I'm very pleased with the Supreme Court's decision yesterday about same-sex marriage. It makes me proud to be Canadian and helps to show that our country is more progressive than the U.S. Of course, socially conservative people who think they have a monopoly on how people should express love will try to defeat the bill in Parliament, but I'm optimistic that they will lose.

Humourist James Thurber had poor eyesight for most of his life, which made him terribly clumsy. He said, "I once tried to feed a nut to a faucet, thinking it was a squirrel." He went completely blind later in life, but he said, "At least, I have been spared the sight of television."

Delmore Schwartz wrote, "Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn."

Ron Hansen said, "Stories give us access to otherwise hidden, censored, unsayable thoughts and feelings now shiftily disclosed in the guise of plot and character...The hungers of our spirits are fed by sharing in the glimpsed interiority of others."

[NOTE: Although "interiority" sounds awkward, my dictionary says that it's a word.]

===A little boy was in a relative's wedding. As he was coming down the aisle he would take two steps, stop, and turn to the crowd (alternating between bride's side and groom's side), put his hands up like claws, and roar. Step, step, ROAR, step step, ROAR, all the way down the aisle. The crowd was near tears from laughing so hard by the time he reached the pulpit. The little boy, however, was getting more and more distressed from all the laughing and was almost crying by the time he reached the pulpit. When asked what he was doing, the child sniffed and said, "I was being the Ring Bear."

=== "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us some email."
-- a 4-year-old girl, misquoting the Lord's Prayer

The poet Joyce Kilmer said, "It is perilous work to thrust your hand in the sun and pull out a spark of immortal flame to warm the hearts of men."

It definitely feels like winter is here!

Yesterday David and I saw a wonderful movie: "Finding Neverland". It's about the events that led J.M. Barrie to write "Peter Pan" and it stars Johnny Depp. I highly recommend it. Last weekend we saw "Ray", about Ray Charles, and really enjoyed it.