Good News Tuesday: Front Yard Veggies, Think 4 Peace, Graduating While Homeless, and a Heroic Cat Rescue

Florida Couple Wins Right to Plant Vegetables in Front Yard

After six years, Hermine Ricketts and her husband, Tom Carroll, finally won the right to plant vegetables in their front yard.  They’d had a vegetable garden years before in their front yard where the sun was good, but the neighborhood banned front yard gardens stating they were “unsightly.” That finally changed on July 1st when a Florida law went into effect which nullifies the banning of residential gardens. Get the details in this article from NPR.

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A Think Tank for Peace

Billionaires George Soros and Charles Koch who are generally on opposite sides of the political spectrum are teaming up to finance a think tank to promote diplomacy and restraint. You can read more about it in this article

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Graduating While Homeless

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14 Year Old Boy Saves Cat Hanging from Overpass

Trust me. Read this heartwarming story.

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Got good news?

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Quality Time and the Letter T

Our prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “T, tea, tee.” The directions are to: “Theme your post around “tea” or “tee,” or find a word that starts with “T” and talk about that. Bonus points if you manage to incorporate all three. Enjoy!”

Taking time away from the internet has been a good thing for me. Not that I went “cold turkey” or anything.  I just cut my on-line time in half (roughly) to do more household things. And I got some writing done yesterday on a Chicken Soup story, so that was good. Speaking of writing. My book starts with the letter, T. Trust the Timing. I don’t plug it that much, but I trust you won’t mind me mentioning it today. It’s about true love standing the test of time, though it (the love) went dormant for almost four decades while me and Mr. D grew up some more. Do we ever finish growing up? I don’t think so, but we can get to a point where we know what’s important. What does that mean? Maybe in ten years, I’ll think different things are important.

Time is important. It always has been. But QUALITY time today means not being on Facebook so much. It (Facebook) pulls me some days – sucks me in. I had thought about setting a timer, but haven’t done that yet. My goal was ten minutes a day. I did that for a few days, but I think it was more like twenty yesterday. Time suck. I’d rather putter around the house, taking care of plants, getting rid of clutter, and reading BOOKS! I miss reading books for fun. Remember when that’s all we had was books? Comic books and real books, no internet! Remember that? And three channels on the TV set! ABC, CBS, and NBC. I know there are a few of us left who remember that. No cell phones, no computers…. I sound like an old geezer. What is a geezer anyway? I don’t care. I don’t have time to look it up.

What about those bonus points? I already wrote a post a while back about my ecology Tee shirt that fit me to a tee in the 7tees. 🙂

My favorite tea to drink is green tea with peach flavor. Sometimes I like to drink chai tea in the winter. Jasmine tea is nice, too. Sometime, I’m going to have a cup of tea and just sit and sip it and do nothing else. I predict that will last for two minutes. Then, I’ll go outside and talk to the trees.

Do take time to visit Linda Hill’s blog and learn more about Saturday’s Stream of Consciousness. Just click the link below:

https://lindaghill.com/2018/07/27/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-28-18/

Here are the rules:

1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing (typos can be fixed), and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.

2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.

3. I will post the prompt here on my blog every Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” “Begin with the word ‘The,’” or will simply be a single word to get you started.

4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours. Your link will show up in my comments for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top. NOTE: Pingbacks only work from WordPress sites. If you’re self-hosted or are participating from another host, such as Blogger, please leave a link to your post in the comments below.

5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read all of them! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later or go to the previous week by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find below the “Like” button on my post.

6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!

7. As a suggestion, tag your post “SoCS” and/or “#SoCS” for more exposure and more views.

8. Have fun!

 

Gremlins in my Laptop

Last week, I couldn’t access my personal blogs. My laptop informed me it was “unable to connect,”  and suggested that it was a problem with internet connectivity. It wasn’t one of those annoying commercial antivirus messages telling me the site wasn’t safe. It was more basic than that. I could  connect to about half the WP blogs I read regularly, but with the others, I got the same “unable to connect” message as with my own blogs. I had to use my phone, or my husband’s laptop, for those I couldn’t access from my laptop.

For many years, I’ve identified myself “low tech” (in spite of my love of Star Trek) and have little confidence in my computer technology skills. I become easily frustrated with technological trouble shooting. So I asked my smart husband to take a look at this “unable to connect” situation. He couldn’t figure it out either. I suspected some mysterious computer gremlin had chosen to block specific blogs. But why?  I figured I have to take the laptop to somebody or wade through “help” systems or tutorials. Ugh.

Just for the hell of it, I went to my internet settings and found the trouble shooting section, which I had not previously found on my new (windows 10) laptop. I don’t know if I can even get back there. No, that’s not true. I got there once, I can get there again. Anyway, I somehow found a way to click on something about trouble connecting to specific websites and asked the computer to find a solution. It gave me some gibberish about something missing on some gobbledygook that neither my husband nor I understood. After I asked the computer to find a solution to that problem, it said the issue remained and was not fixed.

However, after this interaction, I discovered I could access all my favorite blogs again,  including my own! Yay!

I don’t know if I fixed the problem or what. There are still gremlins in my laptop. They used to tell me Webroot did not want me to go to 75% of the sites I wanted to go to. Now they direct me to Wickipedia 75% of the time. But those gremlins won’t stop me. I know how to work around them.

And maybe, just maybe, I’m not as low tech as I thought. We’ll see.

FYI: My plan for April is to write about low tech stuff I love, like NATURE!

(I found the photo on pixabay under technology – computers. I have no idea what it is, but thought it was interesting.)