switches, all of it humming along on less power than a lightbulb.

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Gratitude:

... for the advancement of stem cell research that could help those with osteoarthritis (like me.) Research revealed this week that new biomarkers were found that could help determine treatment for cartilage regrowth for those with the disease.

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An 8,000-year-old statuette of what could be a fertility goddess unearthed at Çatalhöyük Neolithic site in Turkey. It was wrought from recrystallized limestone between 6300 and 6000 B.C. That material is rare for an area where most previously discovered pieces were sculpted from clay.

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Saying goodbye to winter...at least for most of us.

Lake Tomahawk by Rey Castillo Jr. Feb 1, 2026

Leading psychologist Ethan Kross on the benefits of creative visualization to gain perspective in life.

"Engage in mental time travel. Another way to gain distance and broaden your perspective is to think about how you’ll feel a month, a year, or even longer from now. Remind yourself that you’ll look back on whatever is upsetting you in the future and it’ll seem much less upsetting."Source: Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It