12/19/23

 Tuesday, December 19, 2023

In bed at 9:30, awake at 4:06, up at 4:16.  19° under clear skies turning cloucy this morning, high of 34°, wind is W at 8 mph, 7-14/28, wind chill is 9°.  Sunrise at 7:19, sunset at 4:18, 8+59.  Let Lilly out at 4:45.

Treadmill; pain.  CPP, RP, and TP this morning, but it cleared up enought to do 33:00 & 0.70 on the treadmill around 11 a.m. while watching The Silence of Mark Rothko documentray on OVID.  At 4 p.m., I did a session of Chair Yoga on YouTube with the VA Whole Health leader from Grand Island, NE.

A collection of drawings in the TV room

I'm grateful for my amateur paintings and drawings.  They keep me company when I'm on the treadmill, sitting at my desk downstairs, in my bedroom, in the TV room, and in my workspace when I'm working on another painting.  I like them all, the pretty good and the not so good.  They all contain mistakes and disappointments of one sort or another and none of them is worth much to anyone but me, but I remember working on each one of them, so they also represent minutes and hours of my life, personal history. 

A favorite, in the TV room

KSchooling.  In listening to Ezra Klein's podcast this morning, I learned that (1) he hated school, and (2) he graduated from high school with a 2.2 grade point average.  Also, my recent throne room reading has been William Blake and Walt Whitman.  Blake was never sent to school but rather was apprenticed as a child to an engraver.  Whitman went to work at age 11 as a 'gopher,' an errand boy, at 12 he learned to set type, and at 14 he was working in the composing room of a local newspaper.  Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, Agatha Christie and Sandra Day O'Connor were home-schooled. Richard Branson quit school at 16 to start his first business.  Steven Spielberg was rejected 3 times from USC film school and Carey Mulligan was rejected from acting school.