Hello Summer. Now get to work.

These long light-filled days (hello, again, summer, June 21, we have missed you as always), even the cloudy ones, inspire me to catch up on things at my nice big table overlooking the greenery of our yard and yards beyond. This week I worked on a few visual journals current and past, enjoying the fruits of a One-thing-leads-to-another day. Sometimes those days don't end up with products but rather a storehouse of maybes and memories. I'm so grateful to have the time, energy, and desire to have them. I have a LONG LONG list.

I also have spent lots of time through Sunday papers of today and some past weeks. What a news and essay junkie I am. It's a cruse. I know it. I get so much pleasure from finding all this stuff; but my piles of that Very Same Stuff grow more than I can handle. There is SO MUCH interesting going on in this world to, gladly or sadly, take our minds off the bad news. Of which there is so much.

On my Did You See? page I'm posting the links or summaries of what I've captured just this week. I know many readers have not the time or interest. But if you don't go over and look, let me just warn, you may miss stories that contain these gems.

I was 31 before I got my heart broken...I had loved and lost plenty of times, but I had never let myself feel it. I numbed up....I fell for him so fast, and as if through space, no planet in sight. (But then), it was over...I would sob and wail in my car...crying in public, crying as I wrote in my journal at Dunkin' Donuts, as I biked home...but I marveled, too. I marveled at the feeling of being heartbroken.
          Modern Love, Lily King. NYTimes, 22 June 2014

'I think of myself as an intelligent, functioning adult,' says the writer Julie Klam, who has a daughter who just finished fifth grade. 'But my God. Do you know what a 'math lattice' is? No, you do not. The way basic math is taught now, it's not like A plus B equals C. It's more like A plus B, and then you run out for oranges, and then you take the subway. My daughter's recent assignment was like a buffet of confusion.' Several years ago, my fellow parents and i got so involved in an assignment that I suggested it would be best if we kept our kids home and just showed up for their classes.
            Opinion/Judith Newman, "But I WANT to Do Your Homework." NYT, 22 June 2014

The residents and shoppers of Abbot Kinney, the trendy Venice retail and restaurant strip, know her as the tall redhead who emerges in an evening dress and a big hat to police behavioral infractions big and small.  
   Scene Stealers, Brooks Barnes, NYTimes 22 June 2014