Category: Perseverance
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The joy of arriving . . .
Today, with any luck, I shall finish the last scene of the last chapter of my third novel. Its working title is: Biome NE47: Daughters of Eden. In these desperate times of war virtually on our doorstep in Eastern Europe, a retreat into the final scenes of a fictional story exploring what a new life…
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The joy of work-arounds
Well, that was a trying morning! Opened my laptop to begin the daily routine, and the screen jumped and jiggled around before my eyes. It looked like there was something behind the frenzy, but I couldn’t be sure. After rather a lot of trial and error, which included the classic powering off and back on,…
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Doing my bit for
Oh no! The big day came and went and I was out among the stars! But I console myself with the realisation that, in some small way I’m doing my bit for the day, if only because yesterday I finished Chapter Nine of my emerging novel. There’s one more chapter to go and then it…
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Trees in the ‘forest’
I’m indebted to DEARA (that’s the Department of Agriculture, Environment And Rural Affairs) for the ‘reveal’ image of a mature hedgerow with specimen trees standing proudly out from the otherwise annually pruned hedgerow. I knew that our package of hedging included specimen trees, when we acquired the bare root saplings from TreesPlease and planted them…
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Fragile, but joy enters
I’ve been spending far too much screen time doing puzzles, and they’re expanding: Wordle started me off; then the family suggested the math teaser Nerdle; Quordle is fiendish but fun; and lately I’ve been playing a Scrabble variant with a robot on Lexulous. Too much, and my brain is getting frazzled. I was going to…
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Bit of a damp squib, here
My chagrin was just about everyone else’s delight, as the expectations of blizzard conditions here in the North Pennines reduced throughout the day yesterday. And now, this morning we have another light covering of what looks like wet, possibly slightly crunchy snow out there. Not a big blizzard blow at all! But the devastation down…
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Or, track of purgatory
When we arrived to take up residence at our smallholding in Sparty Lea, some thirty years ago now, one of the first set of projects we organised was a re-grading and drainage exercise on the long track leading to the house. That work lasted a couple of years before erosion demanded that we do something…
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Measuring up to the challenge
Our son came to me with a challenge: how about a time lapse sequence of seeds sprouting, Dad, in the shape of the title of our special video? As the seeds grow, they could emerge magically from the soft peat and behold, the letters might appear, revealed from their dark incubating place. So the challenge…
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Reaching ‘The Sweet Spot’ through adversity
A professor from Yale University has written a book titled ‘The Sweet Spot,’ so coming along just after I published my own little ‘sweet spot’ poem, his long piece is timely in terms of these Roads To Joy musings. He suggests that it’s only by experiencing pain and suffering that we can find meaning, and…
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It feels so good . . .
I felt a bit sorry for the woodpecker, checking out the swing support. I didn’t think he’d find any nice grubs in there. But he made a circuit of the garden and stopped off at the bird feeder. He didn’t seem to find anything to suit his fancy there either, and I wondered if a…
Roads to Joy 