Today, April 22, is Earth Day! It’s the 45th Anniversary of the very first Earth Day. Here is Walter Cronkite’s report on the first Earth Day, 1970:
It would also be my late sister Judy’s 63rd birthday.
Whoever made the decision to turn Judy’s birthday into Earth Day chose wisely. Judy was a born environmentalist and recycler.
On the first Earth Day, Judy was a new, very young mother who believed in saving the planet. She was the first “environmentalist” I ever knew personally, and well, I thought she was nuts. There was a recycling bin in her kitchen for as long as I can remember. And this was back when recycling took effort. She believed in gardens, not garbage, and she made life bloom wherever she was.
“I’ve got kids,” she’d say. “It’s their planet too!”
But years later, Judy took recycling to a whole different level when she helped people recycle themselves. In the 1990s, Jude, who was then living in Florida, began working with the Homeless, assisting at shelters. Then she actively began trying to help homeless vets find food, shelter and work — to enable them to jump-start their lives.
When she died in early 2000, the American Legion awarded her honorary membership for her services to homeless vets. A homeless shelter was named in her honor. So she’s still doing good works, my sister is. That would make her wildly happy.
Jude also gave me the Beatles. So it is very appropriate that they wrote a song for her.
You see, the night the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, it was MY turn to choose what we were going to watch. And we were going to watch the second part of The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh starring Patrick McGoohan on the Wonderful Wide World of Disney. My four (all older and MUCH cooler) siblings were furious with me. But I was quite insistent. You might even say that I threw a Class I temper tantrum over it, but I wouldn’t admit to that. But hey, I was seven. And it was my turn to choose. Fair is fair, especially in a big family with only one TV.
Somehow, Judy talked me out of my turn. She was always very persuasive. Thanks Jude.
Hey Jude, Happy Earth Day-Birthday.
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If this looks/sounds familiar, it’s because I recycled this post from last year. Because you should never use fresh when you can reuse something already written. And you can never get enough of “Hey Jude.”
If you know anything about me, you know that I’m a dog lover. Even when I want to throttle my own dog, Duncan, I love him. So I don’t. Throttle him, that is.
If you know anything about dogs, you know that they are bursting with personality. Each and every one of them. But until you get to know a dog, you don’t often get to know what they’re all about.
So Guinnevere Shuster, a photographer who works for an animal adoption organization in Utah, found a creative way to capture the personalities of several dogs who were up for adoption. She put them in a photo booth.
Here are my favorite photo groups:
I need someone with a good sense of humor to humor me
And this one:
Seriously. You can’t go wrong with a guy like me
There are more photo series at this article. Thanks for this one go to my son Jacob who sent it on to me. Thanks, kiddo.
And since I can’t do a dog post without a new picture of Duncan, here you go:
Carrie of A Write Transition told me about this website that shows you how to get [back] into WP Classic mode. I hadn’t been able to do this for about a week. Now I can!
If you are blogger at wordpress.com, this post here will help you to solve a big problem. As you have noticed, the decision makers at WordPress want to force you to use the recent new editor interface that is purely designed for mobile devices and for users who only create short-form content. This is of course a pain if you are desktop user and if you like to create long-form content as well. In this post you will learn how to get back to the classic editor permanently.
In the new editor form, we had a link back to the classic editor but that link is now gone too. WordPress does not have the intention to give us the link back as you can read here in the forums. If you go through this huge forum thread, you will find out…
FiftyFourandAHalf 