MindHouse Book Club is into double digits!  The Big One OH was held at Sue and Jim's office on Friday the 13th, and it was a doozy!  Books: Jeanette Walls' Glass Castle and Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton.

... full of laughter (how to be confident in a meeting ... an email from Dewitt on Melissa' smart phone held up by Melissa and Sue in the photo above), sadness (Melissa's sister's long time companion died suddenly in his sleep on 3/12/15), happiness ... St Patrick's Day is coming (see the color of Jim's shirt in the above photo) and Doug being dragged kicking and screaming into the heart of a bureaucracy (see short story below).

Jeanette Walls' memoir Glass Castle was deeply moving, disturbing and ultimately uplifting.  Walls' father was brilliant and an alcoholic, her mom an artist.  Four children resilient in their poverty and neglect.  Jeanette Walls emerged from this intact and an excellent writer ... worth reading and/or listening to.

"How do you like your new consultancy Doug?", a fiddler player asked at a recent old time  music jam. "Well, meetings are tough: 'Doug what do you think of the new IFP derived from the SSIS section of the RDA?' To help me understand, a colleague sent me a 200 page PDF of acronyms to study." 

Fiddler player: "What's a PDF?"

Biology of Belief stimulated lots of discussion.  For example Dr. Lipton says that its the proteins and epigenetics (not genetics) that impacts perception, belief and behavior.  External stimuli gets to the proteins through receptors, then effectors then the proteins and onto the RNA.  He says that there are 3 major stimuli that can have negative effects on epigenetics: trauma, toxins and thought and goes on to link the third (thought) to belief and seems to warn readers that thought/belief can have a big health impact.  While MHBC didn't disagree with this, we felt that grouping "thought" with "trauma" and "toxins" might have been a bit of sleight-of-hand.  Dr. Lipton analogizes the human to the cell, but the back-and-forth between the micro (cell) and macro (body) was sometimes unclear.  Naturally it is all very complicated and worth thinking about.

NEXT UP: Stephen Hawkings: A Briefer History of Time and Queenie's Love Song by the same author of the Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry ... available on Kindle and Audible.

TIME: Friday, April 24th.