Lucky Me!

Acrylic painting: 16 x20

Sometimes you just get such a delightful gift.  So surprising.

My friend, Marlene Russ, is an accomplished painter…she specializes in acrylics.  For my birthday she painted a lovely lovely painting that includes ME.  The two couples visited a beautiful park in Winter Garden, FL in early spring.  Here I am strolling across the lovely shaded park with my little backpack on that I always wear!  How fun is THAT!!!

Lucky me!  

Sharing my birthday….

Ford Presidential Museum, Grand Rapids,  May 2012

It's always interesting to know with what or whom you share a birthday.  One thing Google will tell you is that today is the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down.  Note the little video they have posted online today.

Pieces of the wall went everywhere in the world.  Here I am standing by a piece back in 2012 in Grand Rapids, MI!  

I think it is sobering to think of this in light of the tension that is again building between Russia and the rest of the world! 

I also share a birthday with Carl Sagan.  (see below) 

It's the birthday of astronomer Carl Sagan, born in Brooklyn (1934). His father was a hard-working Ukrainian immigrant garment worker, and his mother was an intellectual housewife who doted on her son. He said: "My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method."