Brother Blue

My computer melted yesterday. Screen would flip from red to green to white to blue. Just all of a sudden. Reboot, reboot, reboot…no different.
Boarded the plane. Instead of crying (which was my first thought) I got out my “Big Book of Gratitude” (which is nothing more than a spiral notebook I make a list of things I am grateful for each day).
Thing changed my mood. It moved me form feeling like a victim, to know it was going to be okay. Maybe there would be some extra work, putting my data back together (with some of it lost forever), but it is not the end of the world.
I was just about to board a plane to fly to Saskatchewan to send the weekend with a group of Canadian teens. To laugh and share faith.
I was traveling with a good friend.
I am able to afford a computer (something only 1% of the world can do) the gets to melt.
I had a great book with me that was changing the way I see the world (which I still have over 800 pages to read).
Right before the computer had decided to melt I was reading a eBook that was teaching me great things.
My melted computer, in the scope of things, wasn’t the end of the world.

There will always be some level of absurdity to the highest articulation your soul is longing for.

The Pope and his iPod
[via Oddwalk Oddblog]

One of the blogs I check daily is by my friend Anne Marie. Here is piece of something she wrote this week:

More reflections on simple prayer here
[via Cribbs’ Chronicle]

New process I am trying to live…Whenever I feel frustrated or angry I ask myself the question, “Why do you feel like you are being attacked?”
I have found that all of my anger and frustration, no matter how big or small, is rooted in me perceiving my circumstances as attacking something I want to achieve or something I value.
When I take a moment to look for the root of where my anger and frustration is really rising from (because it is rising from a thought, not what is happening to me), I am able to see what is going on in my mind, and it passes.

…you receive lots of juggling related e-mails. You get juggling pictures, cartoons, and videos.
There is a lovely video of Chris Bliss juggling to a Beatles medley.
Jason Garfield has responded. Jason is one of the ten best technical jugglers in the world. I have a feeling he was tired of having his friends send him this link over and over again. So he recorded the same routine, but with 5 balls.

Thank you for the blessings I have received and the blessings I am receiving.
Give thanks for five things…

I came to an odd realization this week. I don’t actually like coffee. What I like is all the cream and sugar that I add. Being that I am trying to eliminate refined sugars from my diet, that is the end of that.

In 1979 three cable channels quietly got their start. It was a time of three major networks, and cable in very few homes. Over the next few decades all three became cultural icons. They were MTV, CNN, and ESPN.
In the beginnings, like all budding enterprises, all three basically made it up as they went along. MTV had less than 200 videos, three camera, and 5 newly minted VJs who seemed more worried about having fun and loving music than anything else. For the first 15 years MTV showed nothing but videos and music. (NOTE: for those of you under the age of 25 the M in MTV stands for music.) At ESPN the first edition of their flagship show Sportscenter had zero video high lights. Hours of programming was filled with tractor pulls, world strongest man competitions, roller-derby, AWA wrestling, and Australian Rules Football (all to my great delight). CNN was not the world news power it is today, but in stead the news was nothing more than reporting wire services from around the world.
By the late eights and early nineties all three had reached their zenith. They were large enough to be significant, but still nimble enough to be truly innovative.

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