I’ve lived in Florida now for 6 years and I still can’t get over the diversity of wildlife here.
One of the animals that I find fascinating are the armadillos that we have wondering around the yard.
If they weren’t so cute I would consider them a major pest with the havoc they cause with the landscaping, digging up the yard and flower beds.
In late January there was an abandoned cat that would come around our back door. One of our neighbors had moved out and left the cat behind. We would try to call the cat inside but the cat was a little wary of people and we could not get near her.
We started to leave food outside the door for her and she would come around and eat, but as soon as she heard anyone coming near she would take off into the back woods. After a couple of weeks of this we noticed that she was looking pregnant.
The weather was getting cold…(even here in Florida we were getting sub freezing temperatures) and I knew that she and her kittens would not survive the cold spells that we were having so using food we managed to lore her inside. This took several days to do.
Just a couple of days after she was inside she had four kittens. You can see the picture below of these little darlings.
After some research on the internet, I discovered that the cat was a Snowshoe cat. Apparently it is a cross breed between a Siamese cat and a domestic cat. The breed is considered rare because the snowshoe gene is not a dominant gene.
Out of the four kittens, only one was a snowshoe the others looking more like the father cat, another stay tiger cat in the neighborhood. After 6 weeks, the kittens were all given to good homes and the mother is still here until we can get her spayed so that she will not have any more kittens.
We will then let her go back outside. She is a very vocal cat and is driving us crazy with her constant meowing. I will miss not having her in the house, but I know that she prefers to be an outdoor cat. I will keep on feeding her as long as she stays around.
One thing that I like to do is go out with my camera and take photographs of anything that might interest me. I wouldn’t consider myself a camera buff and far from an expert, but I have been doing this for well over 40 years.
Now there’s a scary thought, it’s hard to believe that it’s been that long. Have you ever noticed that when you quantify something you’ve been doing in years that it jolts you into the reality that you are not as young as you feel.
Anyway, I took this picture of a Zebra Heliconian butterfly when I was out on hammock trail on Merritt Island here in Florida last week. Oh, and yes I had to look up the name of the butterfly, one of the nice things about the internet is that instant ability to look up almost anything.
I took this shot with my Minota Z1. It’s not the best camera that I’ve ever had, but it does take a pretty nice photo even though it is only 3.2 mega pixels, which by today’s standards is low resolution. Someday I will upgrade my camera, but for now I’m satisfied with what this one can do.
Have you ever noticed that everything revolves around lies?
It doesn’t take much, just watch what people say and do.
Now I’m not just talking about politicians here, they have their own brand of lies. They refer to them is spinning the truth, which in itself is a lie, isn’t it?
I could write a book on just that, but today I’m referring to lies themselves. It is my firm belief that people do not want to know the truth and so we have as a society created a web of lies for our protection and advancement.
Now I’m sure you can think of at least a few (if not everybody) that tells lies for advancement. This can be social advancement, political or economic. Like that guy at work that lies about his qualifications to get that raise or maybe telling his boss lies about how he agrees with the way he’s doing his job. (better known as kissing ass)
Then there is the more excepted brand of lying. When you lie to yourself. This can appear helpful, after all I’m sure you heard of affirmations. Aren’t these just lies that we tell ourselves in the hope that they will come true? The problem with these types of lies is that if you tell yourself a lie enough times you believe that it’s the truth.
We’ve all seen this example many times, in fact there have been demonstrations of this type of lie on many TV shows.
Most notably, American Idol. We laugh at the ones that get up and sing very badly when the performer actually believes that they are talented. This is a lie that they have been telling themselves and probably their friends and family have been telling them, sometimes for years.
I don’t want to insinuate that this is something that has been happening more today than in history. We even have examples of lying to ourselves in fables. Take for instance the fable “sour grapes”.
In this fable there is a wolf that sees some grapes up high on the vine. He would really like to have some of these grapes to eat and he jumps as high as he can but to no avail.
After many attempts he gives up saying to himself, “they were probably sour anyway”. This is a classic case of lying to your self, the wolf really wanted the grapes, but because he couldn’t have them he lied to himself saying that they were probably sour. This is using a lie as a way of dealing with disappointment.
David Hodgson
I walked into a WaWa convenience store, which was a ritual that I did every morning to get my breakfast for the day.
After paying for my food, this man walks up to me and pulls out a check and hands it to me. I took the check thinking that he was one of my customers from my printing company, but when I looked down at the check it was for $300,000.
I asked him what the check was for, he told me that he wanted me to invest it in anything that I thought would be good.
I asked him why he was giving it to me, I do not give investment advice. He told me that he heard a conversation that I had with a friend at my business. I was telling my friend that I thought that the stock market was ready for a major correction and if I had the time I would buy into some stocks and in a few months short the market.
Apparently he took that advice that he overheard to heart and mortgaged his farm and did exactly what I said and made a fast few hundred thousand dollars in just a couple of months. Now he wanted to know if I had some other ideas that he could make some more money on.
I just stared at him for a couple of minutes. I could not fathom that someone would take what I said and literally bet the farm on it. I then handed him the check back and told him I didn’t have anything at that time to invest in and walked out.
Have you ever thought about someone that you should call on the phone only for them to call you? This is what many people call synchronicity. It’s when you have a premonition of something will happen and then it occurs. There have been many theories about what exactly is happening.
Some say it’s just coincidence. And for some things that could be very possible. But there are some things that go well beyond mathematical probabilities. Carl Jung believed that many experiences that are coincidences due to chance in terms of causality suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances in terms of meaning, reflecting this governing dynamic.
Most instances of synchronicity can be attributed of using hindsight to link seemingly unrelated events as cause and effect. So is synchronicity a real phenomena or is it just a collective unconscious manifestation.
Your probably wondering what it is I believe.
My personal belief is that the phenomena of synchronicity is just the way our minds filter all the events that are happening around us everyday and how that in turn effects our environment around us.
For instance you are on unemployment and your benefits are about to run out. Just as you receive your last check you get a job offer. Was this some magical way the universe provides for what we need or is it that there have been offers out there all the time but you have been filtering them out.
It’s the year 1978 and a new couple moves in next door. It’s a young woman, probably in her mid 20’s and a man about 55 with a small girl of 5.
The woman comes over and introduces herself and says that her and her husband and child have just moved in and she wanted to meet me.
She then goes on to talk about her life. She says that she can not reach orgasm with her husband and started on a long story about why she thought that was.
She said that she was raped repeatedly for years by her father and that her father and her ex husband got together one night and saw this nurse walking home after work at night. They grabbed the nurse and forced her into their car and drove to a secluded area in the woods and that they first each raped her repeatedly and then slit her throat.
She said that her husband really didn’t want to do it, but that he was terrified of her father so he went along with it.
She also said that her father and husband was convicted of 1st degree murder and were serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.
She then looked at me and said that she had to go, but she hoped that we could be friends.
I’ve been inspired by many people, although maybe in not the way that they intended. Some times it’s to change my life or to help others change theirs and other times it’s like material for a stand up comic.
In this blog I will try to articulate my experiences during these incounters and what I’ve learned from them. Maybe through doing so, I may realize deeper meaning from them or maybe you can relate to some of them and extract some meaning for yourself.
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