Quote of the day

I've noticed other folks do these little dealies from time to time, so I thought I'd don my 'go with the crowd' hat and do one myself.

"Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living"

Mother Jones

Tough lady. Admirable. Check her out.

Thoughts?

Blaze!

I am now the proud owner of a Logitech Marble Mouse. I know: sounds like a Disney toy, but it's not! What it is, is a trackball. I've never used one before (always been a Mouse-man) and it is taking some getting used to, but I think I may become a convert.
The cursor moves over the screen with grace and speed unseen prior to installation and my wrist isn't hurting anymore (although, in fairness, it wasn't hurting too much to begin with). I'm discovering all the things I could do with the wheel mouse are still mostly do-able with the trackball, although some (Open link in new tab) take a little getting used to. With the Wheel mouse, I had only to click on the wheel to open a website in a different tab. With the Marble Mouse, I must simultaneously click the two side buttons to do the job. And there was no documentation to tell me how to do this: I discovered it on my own. I must remember to notify the Logitech tech people about this.
;-)
Another interesting experience is scrolling. With the Wheel Mouse, I could hold down the left mouse button and use the wheel for scrolling wherever I wanted on a web page. I liked that. Can't really do that with the Marble Mouse, but BUT BUT universal scroll actually works beautifully with the Marble Mouse (it did not work so well with the Wheel Mouse). It does take some getting used to. Marble Mouse also is much more quiet than Wheel Mouse was.

Also, I installed 2 more gigabytes of Random Access Memory today. That makes a total of 4 GB (all my machine will allow) and things do seem to zzzzip right along where they just moved quickly before. Honestly, I can't tell much difference, but I like to think that the machine is now well oiled indeed. I just hope Windows (XP Home) is using it all to its best advantage. Shane or Ludie, if you're reading this, maybe you could give me some idea as to how to determine if that is so.

Busy week: Also received a banjo that I won on eBay. It's beautiful and has a great tone. I used to play fairly well (I know there are some who find that statement somewhat oxymoronic and I don't care), but one fine day about 12 years ago, I loaned my banjo to a painter (house, not portrait) named Bucky.

This was not wise. No. Not at all wise.

So after a recent revival of my guitar playing skills (also dormant for a long while), I began to pine for my long lost banjo. And I got one! It's a Washburn model B9 and it sounds great! My son hates it. Too loud for him. Ah well, he will learn...

Someday I'll do a post about music and our on-again, off-again love affair and tell you about my guitar collection.

Enough miscellaneousness for now.

Pax,
Nelson

He did what?!

Patience is a relative term, especially when it comes to relatives. What works for some, may not be enough for others.

For the longest kind of time, I felt it was my duty to exhibit patience when dealing with my father. Although we began to get along better in his latter years, he always knew how to push my buttons. We clashed on a very basic level and I'm still not sure why. We had a rocky relationship from a (my) very early age which carried on into adulthood. I found the best way to deal with him was avoidance. I know that sounds horrible but it is true and it was effective. So that was the way I chose to deal with my father for most of the time. I think this may have suited him as well, although I do know he loved me, too. It's just that when we got in the same room together, more often than not, tempers would flair and we'd each get angry and... You get the idea. We lived in the same city and my out of town sister saw him probably more often than I did. Please don't miss understand: I loved my father and I still love his memory. There were many good memories I have from growing up and I'm starting to remember more of them. That's a good thing. I wish he was still here to talk things over with. I miss him terribly still: even after more than a year. I expect I will always miss him and my mother (she died in 2001).

Patience. Was it a good strategy in my Dad's case? I think so. It allowed us to be civil and share some good times in his later life.

Now I find my stores of patience drawn upon once again: with my son. He is three and will hopefully be four someday. Until you have experienced it firsthand, there is no way to describe the emotional turmoil that a three year old can generate. Suffice it to say, it's awesome at times. He can go from a perfectly affable, happy little boy to full blown temper tantrum demon (also an awesome sight at times) in the blink of an eye. Similarly, he can go back to his own sweet self almost as fast, sometimes. It is frikkin' amazing.

He's young and is still trying out emotions to see how they feel (and how they might benefit him). It's what he should be doing.

We (His Mommy and I) both dislike the whiny periods. Enough said on that.

I am keenly aware of how my relationship with my father affected me and my life. I'm in therapy once a week partly because of it. I do NOT want my relationship with my son to be the same and I'm striving to not become my own father. I'm hoping that since I'm aware of the potential, I can guide us in a different direction. Maybe our path will not be so rocky. I pray that will be so.

"I swear there ain't no heaven and I pray there ain't no hell.
But I'll never know by livin', only my dyin' will tell."
Blood Sweat and Tears 'And When I Die'

That opens a whole other can of worms. Maybe in a later post, someday, I'll get into that question. Not today, however.

I'll leave you with one more quotation from that song:
"And when I die, and when I'm gone
there'll be, one child born, in this world
to carry on, to carry on."

Thoughts?

Pax,
Nelson