Sentential Links (A to Z 2013 edition)

I'm culling this week's links from the master list of bloggers doing the A-to-Z Challenge. So all of these are pretty much new to me! Go visit them. I still have some blogs I discovered on last year's A-to-Z on my daily read list.

:: Have you ever wished that there were more hours in the day? The good news is that, some time in the future there will be! The bad news is that you'll have to wait a few million years for it to happen.

:: I cannot go anywhere without a cup in my hand. This compulsion I have to always be carrying around water is not as bad as my compulsion to go nowhere without a book (I've stopped in the parking lot, turned around and gone back to my apartment to get a paperback while on my way to drive to Walgreens for a box of tampons. 95% of the time I never even touch the book), but it's definitely something I feel compelled to do. (I sympathize, on both counts.)

:: When I am writing my poetry I do my best to take out the words that really don’t add to the feeling of the poem. I’m not as good at that with my other writing but I think I do that with my poetry. When you are writing can you feel each word, does each word add value to your poem?

:: She’d fallen again. She’d leaned on the television instead of the wall for support. The television went down with her.

:: I'm not sure I'll ever come to terms with my mother's death, and the dreams don't always help. Just when I think I've finally found peace with it, I'll have one of these dreams and I will think I've made no progress at all!

Do you have experiences like this with your dreams? (I do, actually. I notice my dreams more and more these days, and I have noticed an uptick in appearances in them by people I had previously thought that I had left behind, some years before. I wonder what that means, sometimes. I hope it's just a result of random firing of synapses that are storing various memories, and not indicative of some issue or other that I never worked through. I'm never sure we really 'work through' issues, anyway -- I rather suspect that we just cope the best we can before we move on to the next thing that live throws our way. But that's the notion of someone who never once took a psych class, so take that for that it's worth....)

:: During the time we were trapped at home, Ron and I lit candles and I was reminded that fire is the first multi-tool, an element that can be manipulated to do either good or evil, to help sustain life or destroy it. A bonfire can be lit to keep a group warm, cook a large meal or burn the bodies of the infected so they can't come back and claim the lives of fellow survivors. Keep your fires lit, and a flame-thrower handy for any stray walkers that come shuffling into your yard. (Yes, more zombies. Deal with it, Zombie-haters!)

:: It was just that my Dad (93) discussed the Driving History in Daytona. So to honor a man I have the privilege to call Dad and the amazing luck at my age to still have a Dad. I chose Daytona in his honor.

:: Maybe it's in our blood, each and everyone of us. When humanity improved upon being hunters and gatherers, we became farmers, custodians of our own little plot of ground--even if it's a few pots on a city windowsill, or planters on a suburban deck. As humans, we emerged from a life of roaming, to a life of sinking roots, literally as well as figuratively.

:: I tried reading the brick once 'cause we had a really beat up Norman Denny translation of one of our shelves and the description on the back intrigued me. But, like many others before me, I got bogged down on the chapters about the bishop and since I didn't know what to skip and what to read, I gave up. (She's talking about the original novel of Les Miserables, the Victor Hugo doorstop. I'm still picking my way through it, at the unimpressive -- but really adding up -- pace of about ten pages a day. I think it's really the only way to go with a book like this. Hugo's book is perhaps the most unfocused book I've ever encountered. I'm a bit more than halfway through it, and it's something of a maddening book. There are times when Hugo's writing is incandescent, and other times when it's really not. And what's really maddening is that there are times when the incandescent writing takes place during one of his fifty-page digressions, such as when he inexplicably breaks off the main action so he can spend a long time (more than fifty pages!) discussing the Battle of Waterloo, all so he can establish that...[drum roll please]...Thenardier was there. And yet, the Waterloo stuff is really well written! Strange, strange book.)

That's all for this week. More next week!