May 23, 2010 - Working on the bucket list!

Background -  One of my sons and I keep a running bucket list, adding and crossing off items as we go. The items on the list run the entire range of lifetime fantasies to be accomplished before we “kick the bucket” and include everything from a trip to New Zealand (my list) to eating wonder white bread (my sons list - I refuse to buy wonder white bread due to its woefully lacking nutritional profile. My son believes this to be child abuse).

The bucket list came up this particular night because we had been watching the Discovery channel which ran a brief piece on the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights, and what is thought to cause them. I informed my bucket list partner that this was on my list. I had always wanted to go to Alaska to see this amazing phenomenon. He informed me that he still hadn’t had a slice of wonder white bread and therefore didn’t care if I ever got to Alaska. I accepted his candor and we smiled our truce to one another, heading off to bed.

S.C.O.U.T.  -  Plopping down, I cracked open the old “Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader” and finished the previous section about Einstein and nuclear fission and then moved onto the next segment titled “Kristian’s Cannon”.  This title meant absolutely nothing to me until I hit the second paragraph and read about a kooky Norwegian physicist from the late 1800’s who was searching for…

                      “a solution to one of the great unsolved mysteries
                of the natural world -the Northern Lights -or aurora borealis”

This beautiful, swirling atmospheric phenomenon has been believed to be messengers of the gods, signs of apocalypse and even souls of the dead. How strange to be seeing this information just moments after my discussion with my son. What uncanny timing!

I did my usual search of the 494 page book to see where else the aurora borealis may be listed (after all, if its mentioned 25 other times throughout the text this wouldn’t be nearly as strange) and, also as usual, found that this is the only page where you will find aurora borealis or Northern Lights mentioned in this book. All the usual questions apply as the tingle crept down my spine. Was it a coincidence? Did I attract it? Are God and the universe just getting on the conversation of my life? Am I manifesting my own reality in a quantum manner?

While my search for answers continues, I will say that if Uncle John is trying to tell me that since my son has to wait for wonder white bread then I’ll just have to read about the Northern Lights in a book, I don’t accept that… but perhaps now there’s a “wonder white” picnic in our summer plans (just to be sure!), and of course we’ll be bringing our goofy dog Scout along!

Reader Contribution - Loving the Badlands

Maureen has sent me a few more spine tinglers. I may have to make her a regular contributing editor! She was warned… “Once you start noticing these connections, it will give you goosebumps how often it happens!”

Loving the Badlands  -  I have a couple of more for you, yet I am still trying to figure out that they mean. The other day while at the grocery store I was buying bison to make some burgers. The Clerk asked me if I ever saw a real buffalo/bison and I said "... Actually Yes, while I was snowmobiling through Yellowstone years ago. Up close and personal"...we continued our conversation about national parks blah blah blah...and the man behind me in line asked if I had ever seen the badlands...well, other than my hometown (hehe), and the Bruce Springsteen song, It had never occurred to me that it was an actual place...duh.

We continued our conversation, and he explained where they were and how beautiful yet desolate they were. All the while I am singing the Bruce song in my head.

OK here is the Scout -  The next morning I came downstairs grabbed my coffee and flicked on the TV to catch the news. Lo and behold the back ground music for the news clip was Bruce Springsteen's Badlands. THEN later that day when I was driving to pick up Scottie...YES BADLANDS comes on the radio!!! Either I need to go see the Badlands OR I need to go see Bruce! I will send the other later!

The Bruce song titled “Badlands” was the lead off track on the album “Darkness On The Edge Of Town” released in 1978.  Its fair to say that, while very popular 30 years ago, this is a very old song that you don’t hear everyday. Think back and tell me “when was the last time you heard that song randomly, let alone twice in one day?“ I told Maureen she had better do both… just in case!!

May 17, 2010 - Blown away!

Background -  The morning of May 17th I watched an episode of the riveting (and sad) show “Intervention” about people who are addicted to drugs and alcohol (while folding laundry of course - I had eaten all the bon-bons so what else was I suppose to do?) This episode profiled a woman who is a severe alcoholic living in Glouster, Massachusetts. While explaining this woman’s background, her daughters gave a short tour of the town and then finished by noting that Glouster is most famously known for the story “The Perfect Storm” which chronicles the loss of the fishing boat named “The Andrea Gail”.
I found myself thinking a lot about that powerful story through-out the day. I read the book many years ago (long before the movie came out) and decided that I would like to read it again. The details and situations that author Sebastian Younger brings to life about that meteorologically unlikely event are mind boggling, not to mention that this is also where the term “The Perfect Storm” originated and is now used to describe any unlikely events coming together to multiply the destructive effect. Very interesting stuff!

S.C.O.U.T.  -  I hop in bed that night and open to my book mark to discover the next random story that Uncle John is dying to impress me with and open to the title “What makes a perfect storm?” , which, as you have probably already guessed, is about that very same fateful storm that turned the Atlantic ocean upside down and sunk the swordfish boat “Andrea Gail” on October 30, 1991.

Is it too corny to say that I was “blown away” to have this story appear in front of me just hours after thinking about it for the first time in years? Yeah, probably, but that now familiar shiver ran down my spine and I thought “uncanny“. Its as if someone is following my thoughts around and commenting on my inner dialogue. It leaves me wondering, once again, how that could be possible. God? The universe? Quantum physics? Law of attraction? Synchronicity? Premonition? All of the above…?

I tried to run all this by my goofy dog Scout to get his thoughts, but he had no opinion on the subject. Even though Portuguese Water Dogs were originally bred to work on fishing boats and this story should be of great interest to him, its not. He’s probably the only water dog ever born who hates the water and therefore has no interest in talking about 100ft waves. He also sees no irony in that statement. Oh well, as usual, its just me, myself and I to figure this one out.

Reader contribution - Chilling, sad and confusing. Sometimes finding a meaning is tough.

Background  -  August 9, 2010. My brother John and I were chatting on the phone and he told me about a car accident he had seen reported on the weekend update. The fatal accident had taken place only hours before in a town we know well called Bethesda, Maryland. Sadly a 64 year old man with a medical condition had lost control of his car and crossed the median strip, crashing head on into a mini-van and killing himself and the female driver of the van. The woman had been less than a mile from her home and on the way to get her hair done. After receiving a call from the salon, her husband had traveled her route to the shop and come upon the accident only to see them loading her into the ambulance. She had already passed away and the paramedics had to hold him back as he was now hysterical. It was a miserable, miserable, miserable story.

The Sunday night of the very same weekend my brother came to our house to have dinner and had a conversation with my husband about the job he was going to interview for that week. He told my husband about a guy that he had worked with a few years back who was now at this same company. It was a good connection for him and, although he hadn’t talked to this guy for a couple of years now, had always been fond of him. He was looking forward to a chance to catch up and possibly even work with him again.

He told me he didn’t know why he hadn’t kept in contact with this guy because they’d had a fairly strong connection due to the severe peanut allergy that my brother shared with this man’s son. They had spent many a day talking about the dangers and management of such an allergy. My brother was very fond of this guy and they had developed a nice friendship that he now missed.
S.C.O.U.T. -  Monday morning my brother was surprised to receive a text from another former co-worker. It was a woman who had also worked for the old company and also knew the guy whose son has the peanut allergy. The text informed my brother that the woman who had been killed in the car accident in Maryland was, in fact, this man’s wife. My brother was stunned and it took a bit for the uncanny timing of the weekend events to settle in on him. The idea that he had unwittingly spent the beginning of the weekend thinking about the poor woman who had died in the accident and her devastated husband only to find out that the devastated husband was the old friend that he had spent the remained of the weekend thinking about left little room to call it a mere coincidence.

I have found that identifying a S.C.O.U.T. and always finding its meaning, should there be one, are two completely separate excersizes. Perhaps the bond he had developed with this man over the peanut allergy had opened up an eternal cosmic line of communication, or perhaps he “attracted” this information due to the upcoming interview, perhaps it was a slap in the face from God, the universe, and the “powers that be” telling him that a fellow human being was gonna need some friends - old friends, new friends and all the friends in between - to hold himself together after this life wrecking tragedy.

May 14, 2010 - "The God Particle" s Got Gas? Uncle John's a laugh riot.

Background - I was reading “The God Particle, If The Universe Is the Answer, What Is The Question” by Leon Lederman. I’m no quantum physicists so lets just say it was slow going! Today I worked my way through pages 108-110 which chronicles the life of French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his work with oxygen including the naming of the element and the role it played in combustion - just a few of this man’s amazing accomplishments.

I love this book, but it can make my brain hurt, so later that very same day I decided to take a break and pick up some lighter reading to soothe my aching gray matter. The “Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, Plunges Into The Universe” was just what the doctor ordered! It doesn’t get any lighter than that.

S.C.O.U.T. -   I opened to the book mark that held my place from over three weeks ago and began reading. The very first section is titled “Got Gas? Part I” and subtitled “In which our hero discovers oxygen and other nifty stuff by accident” (pg. 104).

 I started getting that tingly feeling. This was shaping up to be a S.C.O.U.T.. Oxygen studying scientists twice in one day?!! The body of this section deals with the oxygen exploits of one English chemist named Joseph Priestley, the man who initially discovered oxygen. This one was close, but no cigar. I would have to see Lavoisier‘s name to consider this really strange timing, which I hadn‘t … until I reached the final paragraph,

However, it wasn’t until 1789 that Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the famous French chemist, actually gave it its name “oxygen”, from the Greek for “acid” (Those crazy French, eh?). In a series of brilliant experiments, Lavoisier showed that air contains 20 percent oxygen and that combustion - the process that produces heat and light - is due to the combination of a combustible substance with oxygen.

Now that’s a S.C.O.U.T.! Understand that #1 - the section before this was about beaches, and the section after this one was about invasive species to foreign ecosystems. Random, random, random. #2 - This is the only page/pages that Lavoisier’s name appears in both the 485 pages of the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, and the 414 pages of “The God Particle”. #3 - I had never heard of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier before today. Just try and calculate the odds of coming across this guy randomly twice in one day. I bet even a quantum physicist couldn’t do that!!

It makes me wonder if Nobel Prize winning particle physicist Leon Lederman and his search for the infinitesimal is following a path that will eventually lead to a redefinition of the macro-world. Look out Newtonian mechanics, your days may be numbered! My goofy dog Scout is unimpressed with my intellect, annoyed with my insight and is pretty sure I don’t understand the first thing about this quantum physics book. All he wants to know is when he’s due for his next cookie. Typical.