When I was a kid growing up in the small town of Andrews, Texas, we had chickens in our backyard. It was something that my subdivision would definitely not allow today, but it was a great experience. While I learned responsibility, my mom bought the eggs for ten cents apiece, which was quite a bit more than they were worth!

My friend Stuart has such a wit. He is really one of the funniest people I know. But if you don’t pay attention, you’d never know it. He mutters these hysterical observations, but he never cracks a smile! You can be having a serious conversation, and he’ll just say stuff from out of nowhere. I have to wonder if he really knows how truly funny he is. And I wonder how many of his jokes I never get. Probably a lot.

Have you ever looked at all the patterns we see around us? I have written in another post about the Fibonacci patterns we see in the universe. You find them not only in living organisms, but in croissants and anything that is coiled upon itself.

I am noticing waves these days. They can be peaceful, violent, calming, or frightening. What got me thinking was listening to breathing, especially sleep breathing. As we fall asleep, our breathing becomes more rhythmic and sounds just like ocean waves. Illustrating this is not such an easy thing, but as I searched for illustrations of waves, I realized there are all sorts of invisible waves around us all the time. Sound travels in waves, as illustrated above. Light, liquids, radio frequencies—all various waves. If you are using a wireless Internet connection, there you go—more waves. Physicists and mathematicians can go on endlessly about the properties and behavior of these waves.

Green is my daughter’s favorite. She loves everything green: grass, trees, even little green bugs. It occurred to me the other day that if a child was born colorblind and saw the whole world in black and white, she would not know what color is. If she were to ask you to describe the color green, you may say that green is the color of grass. If you look at grass and leaves and the new Wal-Mart eco-friendly sign that is “the” thing, what they all have in common is the color green. Still, this child would likely say, “I do not get it.” That person would not understand what these things have in common because she cannot relate at all to the experience of seeing green. You could say, “Well, it is light that comes in at 480 nanometers.” That still does not really describe the experience of seeing the color green.