WINTER IS VERY NEAR

Now I’m busy reviewing the textbook which I haven’t looked at for nine months so I can get back to the algebra course I stopped taking after the winter quarter. I’ve got a month or so to review about seven chapters, do the tests and sample problems, do some of the exercises at the end of each chapter. Lot’s of work to do because math, unused, tends to dry up and blow away.

Photo: Side yard summer.

Lately, I’ve been reading biography, history and a few novels, watching movies and TV, specially Law and Order: SVU. I could feel all the gears shift (the unused synapses firing) when I opened the old algebra text up and began trying to read and digest lines of very logical writing in which almost every word has but one, and only one, meaning. No slopping around in metaphor land when one is doing math.

Photo: Side yard now, on left. Photo on right backyard.

Yeah? Winter, so . . .

TIME FOR A NEW HAT

ALAN WATTS

I didn’t know it till now, but Alan Watts, the speaker and writer for Buddhism and enlightenment, back in the day, as they say, died of cirrhosis of the liver because of a lifetime of alcohol abuse. Now that stopped me in my tracks. Sorry to hear that, even though he’s old news in these days of the now news.