Glancing over the archives
Glancing back over the archives at Life in the Third Layer, I can see that I have been blogging — more or less — since 2003! That long ago I was already thinking about the possibility of retirement and having more time for reading, writing, and pursuing my own interests. A full-time job, let’s face it, takes a chunk of time out of your day.
I have been retired now for almost six weeks, and the schedule has changed but not quite settled. Most of my time so far has been dedicated to changing over the blog hosting and sorting out the tangle I find here on my computer. In the coming weeks I hope to get that task completed so that I am comfortable with the new environment and everything is working. I am considering ways of getting back those old web pages that you expect to see linked here — my puzzle page, the children and YA literature page, the papers, and the small schools project page. I still have the content, so those won’t disappear for long. Then it will be time to focus on new content and get something interesting up here for my friends to read on a regular basis!
I expect to be writing about education and politics, and why one of these activities generally has a negative impact on the other one. And between these two topics, you can’t stay away from writing about religion, at least about the effect of religion in education and politics. These topics will, I am sure, be foremost in what you might expect to find here. However, I won’t rule out the occasional photo of an interesting bug that is eating my vegetable garden. Life is after all complex and curious.
Pet rocks, etc.
Thudfactor is posting about pet rocks, and I have to agree with him that the Mike Huckabee Guitar Hero thread is dumber. After all, I have a couple of pet rocks.
I did not get rocks with papers of authenticity. I just picked up one or two that were hanging around, the same way I get pet cats. I only have 3 or 4 (rocks, that is), and they are mostly too small to serve any practical purpose like a paper weight or a door-stop. But they call to mind a time and place and have a sort of history. I think they are more authentically rocks without the papers, since having the pedigree behind them would make them sort of a “product.” My pet rocks are real rocks, picked out of a tide pool or some such place, and adopted.
I remember coming across Missouri in the early 70′s and seeing a display of rocks for sale. The enterprising natives had constructed shelves out of 1×12 lumber and cinder blocks and hand-lettered a sign, “Genuine Rocks from the Ozarks.” The rocks on the shelves were the same as the rocks on the ground, but those folks were doing a brisk business. I have a bit of jade from Jade Cove in California, and I picked up a small cobblestone left on the side after street repairs in Berlin.
I have a section of brick that John picked up when he was first learning the alphabet and kept with him for a while, calling it the “I rock.” Then there is the rock that Carl picked up on the golf course because it was shaped like a shoe. He carried it home and painted it to look like a shoe. It became part of the American Bicentennial art exhibit at Berlin?s Rathouse Templehof in 1976.
I somewhat regret that I do not have a genuine rock from the Ozarks.
More cuteness, no blogging
You aren’t supposed to blog when you have a new grandson. You are supposed to show off pictures!