banquet, computers, weather

A Late Quicky

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This will be a quick post since I am struggling to avoid strangling a computer that runs everything OS fine except for Windows XP. And then it just kicks up its heels and dies. Actually I suspect it is more the SATA disk controller than anything else. XP is old enough not to have deep grained support for SATA so it may be time to say goodbye to XP forever and start running one of my favorite Linux distributions on it.

Tomorrow evening is the annual city employee appreciation banquet. It’s always interesting. Municipal employees tend to be somewhat clique driven by department. I.e. the sanitation people don’t hang with the street people who don’t hang with the water treatment people who … So you end up with a lot of smaller groups that sort of ignore each other. And of course the temporary blips on the radar like the city council members are usually given a bit of a cold shoulder as well. (I suspect more from awe than from dislike. Just kidding!) It’s interesting because we used to give awards and service pins and associated spiels, etc. The employees finally stood up and admitted they’d much rather just have a a good supper with casual dress and no hot air from the likes of me. So that is what we have done for the past several years and it really seems to work better and be considerably less boring.

It was close to 70 again today, so Molly and I took our walk later in the day to enjoy the twilight. Sometime in the next few days it is going to turn cold again. The forecast for Tuesday has a high of 40 and possible snow and rain. Of course that means believing the weather people are going to get it right; here in Colorado that is a rare occurrence. When L and I used lived in LA, we always joked about how it paid to be a weather person in an area where you could see all the weather coming at you from huge distances and the only question was sunny or real sunny. (It all came in from the Pacific Ocean with no land features to change it for hundreds of miles as it rolled in.) Made them look like paragons of accuracy. You don’t get the same luxury when there are mountains and huge land masses that heat and cool to drive the vertical circulation.

Back to the recalcitrant computer. It was the last of the machines here running a Microsoft OS natively, but that may be over soon. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.

friday high five

Five Ordinary …

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Time once again for

Five Ordinary People From This Week I Admire
  • The 90 year old gentleman that was visiting at the nursing home. He just came to visit since it meant so much to his late wife when she was there when people came to visit. From what the staff said, he visits at least once a week and asks who hasn’t had visitors to make sure he visits them. And he has been doing it for years now. (And a spry gent he was, too. He still drives truck to Omaha (~400 miles) and back at least twice a week because, as he put it, “… sitting in the house doing nothing would kill me.”)
  • The young mother with a little one in a stroller and a toddler in hand who stopped to ask the elderly gentleman carrying a bag of groceries as he wobbled down the sidewalk if he needed a hand. As busy as she was, she still thought of the needs of others and offered to help.
  • The young man who pushed and talked to his young brother on the swing set for the entire two hours I was walking in the park. From the bits of conversation I overheard, he was home on leave after boot camp and had missed his little brother and vice verse.
  • The squirrel that likes to sit in front of the parlor window at the nursing home and entertain one and all with his (or her) amusing antics. Much better entertainment than TV. (Technically not a person, but an honorary one for the nonce.)
  • The lady of indeterminate age who was trying desperately to voice command train her Basset Hound in the park. (Our previous dog was a Basset and they are notorious for not listening.) This one didn’t listen or obey, but the lady remained calm and was so obviously loving to her dog that you couldn’t help but root for her. Maybe she’ll get lucky some year.

Time to get back to the ailing computer that is trying to give up the ghost tonight. I hope it will survive!

quickie

Thursday Quickie

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I spend a lot of time here talking about our dog Molly. In the interest of giving equal time to others, I present the cat without a hat:

In other news, Mom gets to come home from the nursing home on Tuesday. She was pretty stoked about the news.

writer's challenge

I Used To Think …

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I used to think ….

that growing older was mostly experiencing things in the same way as when I was younger, but just choosing a different balance of things to experience. That meant it wasn’t necessary to savor the complete sensory fullness of each and every moment because it could and would happen again in the future. Now in late middle age, I have come to realize that growing older involves so much more than simple choice of what to experience in what proportion. It involves a complete change in how our senses react and are interpreted internally. And that has immense consequences for the whole idea of the repeatability of experience.

It seems that our very senses change in the way they respond to the world around us as we age. Some sights are not as vivid as they once were whereas others trigger new and powerful emotions by association with the past. Sounds have new and different timbres as the frequency response of our ears changes; music we once thought could not be improved upon now sounds so-so; music that we once deemed merely good now sounds great. The sensitivity of touch changes so that textures take on whole new meanings. A baby’s skin still feels soft, but in a different way than it did in our youth. And the callouses that time and use have created on our fingers means that smooth is a different experience now than it was in younger days. In some ways aging leads to a mutability of experience much akin to the LSD trips popular in our youth.

So now I think that growing older consists of experiencing the world in new and different ways, even if it is the same objective experience from my younger years. And that has consequences in how I view and interact with the world and my possible experiences of it, both in the future and now in the present. It makes me realize there will never be another moment just like the current one in my experience. That in turn means that the current moment is important to savor in all it’s fullness. There will never be another one just like it in my life because even if the same conditions were to recur, my sensory intrepretation of the experience will be at a minimum slightly different. That also implies one should not let life get in the way of fully experiencing all that happens. Now matter how dark or dim the present and future may seem, each experience should be enjoyed fully in the now; there will never be another like it.

That is what I used to think and what I now think. What do you think?

This is a response to Mama Kat’s writers challenge for this week. Click on over and join in.

mom, weather

Short Report Tuesday

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The temperature reached above 80 degrees here today, well above normal for this time of year. Everyone just keeps hoping we get some moisture. This has been an extremely dry and warm winter, making it hard when we don’t get snow and it is warm enough that the mountains melt out early. That means that all the farmers around here will be hurting unless we get some rain timed just right and in sufficient amounts. Average annual precipitation here is less than 14 inches a year with half of it coming in the form of winter snow. Needless to say, this winter is at less than 0.5 inch. A worryingly dry year.

Taking advantage of the warm weather, Molly and I hit the park for our daily miles. (Molly was willing to join me today since the period of mourning L leaving was over at about noon when the squirrels got frisky.) I couldn’t believe the number of young mothers and kids at the playground. A literal explosion out of the house and into the park with the warmer weather. Another month or so and the young ladies from the college will be out sunbathing in the parks. That is always an interesting time of the year since it serves to preview what the prevailing swimsuit styles will be this summer at the city pool. Somehow, the older one gets, the less enthusing following swimsuit fashion becomes. It’s not like I spend a lot of time at the pool ogling like a slobbering teenage boy anymore. Besides, back then L was a lifeguard so there was something of interest for me to ogle!

Mom continues to do well and may be able to return home by the weekend depending on the therapists evaluation of the readiness of her house. She is starting to get antsy to be home. She got the surgical dressing changed and saw the orthopedic surgeon today. So it was a busy day for her, going over to the doctor’s office and then having physical therapy. When I got over to the nursing home a bit after 5pm, she and a few friends were sitting outside, relaxing and visiting in the late day sun.  She will still be in a wheel chair and unable to put any weight at all on her leg for at least another 6 weeks, but at least she will be at home. That will make her happy.

Other than that, not a lot to report today. Time to get some real work done so I can get ready to mosey down to the radio station for the weekly show in the morning. 6am comes early, but at least it is light out since the spring to daylight savings time.

Things Done Right