We have just enough information to be dangerous. I don’t trust my doctor or my financial advisor but I trust an online site to reflect the state of my mutual funds. Thinking I know how to do my own financial investing is like thinking I can
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“In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition — either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail.”
― A Walk in the Woods
― A Walk in the Woods
“Then there were all the diseases one is vulnerable to in the woods — giardiasis, eastern equine encephalitis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, schistosomiasis, brucellosis, and shigellosis, to offer but a sampling. Eastern equine encephalitis, caused by the prick of a mosquito, attacks the brain and central nervous system. If you’re lucky you can hope to spend the rest of your life propped in a chair with a bib around your neck, but generally it will kill you. There is no known cure. No less arresting is Lyme disease, which comes from the bite of a tiny deer tick. If undetected, it can lie dormant in the human body for years before erupting in a positive fiesta of maladies. This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all. The symptoms include, but are not limited to, headaches, fatigue, fever, chills, shortness of breath, dizziness, shooting pains in the extremities, cardiac irregularities, facial paralysis, muscle spasms, severe mental impairment, loss of control of body functions, and — hardly surprising, really — chronic depression.”
― A Walk in the Woods
― A Walk in the Woods
“The woods were full of peril — rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex; rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless fire ants and ravening blackfly; poison ivy, poison sumac, poisonoak, and poison salamanders; even a scattering of moose lethally deranged by a parasitic worm that burrows a nest in their brains and befuddles them into chasing hapless hikers through remote, sunny meadows and into glacial lakes.”
― A Walk in the Woods
― A Walk in the Woods
“wise women and men have known for millennia: when we are wronged it is better to respond with love, courage, and grace than with anger, bitterness, and rage. We are made whole by living up to the best part of human nature—the part willing to forgive the aggressor, the part that never loses sight of the humanity of those on the other side of the relationship, and the part that embraces the person with whom we have every right to be angry and accepts him or her as a brother or sister.”
― The Reason You Walk
― The Reason You Walk
“When I asked her once why she didn’t walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. “Because I have a program for the treadmill,” she explained. “It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.” It hadn’t occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.”
― A Walk in the Woods
― A Walk in the Woods
Susan’s 2025 Year in Books
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