This 'n That Thursdays: For Your Viewing Pleasure

If you are looking for a great way to waste a little time enjoy a spot of entertainment, I have a couple of suggestions for you.  First up is the YouTube series Liziqi Channel, which follows the life of a lovely, fragile-looking but strong young Chinese woman named Li Ziqi who runs her family farm pretty much by herself, with a little help from her grandmother.  This woman does everything by hand (no mechanized devices and rarely work animals involved).  She grows, harvests, prepares, and cleans up her field crops, and somehow manages to make it all look wonderful in her films.  Beautiful landscape and nature scenes plus serene music are added to footage of her everyday farm work, which appears deceptively easy but in reality must be challenging if not downright grueling at times.  When you watch these short (about 5-10 minutes long) films you will be enchanted, but also grateful for the relative life of ease that most of us lead.

From Twitter

My second suggestion is the new website from Gary Larson, the cartoonist who was wildly popular a few decades ago (OMG, has it really been that long?).  He produced quite a few books of The Far Side cartoon series collections back in the day (most of which my husband and I own), but stopped drawing them for quite a while before returning with this website.  Now he publishes five cartoons a day Monday through Friday, plus two a day on the weekends, so you can look forward to a good laugh every day!  While the cartoons are not new, it has been a while since most of them were first published, so it is nice to see them again (and Larson has said that he may just add a few brand new ones upon occasion!).

Should you feel the need for a short break from your own daily life, visit these two sites for a brief visit to the simple rural existence of a hard-working young Chinese farmer and the amusingly bizarre world of a gifted cartoonist's imagination!