Ozark Oddments: A spoon full of sugar...

Saturday, March 10, 2007

A spoon full of sugar...

Since the end of July – after we got a really good look at ourselves in the full-length mirrors in the room we were staying at the Tuscany Suites (a truly wonderful place to stay) – R and I have been focused on loosing weight. We are not on a “diet” per se, but are simply counting calories. The upside is that we can eat anything we want as long as we account for it and don’t go over the limits we have set for ourselves for the day. The downside is that we spend a lot of time calculating how many calories are in the food we eat. At mealtimes we sit across from each other at the table with our solar-powered calculators (we're very energy conscious, doncha know) adding up figures and consulting calorie-counting books. So today I added a tablespoon of powdered sugar to the cocoa I had added to my coffee and thought I better look it up in the book and get it written down. So I did and I announced to R: “Powdered sugar has a tablespoon of calories.” He gave me “the look” and we both started to laugh.

What immediately leaped into my mind was the banquet in the CS Lewis novel That Hideous Strength that occurs at the end of book. Merlin crashes the party and “Babel” breaks out as various dignitaries are giving their speeches. It starts off as mixed-up sentences and then eventually deteriorates into gibberish. “Jules seemed to be saying that the future density of mankind depended on the implosion of the horses of Nature... Then he thought, Come! That is going too far. Even they must see that you can’t talk about accepting the challenge of the past by throwing down the gauntlet of the future... and then came the sentence: “The surrogates esemplanted in a continual of porous variations.” Well. I’m not quite that bad.... not yet anyway.

Oh yeah, I caused something of a disturbance yesterday in the aerobics class when I discovered, much to my delight and surprise, that I have now lost enough weight that can touch my elbow to my knee!!!

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Thoughts to ponder

Most of us go through life so absorbed in the cocoon of ourselves that we rarely stop to consider the other. Of course, we think that we do; indeed, we may pride ourselves on our capacity for empathy; we may be considerate and thoughtful in our dealings with others, but how often do we stand before them. so to speak, and experience what it is to be them?--Domenica Macdonald

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, by Alexander McCall
Smith

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Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering -- because you can't take it in all at once. --Audrey Hepburn

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I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all, I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.--Agatha Christie

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Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had my share. But whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analysis, you have got not to forget to laugh.--Katharine Hepburn

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One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

"Two people... told me that the word "Christian" would turn people off. I wouldn't mind if to be a Christian were accepted as being the dangerous thing which it is. I wouldn't mind if, when a group of Christians meet for bread and wine, we might well be interrupted and jailed for subversive activities. I wouldn't mind if, once again, we were being thrown to the lions. I do mind, desperately, that the word "Christian" means for so many people smugness, and piosity, and holier-than-thoughness. Who, today, can recognize a Christian because of "how those Christians love one another"?--Madeline L'Engle, "A Circle of Quiet"