Please send positive thoughts

I'm asking for focused vibes tonight. Send brainwaves, think positively, pray if you must. But please, however you do it share positive energy on behalf of the Solar Impulse, a totally solar powered aircraft that has just begun the longest (trans-Pacific) leg of its round the world journey.

We simply must move away from our dependence on fossil fuels and coal. This incredible engineering feat helps us move forward in terms of bringing efficient solar power within reach. And the incredible courage of the pilots - they fly one at a time which means one of them is tackling this five day leg solo - dwarfs in comparison many of the acts that people these days call heroic.

This marriage of elegant design and gut wrenching courage deserves our attention. Now, start thinking!

Thanks, Pals!

Bigots and bigots

As I type this, a group of ‘Americans’ are gathering outside a Phoenix mosque. They have come there for Mohammed Cartoon 2015.

These people are gathering to take a poke at the Muslim community, to make the point that their free speech rights include drawing cartoons of whomever they like. Some of them are armed, since they say they are there celebrating and enforcing their rights under both the First and Second Amendments.

Yeah, sure they are.

And the fact that the organizer is frequently seen wearing a tee shirt emblazoned with “F--- Islam” does not mean he’s trying to provoke a reaction, right?

On how many levels does a yahoo have to be wrong before we can just toss him in a padded bin?

I’m not comfortable finding myself in the position of defending any religion, much less one that subjugates women as does traditional Islam. Father of daughters, remember? I consider religion in all its forms and traditions to be collectively a great evil. But who made me the King of Right?

So, I respect people’s right to believe whatever they want to, so long as they keep it out of my face. I don’t like ISIS or the Tea Party or the Roman Curia. But I would never go to the Vatican and deface the Sistine Chapel. And neither would I join the ‘protesters’ in Phoenix.

These cowards are going to stir up caca but it won’t land on them. It won’t be the worshipers of that mosque who retaliate and the retaliation won’t be taken out on the pistol packin’ yahoos who are drawing their cartoons and shooting off their mouths this evening.

Rest assured there will be retribution. And when the yahoos who incited it are crying their crocodile tears, I hope we all remember why they held this little gathering. It’s not to exercise their rights under the constitution, not really. It’s because they hate Islam and they want to stir something up.

The terrorists who will retaliate are responsible for the havoc they will wreak. But so are the bigoted a-holes gathering this night. I hope they don’t wave American flags. They don’t represent any of us except the tiny, horrifying minority who look forward to religious war. Bigots inciting bigots. And innocents will pay the price. Lovely.

They’re just stirring up hate. And they know it. They can’t be stupid enough not to understand the probable reaction. They just can’t be that stupid – they’re still breathing.

Spring evening

I had a hard night last night. Woke up every hour or so. Heartburn. Repeated fluid adjustment events. It was one of those nights when sleep just does not seem to play a major part. And wouldn’t you know it – this was the day I needed to be up at five a.m. because of a work commitment.

The work was fun and interesting, as it frequently is but still it was, you know, work. So by the time I got home I was plenty tired. Brain dead and plumb wore out, as they say.

I came in and hello’d Mary. Let the dogs out the back door and followed them out. And the whole day changed.

The back yard was freshly mowed and as green as only recent spring rains can make it. The air was cool. Birds chattered their dissatisfaction at my presence and Zoey the Small and Annoying did her dancing feints and retreats until I threw her toy for her a couple times. Odin the Large and Lazy sprawled on the grass in validation of his name.

Mary ordered pizza so we didn’t have to cook, I’m spending some time writing (duh!) and we’ll watch Reese Witherspoon in Wild before I go to bed early and, one hopes, slumber through until my alarm heralds a new cycle.

Meanwhile, life is good. I truly love evenings like this.

Don

I met a guy named Don the other night. I had come to Orlando on a turnaround trip so I could see Daughter One’s show in the Fringe Festival. The show was great and One did a killer job of selling her big song. The girl has an incredible talent for making an audience live the lyric. And of course, she has the pipes I always wished I’d had.

It has been a great trip and a wonderful visit but as you might surmise from the title, not what this missive’s about.

I was sitting outside at a table drinking my diet drink while I waited for the house to open and struck up a conversation with another greyhair who was there by himself. Turns out that Don has attended a lot of the Fringe Festival events over the years so he was a great source of stories and information. Eventually we got around to talk about families, as geezers are wont to do. Both of us have grown children who are doing well defining their own lives.

Don has been there and done that. World travel, several careers, raised children and made lifelong friends. Interesting stuff. The book I’d brought with me to pass the time until the venue opened (One and I carpooled so I was there quite early) remained closed. Much more interesting chatting with my new friend.

He really got to me when he started talking about his wife, Dorothy. She is ill and fading and he doesn’t know how long she has. His eyes got misty when he shared that bit of information.

They have travelled the country and the world, building and enjoying lives together. So when she began to decline and the doctors gently suggested a long term care facility, Don said no way. They sold their house and moved together into senior housing and he became her primary caregiver. Marriage is a pact that’s not broken by illness. But I don’t think that’s why Don devotes most of his time 24/7 to their partnership.

I asked him if he had seen any of the other Fringe shows this year and it turns out this was the first night out he’d taken in three weeks. And he kept looking at his watch. And finding reasons to mention Dorothy.

You know, we talked about lots of things but every few minutes, no matter the current topic the conversation somehow circled back to Dorothy. Things she’d said, goofy things she’d done on this vacation or that. Times they’d spent together. The way she’d looked one special night, what a great mom she’d been. He dominated the conversation in the way that only a lonely guy can do, a guy who sees things slipping away and needs someone his age to just sit and listen.

That was okay with me.

Don left pretty much as soon as the show ended. Back to Dorothy.

This summer

It’s almost here. Summer.

Usually a period of time characterized by too much heat in our un-air conditioned manse, drudgery in the yards to keep it presentable, primarily for the dogs. And of course, primarily in spite of the dogs. I‘m not a warm weather person, never have been. So I suppose my generalized distaste for most things summery is simply a matter of druthers. Certainly I don’t expect others to share my preference for a nice blustery fall day or driving rain outside whilst I’m reading inside.

I have to admit to a number of positive aspects to the approaching dry season. My brother and his wife usually visit and we get in some paddling. We get to see one or both of the Daughters, One and / or Two. And grilling our dinner is nice. Throwing toys for the dogs where no lamps will be damaged.

So I guess you could say that I usually view summer as a mixed bag.

But not this year. This year it shall have been glorious, as the King might say.

In a couple of days I’m off for a quick turnaround trip to see One’s dinner theatre show, which has me on pins and needles. Can’t wait!

Then we go to Boston for Two’s college graduation. Followed by two (count ‘em – two!) cross country drives with Two and a return trip with Mary.

Yup, it’s gonna be a good summer.

As summers go.

Recuperation

As many of you know, Mary is recovering from surgery to both feet.  She’s what we think of as a trouper when it comes to surgery. Even so, with healing wounds on both feet, she hasn’t been doing much ballroom dancing the last week, know what I mean?

So, we’ve done a lot of sitting around in the last week.  Okay, so she has been sitting and I’ve been fetching and toting and that’s how it should be when one of us is ailing. I’ve really been enjoying the quiet time together. We’ve watched the tube, read, worked on our individual projects and talked.

We’re coming to a very big crossroads this summer. I’ll get a lot of daughter time and I’m looking forward to that. But with Two graduating and going off to live in yet another distant city and One settling in with both a full time job and her entertaining gigs, they’re really moving down their life paths. And at some point, they’ll each disappear around a bend.

I’ve been worried about that. I have my work and my writing and Mary has her work and her hobbies but I worried about what the third person in the room – the ‘us’ person – would do once we truly become empty nesters.

This week has gone a long way to relieving my fears. I get to go see One’s show in a couple weeks, then we’ll all of us meet for Two’s graduation, then Two and I will do our father-daughter road trip and in August I’ll drive with her to her new city and Mary and I will drive back together. And then here we’ll be, alone together.

And that’s okay. Way okay.

I like old stuff

I decided this morning to convert old 8mm video cassettes to digital with my old confuser whilst I worked on Da Book with my new(er) confuser. So I got out the cables and the old video recorder and some tapes, hooked everything up and got to multi-tasking.
Or actually, not.

Couldn’t get the conversion program to work. Probably too old. Me or the program or both. But Daughters One and also Two gifted the converter to me and it’s not their fault I took my own sweet time getting around to trying to use it, so I’m not giving up on it yet.

Mary will try loading it on her confuser and if that doesn’t work, we’ll have Two take a look when she comes home for the summer. I hate discarding a product simply because I let its shelf life run out. And it may well be that I’m just not competent at using the durn thing and Two will figger it out right sprightly. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, it was a trip pulling out the old camcorder. I had forgotten what a joy it was to use. Well, except maybe for the fact that rewinding seems to take forever in the context of today’s point-and-click world. On this old relic, every button is clearly labelled, indicating what it does in terms even I can understand. And there is a discreet button for – wait for it! – each and every function! I can actually operate the thing without accidentally deleting or corrupting anything because I didn’t understand where I was in multi-function land!

I know tape is old speak and I admit that my intent is to produce a non-tape copy of our entire photo / video family history for each Daughter and another for Mary and me. I will create them on Terrabyte drives that fit in one’s pocket. So I’m not entirely bent on stepping back into Old Techville.

The camcorder will end up donated and probably sooner rather than later. But I have to admit I’ll miss its straightforward utility. Lots of things seem to be going that way.

Sad. And inevitable.

The Ball of Twine Tour

In the year after the 9/11 attacks, Mary and I loaded the car with Daughters One and also Two and headed out on what for us would prove to be an epic adventure. With a carefully packed van and printouts of directions to myriad points of interest in each of the states through which we intended to pass, off we went.

In order to facilitate communication with family and friends during our grand tour, we set up a web site called The Ball of Twine Tour (okay, so One’s twelve year old friend set up the site after I failed utterly and completely to understand how to do so – what of it?). The name arose from the fact that I had researched the world’s largest ball of twine and threatened Mary with the prospect of visiting all three locations that claimed the title (the real one is in Cawker City KS and Darwin, MN are the real thing, if you care to know, while Branson, MO is a pretender).

We didn’t actually visit the twine balls on that trip, although One and I did finally visit the one in Cawker City during a later trip. But the BallofTwineTour moniker stuck and we really enjoyed posting pics and comments to the site for the enjoyment and edification of our homebound correspondents.

Jump forward to yesterday. We had finally decided to dump the site and stop paying $12.95 for its maintenance. So after downloading and printing out each of the web pages for posterity, we arranged to drop the site and the contract.

Or so we thought.

I will refrain from subjecting you to a recounting of the entire sordid process we have gone through on this. Suffice to say that in spite of our multiple requests that the site be taken down, all Yahoo did was kill the functionality while continuing to bill us.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

1)      A family website can be a really fun thing that means a lot to each and all of us, but…

2)      Yahoo is not the place to host a website and not a company with which we’ll ever do bidness again.