Fireworks are banging off with abandon...

I can hear them. I can see some of them if I crane my neck at the right angle and look out my kitchen window.

I know there is probably a crowd watching somewhere. But I can't get my mind to imagine it.

Oh well,

Here's to scaring away all the nasties, and may the rest of the coming be more happy than not.

Cheers!

PS. In asl, "10" is signed with a thumbs-up.

So: Thumbs up, ever-buddies!

This is a G.I.P., instead of the post I was planning, because I need to focus on the positive

This was my father's greatest compliment. He gave it often.

It was the central idea he took away from those childhood conversations with his father, about the nature of atoms and the universe, that I wrote about the other day.

It's a more concise statement of the collage of quotes that made up that music vid I also posted the other day (and that's why the vid brought a lump to my throat, and why I'm still kind of itching to talk about it).*

"The beauty of a living thing
Is not the atoms that go into it,
But the way those atoms are put together."

And:

"We are all connected:
To each other, biologically,
To the Earth, chemically,
To the rest of the Universe, atomically."

*It's from the same person who made the "A more Glorious Dawn" video from Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking quotes. I don't think it's a strong, musically, but there's a lot there to mull over and get meta about.