I'm baaaack

I know it has been awhile since I posted. I discovered the many joys and tribulations of joining Facebook. More later

The Hunted

"Thump, Thump" the sound of running,
As I duck behind a door.
I can hear my heart a-pumping,
"Boom, Boom" against the floor.

I lie down on the ground,
And listen to it beat.
"Boom, Boom" I hear it pumping,
And I hear the sound of feet.

"Pat, Pat" the distant sound
of footsteps away downstairs.
"Thump, Thump" they get much louder,
And its more than I can bear.

"Pat-Pat" they go away now,
My fear is now drawn taught.
If they come right back now,
I will be surely caught.

I hear my breath quite loudly,
"Whoosh-Whoosh-Whoosh" it goes.
How long will it last now?
No one really knows.

This poem was written in 1996 by Nate Boshears, age 13.

Soap by the Slice: Pandanus with Coconut Milk

Coconut and olive oils combined with lard create a smooth hard soap. Pandanus leaves, collected on Kaua`i, are added to provide skin-healing medicinal qualities, and to give it a nice, natural green tint.

Rosemary essential oil is added and provides clarifying, focusing, inspiring, and invigorating qualities to this soap. Also, a touch of ylang ylang essential oil provides balancing, calming, and anxiety-soothing elements. Added vitamin E helps to restore skin health. You will love bathing with this soap; you will feel as though you are spending time in a spa.

This soap is nicely lathering and will both refresh and soothe your skin, giving you a tropical treat. Bath bars come in large, 4 oz sizes and are $4.00 each. Hand soap and travel sizes are available as well. If you are interested in purchasing this soap and to experience luxury on a budget click here!

Top Ten Useless Limbs

No, I'm not talking about my youngest child. I'm referring to a recent article I read regarding useless remnants in the anatomy of animals and humans in the course of evolution. Things like pelvis and thigh bones in whales and wings on flightless birds are interesting. Even the unnecessary sex organs on dandelions (apparently they reproduce by cloning themselves) are food for thought.

But what is really fascinating are the extra things that humans are carting around: extra molars (wisdom teeth), a tail bone, male breast tissue and nipples, and the appendix!

The human appendix is a small pouch attached to the large intestine where it joins the small intestine and does not directly assist digestion. Biologists believe it is a vestigial organ left behind from a plant-eating ancestor. Interestingly, it has been noted by paleontologist Alfred Sherwood Romer in his text The Vertebrate Body (1949) that the major importance of the appendix "would appear to be financial support of the surgical profession," referring to, of course, the large number of appendectomies performed annually. In 2000, in fact, there were nearly 300,000 appendectomies performed in the United States!

Well, I still have mine, as well as my tailbone. I put my nipples to the test with my four babies and they seemed to do the job satisfactorily. Lastly, my wisdom teeth burst forth in 1975, screamed for attention, and were dealt with accordingly. Nowhere in the article did I read of the current necessity for pinkie toes or earlobes. The extra pounds are killing me!

Rabbit, Black, Donought, and Puka

What do all of these have in common? They are all a type of hole. Those on the left are "Puka" (pooka) shells. Commonly found on the beaches of Hawaii, they are actually the remains of sea snail shells. Ground and tossed by the sand and waves they are polished and smooth; radiating a warm luster. The hole ("puka" in Hawaiian) is a naturally worn area on the top of the shell.

I discovered something important about myself recently. Sitting with this pile of puka shells in front of me, endeavoring to sort shells into incremental sizes, I had embarked on a project that could possibly take more than one day. This was not good. I realized right there and then that although I love a crafty project, I seldom have the patience for it to last beyond a 6 or 8 hour span.

So, replicas of the Sistine Chapel ceiling (7 years to paint. 10 years to restore) as well as an attempt to carve anything bigger than a chop (see July 22 entry) are out of the question. Once started they would end up in the black hole of discarded projects; never to be finished and/or admired. Don't worry, I did assemble all of these wonderful shells into a rustic necklace in under 5 hours. Too bad I'm going to disassemble them due to the fact that they didn't meet my stringent standards of aesthetics (it turned out ugly). Does re-assembling them into a different necklace just add ticks of time on the already-started project clock? I hope not or I will chuck them down the nearest rabbit hole and despondently eat a bucket of donought holes.

Puzzling matters

Did you know that five different people have patents to the "Puzzle with Pieces Rotatable in Groups"? Hmmm. It seems that everything can stand for a little improvement.

Did you also know that there are 43,252,003,274, 489,856,000 different ways to position the sides (without taking it apart)? To put this into perspective, if every permutation of a 57 millimeter Rubik's Cube were lined up end to end, it would stretch out approximately 261 light years.

Despite the vast number of positions, all Cubes can be solved in twenty-five or fewer moves! It is said to be the world's best-selling toy, with over 300,000,000 Rubik's Cubes being sold worldwide to date.

Let's see... I paid about $10 for mine. Um, let's say that we average the price, since it was first sold in 1980 by Ideal Toy company, to, say $7, this would equal gross sales of $2,100,000,000. This is over 2 Trillion Dollars!

And I can solve it in 2 minutes. Yes, I'm a genius. And a superhero. I wish I was an inventor too.

What makes us Human

What makes us human? Its not walking on two legs. Birds can do it. Its not being able to figure out complex tasks. Dolphins and monkeys can do that.

What makes us humans is the ability to have our hearts broken. To know a numbing pain that eats away all the joy we used to feel. To have memories and experiences trigger a gut-wrenching pain that we project will last well into the future.

What also makes us human is the ability to take these same experiences and let them mold us. They shape the way we stand; shoulders square with purpose, or bent over and beaten. They affect how we see the world; a lonely desolate island, or a delightful and exciting wonderland. And they also provide us with the opportunity to change; ourselves, our surroundings, our choices and our future.

"The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind." Frank Lloyd Wright