SAQA and Poetry journals arrived in the mail recently.

• SAQA: slim little volume which starts off with a note from the prez chastising members for typos etc in their web pages.
• Poetry magazine: 250+ pages which I could barely put down because of the compelling long article combining current events, poems and photographs.

In more interesting news, I couldn’t sleep the other night and as I lay there (very atypical for me) tossing and turning, I tried to build a calming image in my head. Suddenly I had an idea for a quilt. A pretty big quilt. It’s going to require some fabric acquisition, which by itself is rather exciting. I looked and looked at it, there in my head and liked it more and more. I fretted for a moment or two that I wouldn’t remember it and wondered if I should turn a light on and write it down but I didn’t. I wondered if it would be better pieced or appliqued – not my normal thought process at all! I pondered it some more and finally fell asleep.

The next morning at work I started off answering phones so I took a little pad of graph paper with me and sketched out the basic idea of it.

I’m pretty stoked by the whole thing.

Peace doesn’t require two people; it requires only one. It has to be you. The problem begins and ends there. – Byron Katie

I watched this last night:

I was struck not by the craziness of the storm chasers but by their flow of observations and careful watching of the storm. It was pretty well developed by the time this video starts and I was impressed by the massive size and violent action in the tornado area. I think people get tied up looking for those funnel clouds but you don’t need to see that to know that there may be, even in a circular-movement storm, a lot of force at the center.

That was last night. Just now, I watched this, this shows the very rapid transition from big developing mass to a long skinny funnel touching the ground to just this wall of destruction. The reports from the cars are increasingly frantic as they realize that cars are part of the debris seen at the edge of the storm. Meanwhile the on-air people are reporting the tornado emergency and strongly encouraging people to get underground right away.

It’s worth watching if only to understand just how fast dangerous storms can develop.

sententious |sen’tenCH?s|
adjective
given to moralizing in a pompous or affected manner: he tried to encourage his men with sententious rhetoric.

of this going on at my house:

which explains a whole lot of things.

Not everyone takes gnomes quite so seriously, but they should. Oh yes indeed, they should.