Simplicity

Simplicity is the keynote of a good life. Choose the simple things always. Life can become complicated if you let it become so. You can be swampled by difficulties if you let them take up too much of your time. Every difficulty can be either solved or ignored. Something better can be substituted for it. Love the humble things of life and revere the simple things. Your standard must never be the world's standard of wealth and power. These are ultimately sheer deception.(Alan L. Roeck, Look To This Day, 12 March)

• Yesterday I opened one of the boxes in the basement to review the contents. Much of the contents was travel brochures that I'd saved from one of our trips. I wonder why I always want to save these things. Half of them are for places we never got to visit. Do I think we are going to return to the same area again? In the ten years since that trip how many times have I actually read one of them? No wonder there's so much clutter, when I refuse to throw out pieces of paper I'm never going to read again. I must have been in the right frame of mind yesterday. I went to get an empty waste basket and filled it. Now all I have to do is resist the temptation to look in that basket again before trash day.
• Several people are registered as followers of my genealogy blog. This happened recently. I also noticed that one of my Facebook friends has links to my blogs on her Google blog. The link title points to the latest blog entries. That's another thing I don't know how to do. There's always something to learn with computers and the Internet.
• This morning a thought about Facebook groups flashed through my mind, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." I am member of four groups. It seems that most people who join a group are passive members. Many of them never post anything. They don't even post to The Wall to announce they joined. The Alumni group has over 600 members. When someone joins the count changes but you can't tell who joined unless you look through 600 profile photographs trying to spot a new face. This brings up another social networking issue. Many don't post a profile photo or they post an image of a logo or of more than one person.

Mr. Dickie