Category: Creativity
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The Pink Flamingos of the Pacific Northwest
I asked my daughter, Erin, about her opinion of pink flamingos. “They have their place,” she answered, without taking more than five seconds to think it over. That place was in a front yard, several blocks from her home in Orting, WA. My wife and I were walking back from a brief shopping trip to…
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The Impossibly Long Life of a Snowflake
It’s a simple act of nature. A billion snowflakes drifting slowly earthward…sometimes rising, sometimes blown sideways…but always downward. If they each made a sound like a bird, someone stepping out onto a frozen porch in the North Country of the Adirondacks would be deafened. But each flake makes a sound only it can hear. It…
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An Ice Queen and Prometheus on a New York City Night
A month ago I wouldn’t be able to stand where I’m standing tonight. Impossible. Unless I was willing to share the same physical space with seven other people. I’m looking down at the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. Four weeks ago, thousands of tourists and locals were cramped in and around the small park that…
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The Weekend I Took the Moon Rocks Home
Only on rare occasions (once or twice a month) do I check for the black SUV’s in my driveway or parked around the corner on the road where I now live. I hesitate to give the name of the road–I’m not sure it’s in the Big Computer now. We only moved here in December of…
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The Digital Indoor-Outdoor Thermometer From Area 51
It’s common knowledge that various agencies under the umbrella of the “Federal Government” have been conducting TOP SECRET experiments in highly secure location inside an Air Force Base in California (or Nevada or some such forgotten region of the Great American Desert). This place has been known by many “in the know” people as “Area…
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Floccinaucinihilipilification Or Not
On a day last week when the sky took on a strange hue of Cerulean Frost mixed with patches of Brandeis Blue that hung, ever so delicately, over hills of Bulgarian Rose and Caput Mortuum, I happened to be having a chat with my octogenarian friend…a retired oceanographer. “I am full of vicissitudes today,” she…
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Not Just Another Skyscraper
The Empire State Building has been linked to me, in one way or another, since before I was born. That may sound a bit confusing…but stay with me. I am an American male, raised to hide emotional reactions. But, I can say that the building has made me cry on more than one occasion. When…
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Gratitude From A Dragonfly
It was one of those rare days in mid-summer here in the north country. The sky was free of the clouds that seemed to linger…day after day after day. I was walking across our front deck and something caught my eye. It was a dragonfly trapped in a spider’s web. I wrote a blog about…
patrickjegan 