pragmatic historian time

Timekeeping with Fingers and Sun

When I was a kid, someone taught me a nifty little timekeeping technique involving my fingers and the sun. If you hold your fingers between the setting sun and the horizon, you can estimate the time for full sunset by counting 15 minutes for each of your fingers between the sun and the horizon line. For the photo above, there are 4 fingers between the sun and horizon, so there is about an hour before…

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history pragmatic historian

44 Pages & a Long-Standing Mission

Remember when PBS was THE domain of documentaries? No longer. Aside from cable, which we cut years ago, Netflix has a fabulous rotation of documentaries on all sorts of topics, even arcane, who-would-ever-think-to-make-a-movie-about-that? documentaries. A few nights ago, my husband and I watched 44 Pages, a documentary about Highlights magazine. Remember Highlights? If you have visited any doctor’s or dentist’s office in the past 6 or 7 decades, you have likely flipped through Highlights, especially…

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observations

Those People Who Always Know When Rain Is Needed

When you live in a place like Minnesota that gets four distinct seasons per year, you tend to be attuned to weather fluctuations, simply because it is always changing. Although, if you’ve lived here long enough, you can get all Buddhist about the weather because of the constant change. You stop paying attention to it and go with the flow. (Yeah, that’s not very mindful, is it? The Buddhist acceptance of constant change is cancelled…

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