Tag Archives: Team Pepper

Our DVD Collection

I love reading books and I love films.

We have quite a library of DVDs we have acquired over the years. We do not buy them as often lately. I borrow many DVDs from my local public library.

I recently purchased some great DVDs from PBS that I thought would be good additions to our collection. They were on sale so I decided to go for it. My husband and I have been watching them the past few days.

A perk of owning DVDs is that you can watch them over and over. If I haven’t watched something in a while I forget enough parts of it that I can enjoy it all over again. Or even if I remember the story, because I love them so much, I don’t care how many times I have seen them. Like re-reading a beloved book. I may even see more of the nuances that I may not have seen with the first viewing.

I like collecting older films or classics. We have a few. One reason I want to collect them is I am afraid that eventually we won’t be able to find them. That they won’t be available anymore. It is like old books that go out of print.

We just finished watching The DVD of Mark Twain by Ken Burns. Very good. It is a 2 Disc set. It covers Mark Twain’s life from beginning to end. It includes many great and funny quotes and excerpts from his books and some great photos. I really love many of his quotes and will be using them from time to time. There are interviews with some Mark Twain scholars, Hal Holbrook and Arthur Miller. It has special features that go into the making of the film and more Mark Twain quotes and photos.

The scholars, Holbrook and Miller share their knowledge, insights and impressions of Twain’s writing, motivations and personality. It is interesting to hear about the man behind the writing.

We all like to think that we are revealing our truth(s) with our blogs. Here is a quote from Mark Twain about honesty:

I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead–and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and then they would be honest so much earlier.

Do you like having your own collection of films? Have you watched this particular film about Mark Twain and what did you like about it or learn from it? Do you have some favorite classic or older films?

|Nano Poblano| among other things.

Fall Back

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Spring forward, Fall Back.

Today, November 2, 2014 at 2 am in California we turned our clocks back by 1 hour to Standard Time. DST or daylight savings time is over until Spring of 2015. Hooray!

I have never liked Daylight Savings Time. I am not a morning person and the idea of getting 1 hour less sleep did not appeal to me. Depending on where you live in the world and in the United States the time changes differ. Some countries do not observe it at all as well as two states in the US which are Arizona and Hawaii.

So today we go around the house and reset our clocks and wrist watches and the clocks on our stove, microwave and in our cars. Usually some of these gets missed. I am pretty good at doing the mental calculations if I realize the car clock is off by 1 hour. It really doesn’t confuse me. What time is it again?

There have been many reasons given for why we need DST. Conserve coal energy during WWI, more daylight to play golf, sports, watch sporting events or search for insects after work hours among other things. The insect idea was from an entomologist from New Zealand.

All I know is I love the Fall Back and do not like the Spring Forward. There is scientific information that all this artificial time changing is not good for our health. It messes with our natural circadian rhythms. There are more car accidents and heart attacks from this man-made sleep deprivation. Would you rather have more time to hunt for insects even if it may lead to your death? Well, I guess it depends how passionate you are about these evening hours pursuits.

Ask Smithsonian: How Does Daylight Savings Affect the Body? | Smithsonian.

What do you think? Do you have the time changes where you live? What time is it there?

|Nano Poblano|

|NoBloPoMo| still trying to figure this one out 😦

A Post A Day Will Not Cause An Emotional Breakdown I Hope

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All right. I have committed to write a post a day for, and I am terrible at acronyms and why do we need them anyway, NaBloPoMo and Nano Poblano. OK I know poblano is a type of chile pepper and not an acronym.

This is the first day of November and we have had our first rain of the season all last night here in Southern California. It really gave me such a great feeling. In case you are unaware, we are going through a drought here.

I usually love listening to the rain at night but last night was particularly wonderful. I had just finished writing a post. My husband had the radio on in the bedroom. I think that blocked the sound of the rain at first. Then I heard a loud drip, drip, drip like there was a leak somewhere. Our plumbing has been noisy lately so I couldn’t be sure.

Then I thought maybe it is rain. It had been predicted for last night. I turned on the light over the backyard patio. I was so happy to see the dripping noise was the rain running off the edge of our tile roof.

It is like any everyday thing that you haven’t experienced for a long, long time and when it happens again it is so special. As if it has never happened before and this is the first time.