The Death of Bees by Lisa O’Donnell
Death of Bees was another powerful recommendation by National Public Radio.
I believe in a greater power, in a God who sends things my way and that I am meant to be paying attention. Several books have been recommended to me lately which I didn’t choose, or might have avoided had I known how painfully they dealt with poor parenting and children in the depths of horrific poverty.
Here is what the lead into the book says:
Today Is Christmas Eve,
Today is my birthday,
Today I am fifteen,
Today I buried my parents
in the back yard.
Neither of them were beloved.
Oh my goodness! I am sucked in immediately. And immediately I am overcome by the grinding nature of poverty, the enormous amount of energy it takes just to be fed, to have a roof over your head, to function in the bureaucracy that seeks to ameliorate the burdens of poverty.
I am horrified by the lives of innocent children in the hands of people who should never have responsibility for anyone, even themselves, their decision making skills are so non-existent. There are parents who have no idea what self-sacrifice GOOD parenting requires, who raise children who are often trying to survive their own parents.
The Death of Bees has redemption. It has two sisters who love one another and are smarter than the average child. It has a neighbor who notices, not in a snoopy or intrusive way, but in a kind, helping and ultimately sacrificial way. It has moments of black humor, when the neighbor’s dog keeps digging at the parental graves in the backyard and bringing bones inside just at the worst moments.
Ultimately, it is a tale of survival, in spite of the parents, in spite of the system, in spite of betrayals by family and friends. There is a glimmer of hope that life may be different for these sisters, if they can survive their upbringing and overcome their childhood.
Now, go read the book 🙂
Downton Abbey Season 3 Starts Tonight
I could give up TV almost entirely were it not for HBO, HGTV and National Public Television. Tonight starts season 3 of Downton Abbey – I cannot wait!
Mutual Hallucination
“Let’s stop at that quilt shop up the road here!” AdventureMan exclaimed, sounding a lot more enthusiastic than I suspected he felt.
“I don’t know,” I reply, “it looked a little junky. I’m not sure it was even open.”
“It IS open!” he was delighted as we approached.
We drove in, and peered through the windows. It didn’t look like a quilt shop. It looked like a rickety tickety oyster bar of some kind, the kind of place we might love, if we were hungry, but not a quilt shop at all.
We looked again at the sign:
We had both read it as “Quilts Too” but it was something else entirely. I guess we saw what we expected to see.
Why Am I Never in the Atlanta Airport When This Happens?
I fly through Atlanta all the time. I NEVER get to see anything fun like this!
Lincoln Movie
We’ve never seen this happen in Pensacola before. We went to see the afternoon showing of Lincoln at the Bayou Rav Theaters and it was totally sold out. People! This is the weekend before Thanksgiving! Aren’t you supposed to be grocery shopping and baking and polishing silver for Thanksgiving? This isn’t James Bond, this is a historical movie! What are you thinking??
Drunk Nate Silver
My favorite statistitian is parodied on Twitter #Drunk Nate Silver. Don’t worry Nate, they’re just jealous 🙂  :
Twitter commandeered by ‘Drunk Nate Silver’
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This story started on
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By Dorrine Mendoza, CNN
updated 5:36 PM EST, Thu November 8, 2012 | Filed under:Â Social Media
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 CNN iReport
- Poll-cruncher Nate SIlver has inspired a parody hashtag on Twitter
- Silver correctly predicted who would win all 50 states in Tuesday’s presidential election
(CNN)Â — You may not have heard of Nate Silver. But the statistician, who crunches political polls for The New York Times, is having a moment.
Silver has received a flood of acclaim since his blog,FiveThirtyEight.com, correctly predicted who would win all 50 states in Tuesday’s presidential election, even as pundits were saying the race was “too close to call.”
Named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine in 2009, Silver first gained fame for developing a statistical system for forecasting the performance of pro baseball players.
He’s really good at math. And predicting things.
Now the jokesters of Twitter are paying homage with a #DrunkNateSilver hashtag that re-imagines him as a belligerent, know-it-all prognosticator.
Here are some of our favorites:
If you cannot see the Storify below, click here.
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Drunk Nate Silver stumbles through traffic on the Jersey Turnpike, screaming out what time each driver will get home. #DrunkNateSilver
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#DrunkNateSilver goes to Africa, finds the butterfly, asks it not to flap its wings, prevents the hurricane. -
#DrunkNateSilver knows the actual probability of Taylor Swift ever, ever getting back together. -
@thisisdannyg Drunk Nate Silver knows why the caged bird sings. #DrunkNateSilver -
Drunk Nate Silver knows what you did next summer.#DrunkNateSilver -
When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he discovered 3 missed calls from me.#DrunkNateSilver -
#DrunkNateSilver stopped a robbery with cluster analysis. -
Drunk Nate Silver shouting at jukebox blasting Biggie, “No! Mo money only correlates with a 42% chance of mo problems!” #drunknatesilver -
I knew Darth Vader was Luke’s father before he did.#drunknatesilver -
#DrunkNateSilver knows precisely how many boys your milkshake will bring to the yard (spoiler: not all of them) -
Drunk Nate Silver in the parking lot of Yankees stadium, spray painting the spots where next years’ home runs will land. #drunknatesilver -
#DrunkNateSilver launches his own economic recovery program: yells out next winning lottery numbers at area 7Eleven -
#DrunkNateSilver predicted I would type this. And this. -
Drunk Nate Silver knows when Ice Cube’s next good day will be. #DrunkNateSilver -
Drunk Nate Silver only reads his Choose Your Own Adventure book one time. The correct way.#drunknatesilver -
#DrunkNateSilver already knows how much employee time was wasted today with #DrunkNateSilver tweets -
Drunk Nate Silver gets home 30 seconds before the Comcast installer shows up #drunknatesilver
Things Southern Girls Say
LOL, I hear these every day! It’s really true!
Chris Rock: A Special Message for White People
You gotta love this guy – he is hilarious, irreverent and can find humor in a situation where some people are ready to come to blows:
watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EDxOSjgl5Z4
(I cannot make the image show; click on blue type to watch this video on YouTube)
Fairbanks, Alaska or Brazil
I would have loved to be able to actually watch and see when the actual 2 millionth visitor visited, but as it does, life got in the way. There were things that needed doing, people that needed time and attention, and I by the time I got back to check, I had already gone over.
Using StatCounter, I was able to go back 78 people and figure out that it was either the visitor from Brasil or a visitor from Fairbanks, Alaska.
A couple times, I have thought I would quit blogging, like when I hit 5 years, then six, or maybe when I hit 2 million hits . . . Now, I don’t know. There are times when it is hard to get inspired, hard to think of anything I might have to say that you might find interesting, too.
I have a little trick. When I am stumped, I think of our aqua aerobics group in Doha, Qatar. We weren’t very serious, but we were very committed. We had to show up because the others counted on us. Our motto was “any exercise is better than no exercise” and on very cold days in January, exercise counted as sitting in the hot tub and kicking. We talked to pass the time, and not to think about exercising. We talked about books we had read, dishes we had cooked, movies we have seen, and events in the news. So when I can’t think of anything much to say, I think about my friends, the Aqua Babes (LOL!) and I can usually come up with something.
A long time ago, in Kuwait, there was a blogger called (something) Red, I followed, and she thought about quitting and asked us to give her reasons why or why not. I remember writing that we blog because it’s what we do, we write because it is something in us that needs to be written. Until I wrote that to her, I didn’t even know that I thought that. I guess that is why I keep on, because there is something in me that needs to do what I am doing, and when I don’t need to do it, I will stop.
Not the Day I Expected
Last night just before we went to bed, I reminded AdventureMan to set his alarm clock back for the end of daylight savings time. It was so much fun, having an extra hour to do things, to read. It was so relaxing, waking up and knowing we had plenty of time to get to church. I got up, fixed my coffee and changed all the clocks downstairs.
As we drove to church, I noticed all the outdoor clocks along the way, still on the same old time. I was feeling very smug.
When we drove into the parking lot, it was full, which was odd, because it was early, even for the early service. When we saw people leaving, as we were driving in, I had the “aha” moment.
Oh wait. This isn’t the first week-end in November . . . 😦 I’ve gotten ahead of myself. I got the fruitcakes all done and I was ready for November, so ready that somehow, I thought it was a week later . . .
We missed the early service, LOL. We always think of the early service as Episcopal Lite; the express version. Instead, we attended the 10:30 service, and had a great treat at the end, Ken Keradin playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, you might know it as background music for other creepy movies.
You know how once a day gets started the wrong way, the rest of the day just seems weird? It is a gorgeous, chilly day, bright sunlight, and I can’t get started on any of my projects. I feel jangled, turned a little upside down. Now I have to go through all the clock changes again next week-end!
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Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 