It's too early for Christmas Music. Stop it!

"If they are wise, do not quarrel with them; if they are fools, ignore them." - Epictetus

Space Stuff

 "He who is discontented with what he has, and what has been granted to him by fortune, is one who is ignorant of the art of living, but he who bears that in a noble spirit, and makes reasonable use of all that comes from it, deserves to be regarded as a good man." - Epictetus

Acid Rain, Cold End Corrosion, HHV and LHV

 “Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance.

Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a secular winter. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

Critters on the loose...

"Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him." - Epictetus

"Make an assessment."

 "Everything - a horse, a vine - is created for some duty.  For what task, then, were you yourself created?" - Marcus Aurelius

Road Trip!

 "The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you.  Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere." - Marcus Aurelius

It begins...

 "Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Stabbing in the stakes

 "Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish?  Nothing else." - Epictetus

Home away from home

 "If you can cut yourself - your mind - free of what other people do and say, of what you've said or done, of the things that you're afraid will happen, the impositions of the body that contains you and the breath within, and what the whirling chaos sweeps in from outside, so that the mind is freed from fate, brought to clarity, and lives life on its own recognizance - doing what's right, accepting what happens, and speaking the truth - If you can cut free of impressions that cling to the mind, free of the future and the past - can make yourself, as Empedocles says, 'a sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness' and concentrate on living what can be lived (which means the present)...then you can spend the time you have in tranquility.  And in kindness.  And at peace with the spirit within you." - Marcus Aurelius

A Subaru Day

 "When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca