In a few minutes Nina and I will go make the beds. Our niece Ashlyn was here for a couple of days (long enough to get quite a ride in the car … but that’s a story for Nina to tell) so that’s one bed. We also turned our mattress today, so all of that bedding has been washed and hung outside to dry as well. It’ll sure smell nice in the 4 minutes it’ll take me to go to sleep tonight. But making beds isn’t much that would be considered to be “news”, just part of life going on as normal.

My friend Duane is making a good recovery and can now work the keyboard with two hands. That’s news, but not from around here!

I am really enjoying Pandora Internet Radio. Just send your browser to Pandora.com and do a free registration. I’m now getting only the music I want to hear. I’ve set up a couple of stations and chose depending on my mood. I expect that streaming music over the Internet is the future for music. Pandora is not necessarily anything of significance but it is a good recommendation in any case.

One of the blogs I read regularly is “Confused of Calcutta“. JP Rangaswami is very articulate and always interesting. Except when he’s writing about Cricket (a unintelligible game to me), his stuff is stimulating and sticks around in my head for quite a while. He wrote a post today about the enormous benefit of recommendations over critiques and criticism. He puts into words some thoughts I’ve been mulling around in my head for a while. For instance:

I want the people I trust to tell me what’s good, not what’s bad. Telling me what’s bad is easy, everyone does it. The scarcity that I’m prepared to pay for is to be found in the good things, in the people who can tell me about good things.

Too much of what passes for “news” today results from the race to report the worst of the bad. Each report seems to try and trump the previous item … whatever you said, I’ve found something (smaller, bigger, nastier, dirtier, crazier, stupider….). I’m tired of that. I’m tired of people looking for (and usually finding) the worst in everything.

There’s a lot of good news out there. We had a normal day. That’s good news. We had a fun time at a Stake Ice Cream Social tonight. That is good news. We’re preparing for a Sabbath day tomorrow where we’ll hear once again about the “good news”. We’ve got a lot of family coming here next week. That is excellent news.

Nina and Ashlyn are well and suffered no ill effects (from the story that is Nina’s to tell … watch her blog!). That is fabulous news.

There’s plenty of good news and to spare. Let’s share the wealth. Life is good in Pocatello.