A Comment About Comments

 If uoi are a fellow blogger and you have been listed recently in one of the various blog rolls that appear here on Leap of Dave, you may have seen or be seeina in the future a comment on one of your posts that looks like thei:

Happy New Year! Each year at this time, I clean up my blog to prepare for the upcoming year.  I consolidate all of my blog rolls to one entitled something like These blogs are so last year. Then at the beginning of the year when people post on their blogs for the first time.  I read that post in it's entirety and usually read or reread the last post of the previous year.  This year I decided to then write a comment on the first post which is why you are reading this. 

The comment then will say specific things about their blog and post.  In a few days I'll stop adding a comment after the first post, but for the rest of the year I'll continue to prune the last year blog list and transfer most of them to the current blogroll.

I follow this procedure for multiple reasons: 1) It's a quick glance for me to keep up with  which blogs may have stopped posting over the previous year.  2)I helps me evaluate whether I want to keep blogs on my blog roll that I'm no longer reading or interested in.  3) In a bizarre way this process id fun and comforting me. 

 My blogging has evolved since 2008 when this blog began as Home School Dad.  Other blogs like Dave Out Loud, and Crazy Uncle Dave's Sports blog soon followed.  Eventually this blog changed names and incorporated some of the other blogs in a one stop shop/ multiplex of my many and varied interests.  

As my blog has changed so have my blogrolls, this yearly changing of the blog guard helps facilitate that change.

Two Thoughts on Life

Robert Redford and Rob Reiner were two of my favorite actors turned directors.  They both passed away in the last 4 months of  2025 and as a result I've been thinking about them and their work.  Yesterday, quite by accident, a movie quote popped into my mind.  I could not place the movie at first, so I googled it and soon this scene was on my phone.

 

 

This quote from The Natural, although said to Redford's Roy Hobbs rather than by him,   informs and leads  the protagonist to the decisions that makes up the film's climax.

Thinking of Redford naturally made me think of Reiner. Thinking of Reiner led to thinking of the Princess Bride, which led me to this brief scene.  

In reviewing the context of both of these scenes, the hard fact that life is painful cannot be denied.   Both characters were denied (albeit temporarily)  true love due to circumstances beyond their control. The quotes are both delivered to their respective true loves when at each point of the film a happily ever after doesn't seem to be in the cards.  

Hope and bitterness both carry transformative powers.  The concept of hope in the line "the life you learn with, and the life you live with" says to me, yes life is pain, but much like pain you endure in a fire swamp you can learn from that pain.  Thinking that life is only pain can create a bitterness that is hard to overcome.  I am glad  that the 4 characters depicted in these scenes found their happy endings.  When I think of Redford and Reiner and all the stories they told through their acting and directing, it makes me sad that their lives have ended (especially in the tragic way Reiner's ended ) but glad that I am still learning about life through their work.