Somehow the first real blog on one's website should be special so I was dithering over what to write about. In the process, I ran across a video of a 13-year-old who was playing the 1801 version of The Last Post...

Do not go into the basement, batteries will eat up little girls. Do not go out into the pasture, the bull will kill you. Do not go near the pig pen; a mother sow will kill you and eat you. Do not climb the windmill, the fan blades will cut off your head. Do not kick the horse in the flanks; he will throw you off and break your neck. Watch out for gypsies, they like to steal pretty little girls. They will teach you to beg, and we will never see you again. Do not hold on to the door handle when you are in the Terraplane, it will throw you right out of the car.

Ch 2: Elaine Zeiss must decide whether to trust a powerfully built stranger to get her out of a city in chaos. This man, Sean Carpenter claims her family sent him to rescue her and that they must make their way to the lake front so they can begin a journey to an unknown place to rejoin them. Elaine is put aboard a boat with other strangers, but Carpenter is called away for another rescue. If he does not return in time, how will she know where to find the family?

Which Way Is Home?

Each day the smell of smoke had gotten worse and Elaine was no closer to finding transportation than she had been the day before. All airports, including O’Hare and Midway, had been shut down with the first report of the dirty bomb in Norfolk, and rumors were rampant that the District of Columbia had been hit from the Chesapeake side. That was puzzling. The Potomac would have been a better choice for the prevailing winds to carry the radiation toward the Capitol.  No doubt Annapolis, Baltimore and Philadelphia were in for it, and she  watched the panic on U-Tube until her laptop battery gave out. That was yesterday. She did get out emails to Ted and his dad but had no response before the battery failed. Her cell phone was useless; the lines were jammed.

My first finished artwork was a bunny on tablet paper. Somewhere around the age of four, I went to Dad and asked him to draw a bunny for me. Dad was deaf and had been since early childhood so I had to sign it to him by taking my index and middle finger, placing them at the side of my head and wiggling them backward. I indicated a drawing by holding my left hand out like a tablet and using my stubby little finger as a pen to indicate writing or drawing.

On a routine overnight trip to a neighboring city Professor Elaine Lacy Zeiss is trapped away from home. In addition to interstate wildfires that rage out of control, the president declares a national emergency and closes all airports. Thousands are stranded, all trying to find transportation that will take them home. Elaine's with its full tank of gas is trapped in the hotel garage. Communications are jammed, public order is breaking down, and a man pulls her off the last train out of Chicago. He claims her family has sought refuge in another state. It is his mission to take her to join them.

You spend a fortune and an incredible amount of time, agony and energy to get a Masters of Business Administration. You get a piece of paper for all that, and that is supposed to make you a very marketable commodity and assure you a good salary and lifestyle. Oh sure, but what no one tells you is that forever after, all that training will stalk you mercilessly. You are doomed, doomed to spend your life calculating cost/benefit analyses!

Is there such a thing as a creative mind? Is creativity a mark of genius, insanity or plain necessity? My hunch is that it is often a combination of the three with necessity leading the pack.