What a wonderful world.

My favorite song ever........
    A wonderful way to wake up! David Attenborough does it again!
What a stunning commercial from BBC !
www.youtube.com/embed/auSo1MyWf8g?rel=0 

The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems (1916) "Fog"

     The day began with heavy silent secret fog....chilling. Who knows what ghouls were out and about.  But then the sun appeared and it went on its way in rolling waves of indecision.

fog heading out

fog rolling back in

The Peace Factory

            
                                   shared from  Freedom Service Dogs         

Charleigh Brown, the Great Pumpkin

     I have a scout-mom good friend who has organized a boy scout haunted house for the past 5 years.  Last night I was privileged to help out a bit. I don't have the opportunity to be around little kids very often in my day-to-day life, so I had a blast!  It reminded me, yet again, how really good and sweet children can be.
     I got to run the pumpkin ping-pong toss....5 chances to toss ping-pong-eyeballs into pumpkin pails for only 1 ticket.  This simple game appealed to the small set. I did get lots of exercise chasing the bouncy eyeballs as they caromed around the cafeteria off of walls and between people's feet, but the kids helped, too, racing after the eyeballs they had lost....I think that was half of their fun. The best moment was when a costumed toddler dressed as a convict in stripes, took a try.  He was a smart kid....he gathered his ping-pong-eyeballs and toddled over to the pumpkin buckets and neatly put one in each.....no risky tossing or bouncing the eyeballs for him!  (This baby convict also won his age group in the costume contest).
     A popular game for the older elementary kids was shooting a rubber-band gun at a row of shrunken plastic heads and skulls dangling from strings.  How creative!  Of course, the most popular kid activity was the cake walk....but I got to see more than one winning cake accidentally upended on the floor while the winner wandered around.
     The boy scouts ran the haunted house.  There were hallways of games run by girl-scouts.  I was so proud of my friend for pulling off such a great event. It could have been chaotic, but wasn't.  I do not have that skill set.  I would have been pulling out my hair, but she remained calm and cheerful all evening.

     This morning was Saturday family fun-run group with costume contest.  Some people had amazing costumes!  I seem to lack the creative gene. Charleigh went as a jack-o-lantern.....Charleigh Brown, the great pumpkin.  The pet costume winner was a little chihuahua dressed as a squirrel.  He won 3 big marrow bones, bigger than he was, so shared one with Charleigh who was out of her mind with joy.  The costumes did freak Charleigh out a bit....especially the beagle in full fireman regalia complete with helmet, and the little boy dressed as a fuzzy purple dolphin who must have resembled a big stuffed toy.


Eat. drink, and be scary..........author unknown.

It took me a second.....

                      Non Sequitur                                   10-26-13

Urgent need to stop deforestation

     Below is a link to a short 6 minute talk by Robert Goodland, a tropical ecologist, who served as the World Bank Group's environmental adviser for 23 years.  He feels there is an urgent need to stop deforestation.  As you have read, raising and eating livestock is not sustainable.  The livestock sector is responsible for 51% of greenhouse gas formation.  According to Mr. Goodland, we have a very small window of time to reverse this.  The first tipping point will be massive flooding, possibly as early as 2017.
     The first thing we must do is decrease livestock production to free up food growth for people, to feed the expected future 10 billion humans and environmental refugees on earth by the end of the century.
     Secondly, in parallel, we must plant more trees to sequester carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.
     Thirdly, it is essential to continue the rapid conversion from fossil fuel economies to renewable energy, but this will take far too long by itself.
     He feels, and I quote, that "we have no option.  We must do this or we will be wiped out as a civilization."
     Please take this information to heart, act on it, and spread it to everyone you know.
     

http://www.drmcdougall.com/health/education/videos/advanced-study-weekend-experts/robert-goodland-deforestation/


     As a side note, this is interesting.  Bicycles are outselling new cars in  almost every European country.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/10/24/240493422/in-most-every-european-country-bikes-are-outselling-cars

"The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other but to be with each other." Christopher McDougall

     Runners are friendly, supportive people. We share the same experience, whether over 3 hours or 6 hours. It is hard.  At the race Sunday in my starting corral I met a woman from Washington state who runs for her daughter who died 4 years ago at age 14.  This Mom has run dozens and dozens of races in her daughter's memory to publicize the charity she started.  She showed me photos of all of her race medals. She is truly amazing.  The charity is BooksFromBug.org  Check it out.

     I've been reviewing my experiences over the past few months of training to determine what, if anything, I learned.  Running is mostly mental.  You are going to get tired.  You do it anyway, any which way you can. It is a metaphor for living a life.  Others have said it all so much better than I ever could, though.........
 
"It's important to know that at the end of the day it's not the medals you remember.  What you remember is the process--what you learn about yourself by challenging yourself, the experiences you share with other people, the honesty the training demands--those are things nobody can take away from you whether you finish twelfth or you're an Olympic Champion."---Silken Laumann, Canadian Olympian
   
"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face...You must do the thing which you think you cannot."   Eleanor Roosevelt

"A man can live his entire life without knowing whether or not he is a coward."  John Berryman

"It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them.  They went out and happened to things."  Leonardo Da Vinci

Slow runners make fast runners look good.  You're Welcome.

At mile 20 I thought I was dead.

At mile 22 I wished I was dead.

At mile 24 I knew I was dead.

At mile 26.2 I realized I had become too tough to kill.