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Quote For The Day 10-26-2026

“I like to believe that you don’t need to reach a certain goal to be happy. I prefer to think that happiness is always there, and that when things don’t go the way we might like them to, it’s a sign from above that something even better is right around the corner.”
― David Archuleta, Chords of Strength: A Memoir of Soul, Song and the Power of Perseverance

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Retro Tuesday on Wednesday 10-21-2026

A Funny… Weird… Sad Thing Happened on the Way to the Armchair 12/12/2019

And no, I don’t mean funny ha ha. I mean funny as:

“differing from the ordinary in a suspicious, perplexing, quaint, or eccentric way: peculiar” as quoted from the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

And maybe, I don’t even mean that.

Maybe I mean weird in the same “suspicious, perplexing, quaint or eccentric way.”

To be honest, I am not sure. My brain hasn’t processed enough to understand something which is, ultimately, not understandable.

I do know I mean sad. As in the sadness and shock of my world being changed in an instant.

Yesterday, in the middle of a normal, everyday, day, a co-worker with no health problems, no signs of anything wrong, collapsed at the office. After getting her heart started again three times, the rescue squad spirited her away.

She didn’t make it.

I only knew her as a familiar voice on the phone over the years I have been at my job, both at the hospital and now at my current position. She was always happy and friendly. Happy, I guess, just to be alive. Phone co-workers, phone-friends, even if we never met face to face.

Until last week. Last week, I spoke with her on the phone and discovered she works in the same office building as I do, just around the corner. I asked where she sat so I could come say hi. You see, I’d seen her at the office, but I never put the name to the face. At the end of the week, she walked by my desk and waved. “I’m Betty(not her real name).”

Now she is gone and something inside me is gone, too. Maybe not forever, but pushed down by the shock in which I’ve been moving these last hours.

How does this happen? How can somebody be there one minutes, fine and whole and healthy, and the next, gone? I don’t understand and I don’t like it.

The truth is, none of us are safe. Our lives can change in an instant, both because of those around us and us ourselves. Life is not forever. Life is a butterfly soaring on fragile wings until that one moment when a wing breaks and all is over.

Should we hold those dearest to us close and never let them go. Should we remember to show our love in every day and in every day? Should we never take anything for granted?

Yes, yes and yes. We should do all this and more. I should hug my child every day and tell him I love him. I should call my child living an hour away and do the same. I should call my father, my sister, my friends.

So why don’t I?

Because, in the end, we all willing wear blinders to hide us from the truth. Not out of indifference, but out of fear. We are afraid of death and afraid of the vacuum left behind at another’s death.

I am feeling this sadness because of the suddenness of her death. It was another day, just any old another day, so how could it change so fast?

I don’t have that answer. Maybe, I never will.

Right now, I need to hug my son and my puppy and my cats. Right now I need to celebrate being alive…..

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Word Of The Week 10-21-2026

sleuth

verb

Definition

To sleuth is to carefully or methodically search for information, or to act as a detective.

Origin

“They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” Those canine tracks in Arthur Conan Doyle‘s The Hound of the Baskervilles set the great Sherlock Holmes sleuthing on the trail of a murderer. It was a case of art imitating etymology. When Middle English speakers first borrowed sleuth from the Old Norse word slōth, the term referred to the track of an animal or person. In Scotland, sleuth hund referred to a kind of bloodhound used to hunt game or track down fugitives from justice. In 19th-century U.S. English, sleuthhound, soon shortened to sleuth, began to be used for a detective. From there, sleuth slipped into verb use to apply to what a sleuth does.

Merriam Webster Dictionary