the migratory habits of butterflies sometimes go awry

Thinking Out Loud

When you're a kid, you spend most of your time peering into the future, mostly because there's not much past to recall.  When you get really old, a lot of your time is spent looking  back, remembering what was because what's much too near at hand is often nothing we want to contemplate too deeply.  It catches us all, eventually,  and I think by then we  have sorted out what memories we will keep for comfort food, and which we will ignore, deny, or forget entirely.

But somewhere in the middle I think a lot of us begin to look back at what our childhood was like, and our parents, relatives, and friends,  and wonder how much of that shaped us directly, gave us a gentle shove in a particular direction, seemed to have no influence at all--or became something that we learned to work around or tunnel away from, in order to survive. 

Many people spend a lot of time denying the past,  pretending it doesnt matter, when in fact it's all we have of who we were.  How we reacted to it, from the inside, often has a great influence over the rest of our lives.   And equally interesting,  as we mature,  our point of view changes--we become, often, more dispassionate about things, and now and then have some pretty heavy insights into not what our parents did to  or for or about us,  but why.

The why is the key.  And denying that childhood, that base we all stand on,  is denying that we ever had one, sort of.  And sometimes it says, if it didnt matter, then I don't, either.  I think it's the key to everything, to us, and to how we deal with our own kids and grandkids.  It matters, if only to us.

I love new appliance day

My old  washer died two weeks ago, or rather it began to breathe funny, and make a clickclickclick sound around the agitator.  So I did my famous appliance hunt, which mostly means walk in, find the cheapest one, and work my way up from there to the one I really want.
Two days ago I went back and the new one wagged its little stubby tail and looked as wan-but-expectant as any puppy in a pet store--the clerk knew, I could see him approaching from one side.  Can I help you, he asked.(sly devil, he already knew I was hooked). Why yes, I answered, pointing.  That one. And it was. 

Of Mice and Men and Microsoft

We've been running Avast (the cheap guy version) anti-virus for several  years, since Norton got so big it couldnt fit through the doors.  Worked well,  but now they want us to download the new spiffy version, 5.0.   I tried it and it just about ate my computer.  No thanks, I said.  so for the last few months they've been hitting me with reminders, daily, much the way Norton did. Nag, nag, nag. 
My cynical elf suggests that the free version is deliberately made buggy, and the pay to use version runs very well indeed.  But I don't want to invest 29 bucks to find out for sure.

So.  The mister suggested I get, heaven help us, MSN.  The downside is, you have to accept alllllll the security downloads Ive been avoiding for the past three years.  All of'em.  If you refuse the honor, they won't let you run MSN Anti virus stuff.  If you decide to let 'em in,  and then delete, everyone of them requires a restart.  They gotcha.  No one wants to restart their computer 200 times in a day.

sulk.

119K miles later...

Today it goes to Honda heaven. Its been sitting in the back field (the limbo for dead cars, trucks, and assorted motorized things) for 8 years, and we are finally parting with it.  Found some  pennies in there on the dash, that had cupped apparently from the heat over the years.  They look a bit like tiddly winks now.

Gonna miss it, in a strange way, but mostly for what it was, not for what it is now, which is a hunk o junk full of acorns and mouse nests...

Of the Written Word

added in a new member to the "Written Word" list,
http://www.bachelorsdegree.org/2010/11/11/50-best-poetry-books-for-kids/

which while being a bit ad-heavy for my taste does a really nice job with the list, enumerating the strengths of each book on the list itself.  So it's not just a rip and read group of titles.  Some of them I remember fondly, some I had forgotten about, and some make me wish I had a grandchild to read them to.