Yesterday morning while I was getting ready for church, I pulled some black socks out of my sock/underwear drawer.
And, being thoroughly male, spent a few moments in absolute concentration under a bright light trying to make sure that these socks were indeed black, and not blue.
I finally decided, that (a) since it has been a long time since I wore blue socks and blue ones wouldn't be that close to the top, and (b) they really did look black, I would go ahead and wear them.
(Sure, like anyone at church would look at me closely enough to determine whether or not I was wearing blue socks with my black pants.)
But the slightest tint of blue was in the socks and so I started thinking about light, color, and how we see them.
You know, plain old science stuff we learn. Like how we don't really see color per se, we see reflected light that our minds interpret as color.
I was thinking of how a red flower isn't red, it's chemical makeup causes it to absorb most of the colors in sunlight, but not the red, which is reflected back to our eyes, and our brains have been trained to think, 'red'.
But then I got to thinking about how light travels. Now light travels at the rate of three hundred million meters per second. So this sock that I'm looking at, although it's only inches from my face, has it's reflected light taking a certain amount of time to reach my eyes and my brain to register the color.
Then I was thinking that these socks were roughly 15cm (.15 meters) from my eyes. So that meant that, at 300,000,000 meters per second, the light being reflected from the (black, definitely black) socks traveled from the sock to my eye in about, like, five ten billionths of a second.
Which, of course, for all practical purposes is instantaneous.
But I started thinking even more.
I've never actually seen anything as it 'is'. I have, and will always see anything and everything I look at, IN THE PAST.
So if I tell you I'm watching you, I'm really watching what you were doing some extremely small fraction of a second ago.
We have only ever seen or heard something in the past.
We can never actually see or hear ANYTHING AS IT HAPPENS. Everything we sense is in the past.
And during all of this thinking, I had time to finish getting ready and started locking doors before leaving for church, and went on to other matters.
So women, when you ask your husband/boyfriend, because he's being quiet, what he is thinking?
You REALLY don't want to know.
105 Years Old
Our church, once a month has a mass celebration for everyone who has a birthday or wedding anniversary that month. Yesterday was our celebration for the August birthdays and anniversaries.
A lady at our church was born on August 25, 1901!
She'll be 105 years old in a few weeks.
So at the celebration, they asked me to cut cake, but someone told me to take the cake over and show the lady (at 105, she got her own cake, not shared like the others) her cake before cutting it.
I took it over there and told her that this was her cake and that we wanted her to see it before the masses devoured it.
She looks at it and remarks that her name was misspelled, but that that was alright.
Man. This lady is sharp. 105. Lives alone. Still has a current Florida driver's license, and has never had an accident or ticket.
We should all be so blessed.
(Her son, who also goes to church there, is 82 and has been retired since 1992. He's as healthy as anyone you've ever seen. He volunteers at the church all the time. You would guess he was 65, tops, if you ever met him.)
For Big Sis
My Big Sis left a comment on my post the other day about Emerald Mound on The Natchez Trace Parkway.
She asked if I had any photos of Loess Bluff. (Loess is a geographical type of soil that is loose, windblown topsoil that can be dozens of feet deep in places. On the Natchez Trace, there is a bluff of about 50 or 60 feet high that shows a good section of loess.)
Well, Sis, I do indeed have a couple of pics. And here they be.
This first one is from 1992 when the pics of The Girls and Me on the other post were taken. Behind the sign you can see the 50-60 foot bluff of loess.
This second one is from around 1961. From left to right is Big Sis, Mamaw Hinton, Papaw Hinton, Sainted Mother, and Big Brother. (trust me, you might not be able to make them out in this photo, Sis. This old slide has a fingerprint that you can see in the sky part. I'm not good enough with Photoshop Elements to clean that up just yet.)
And since I am on the subject of The Natchez Trace again, I wanted to show anyone out there that there are still open sections of the Trace, or road, that are kept clear to show visitors to the park old sections of the actual trace from hundreds of years ago.
This last photo is of Lovely Wife and Lovely Daughters on such a section of the original Trace 'road'.
Long post for a Monday wasn't it?
Oh, kwit yer komplainin'.
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