🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Angels🎶
Funding Restaurants🥘
To Paw-Paw🍦
THE DAILY UPDATE
Three Things I’m Grateful For Today:
- A fun weekend of baseball and family.
- A good night of sleep.
- My resilience.
Pursuit of Wordle Godhood: Today’s result: Six. That took too long.
Wordle 1,045 6/6
⬜🟨🟩⬜⬜
🟨🟩🟩⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟨⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Pursuit of Connections Godhood: Today’s result: PERFECTO! And I rarely get this in this order.
Connections
Puzzle #323
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
The song in my head when I woke up: “Anthem of the Angels,” Breaking Benjamin
Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: Days go on forever/But I have not left your side/We can chase the dark together/If you go then so will I
Post-Tournament Tunes: The drive home after a narrow defeat in the semifinals that eliminated us from our baseball tournament was to my Nu Rock playlist on Amazon Music.
- Bounce, System of a Down
- The Sound of Silence, Disturbed
- Black Rose, Volbeat
- Click Click Boom, Saliva
- Fake It, Seether
- One Last Breath, Creed
- Halo, Soil
- Everlong, Foo Fighters
- Daylight, Shinedown
- Blurry, Puddle of Mudd
Something I’m looking forward to today: My bi-weekly space trip
Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: The start of a new month.
Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: The fight my baseball team showed in coming back to tie the eventual tourney winner before falling on a walk-off. So close!
What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved no writing other than the Puzzle Pieces. It was a big baseball day!
What I’ve written: A New Recipe for Success: Akito Kashiwai credits the MMM program with giving him the needed support to create a startup aimed at changing how small food-service businesses find funding.
Today’s Stoic Though of the Day: “Watch the stars in their courses and imagine yourself alongside them. Think constantly on the changes of the elements into each other, for such thoughts wash away the dust of earthly life.” – Marcus Aurelius
John’s translation of Today’s STD: “Feeling full or yourself? Like you’re something hugely special? Wait for night. Go outside. Look up. You are an infinitesimally small part of a huge universe you can’t possibly understand. So remember, though you fill a body and might think of yourself as important, you’re a part of something much bigger.”
My father-in-law loved ice cream. I learned just how much he loved it soon after I married his daughter.
One of the things I’ve been telling Boy The Elder as his wedding date approaches is that he’s about to learn a whole lot about his fiance. There are these things that we accept as Truth because we were raised in a family that did these things a certain way. Only after we combine our life so deeply with another do we realize not everyone does those things that certain way.
I was raised in a family for whom ice cream was a summer thing, for the most part. It certainly was nothing you sought out on the coldest winter days. But on one visit to our then-Ohio home, my in-laws, Wifey Poo and I were touring the Longaberger Basket Factory (because that’s what you do when you’re married, even if its NFL Wild Card weekend). The drive up had been through snow flurries, and it was really whipping by the time we arrived.
After the basket factory tour, we went to this barn that sold crafts and such. Inside the barn, which was very much not climate controlled, was an ice cream booth. “Who wants ice cream?” My father-in-law said. I should have realized then it wasn’t really a question. It was more like, “Who wants ice cream!”
I laughed, thinking that no one would even consider having ice cream on a day as cold as that one was. My chuckles were met by three stares from six eyes — those of Wifey Poo, mother-in-law and father-in-law. It was the ultimate, “What’s so funny?” moment.
Soon, we were all eating ice cream in the cold, and I realized my father-in-law needed an ice cream 12-step program.
Yesterday would have been my father-in-law’s birthday. He passed away in 2021. So every year since on his birthday, we buy his favorite ice cream — Moose Tracks — and have an ice-cream toast to the patriarch of the family, the man who raised my amazing Wifey Poo, and a true ice cream lover. Yesterday’s toast came after a weekend of baseball. The three in-house members of the Core Four raised our cups and said “To Paw-Paw.”
He was, indeed, a good man.
Would you please help a brutha out? I’ve created a weekly eNewsletter called News-B-Nuts in which I’ll be sending out news nuggets and witty commentary to subscribers. If you can, would you support this endeavor for just $5 a month via Patreon?