Monday, August 12, 2013

I got on the computer to look up some genealogy at about 8:30 AM and searched until 1:30 PM, and even forgot to eat until the phone rang and I got up to answer it. I found a bunch of Wallaces and Manesses and Morrisons and a short list of Thomases. Moore County and Montgomery County NC are hotbeds of genealogy enthusiasts. The one website The Wallaces of Moore County has all of those names listed on it. I copied a lot of it off into a Word document to keep. I found another Rossie Maie Thomas about grandma's age who was a negro. I didn't think the Thomases owned any slaves.

Then I ate a late lunch and went downstairs to Richard's apartment and watched a very good movie called The Last Song about a musically proficient young woman whose father is a composer of songs. It is a love story and features the girl's relationship with her terminally ill father. It was sad, but good.

6:30 PM enough writing for now. That's all that happened today.


Tuesday, August 13, 2013

12:39 PM I've been on the computer surfing the web for articles on magical thinking and the psychology of it. I read from 8:00 AM to 11:30 or so. Time flies when I'm looking on the Internet. I have an acquaintance who believes or half believes the woo woo that he hears, which half irritates me and half worries me. I think people who are very gullible are either educationally challenged or not completely sane. Why do some people use logic to get through life, while others are superstitious or very trusting in whatever they hear as a source of wisdom? I hear all kinds of things, but if it doesn't sound like it's true, I don't believe it. There are people who make up stories for the fun of it, and I don't want to be their victim. There was one article on the net today on “bullshit” versus “lies.” I have a certain appreciation for bullshit, in that it can be viewed as a form of humor, but I don't believe in it to give myself a source of security. I think some people believe in magic to give themselves the confidence to get through life. It's a substitute for religious faith. I am a skeptic, so I don't believe in the supernatural. That has made my adjustment to life harder, and it's harder to have faith that the future will be secure and good, and as a result I have more anxiety than some people do. Still, I just can't do all the “believing” that is necessary to join a strict religion or blindly follow a leader. I go, when I go, to a Unitarian Universalist church which doesn't have rigid doctrines. They never ask me to believe anything that is improbable. It satisfies my need for a church, which is a couple of hours in which I give over my thoughts to uplifting and peaceful contemplation. It helps me have a positive attitude about the facts of my life, and opens me up to other people. It doesn't make it impossible for me to think clearly.

I have a meeting down in the auditorium for signing my new lease. They get a big group together and go page by page and talk about what it says on the page, then tell us where to sign or initial it. It is a big bore, but there is a need to do it, so I grin and bear it. It has some interest value because it gives me a chance to see all the other people who live in the building, which can be entertaining.

I didn't comment on the weather. It's supposed to 97 degrees today. So far it isn't that hot. It's my understanding that the day reaches it's fullest heat at 3:00 PM, due to the length of time that the sun has been shining. I basically enjoy high heat if I don't have to spend too much time in it. Sometimes in Jacksonville on a really hot day you can see steam rising from the sidewalk after a rain storm. That looks impressive.

1:18 PM – More reading, in my novel this time. 3:32 PM I attended the meeting about the lease, and they abbreviated the procedures. Rather than having us all go page by page through the lease and look at each, the young woman from the Housing Office just told us about four changes to the whole lease, and didn't require us to go to each one and read it. Then she just told us to go through on our own and sign or initial, as indicated. It took under half an hour. The only interesting change is that the whole building will be non-smoking as of October, except for the balconies. Are they going to burst into our apartments and try to catch us smoking inside? Luckily I quit smoking in 1995. Back to my book now.

I went to the Internet again to look up “wild grains” in a followup to the novel I'm reading about prehistoric times. I found an article, a blog actually, about wild grains. They also discussed something called the paleolithic diet. Sounds like a fad diet. It is a low-starch diet, called paleo because some think that paleolithic hunter-gatherer people didn't use grains much as opposed to the high starch diet of agricultural peoples. This author Auel has her characters gathering wild grains, and I wanted to see what kinds of edible wild grains there actually are. The article on wild grains said that there are some 60 kinds of edible wild grains, and that in parts of Africa the native people gathered a large amount of wild grains and depended on it up to about a hundred years ago. It was an interesting article. I've always been interested in knowing how to forage for food in the wild. The old farmers of the southern United States ate some wild plants and hunted a variety of animals. They were poor and didn't have grocery stores on every corner. They bought staples in town when they went, which was only occasionally, and depended on their farms and the nearby woods to round out the diet. I have eaten wild rabbits, squirrels, opossum and turtles. I have always been curious about what rattlesnake tastes like. I draw the line at bugs, however. I would really have to be starving to eat that.

5:35 It's time to eat and watch the news. Goodbye.