Hello. I'm slipping away this week. Riverssance is upon us and it's eating up most of my free time. I have been looking forward to a weekend in the Kingdom since the late afternoon rain washed the festivities away last year. It's great to be someone else in a foreign land for two days. Our merry band of peasants hope to overthrow the existing anarchy and give the Mudman his rightful place of honor as King of Riverssance.

People do not place the same importance on the events in their lives. This makes it difficult to be sensitive to another person's thoughts and desires. How do we understand the level of importance a person feels about something? To complicate things, people express their feelings in strange ways... or not at all. It seems that when I think I understand, words jump off my tongue and jab someone in the heart. Damn it, I wanted to polish those words a little before I spit them out. Listening with an open mind and holding the tongue helps. These are two difficult tricks for an old dog like me. If keep getting swatted on the nose, I'll learn.

A friend of mine was talking the other night about "living only for today". I love that notion. The past is gone, the future is unknown, so all that holds any importance is right now. We certainly can't change the past, it's done. You can debate whether we can change the future...I don't think so. I want to think about this more. I'm sure I'll be writing more on this tasty morsel.

Hip! Hip! Huzzah!