For the past week I've been tied up helping to care for my dad who had surgery a couple of weeks ago on his leg to restore circulation and heal an infection in his foot.  The operation went very well, he was steadily improving and then over the weekend he spiked a fever, had chest pain and difficulty breathing. So off he went in the ambulance for a check over at the local hospital (not the one in which he'd had the surgery).

Read more...

It has occurred to me that we can describe the various phases of our adult lives alphabetically. In our 20's we Accelerate, We enbark on careers, we marry, have kids, and hurry into adulthood as quickly as possible. Time is wasting, and we want to do it ALL. In our 30's we seek Balance: juggling kids, jobs, bills, activities. In our 40's we Challenge: with age comes wisdom (for most of us, hopefully) and we take stock, analyze what we're doing and whether it's working, whether it's where we want to be and what we want in life. We challenge the pace that we've been keeping for the last twenty years. Then comes the 50's with De-clutter, De-stress, and Downsize, or else we will De-press and that's no fun. We know the clock of life is ticking and we don't have time or energy to do half the stuff we used to do, so we start to prioritize. And I haven't hit my 60's yet, what will that bring that begins with E? I'm guessing maybe Expression, because my friends in their 60's all have a lot of wisdom they want to share, experience to pass on to the younger ones who, sadly, don't have (or take) the time to slow down and listen to learn from them.

With so much going on in the world today you would think it would be a real opportunity for the journalists of the world (or at least the US where there is still freedom of the press, but who knows for how long...). But it doesn't take too much flipping of the channels to realize that the news has become milk: homogenized and pasteurized. Everyone is reporting the same news stories and in many cases, almost with the same words (or at least the same catch phrases.  I am so sick of hearing "at the end of the day..." and hearing about the "heartbreaking photos of wildlife" impacted by the gulf oil disaster" --- people, you have college degrees!  I assume you have a reasonable command of the English language to be able to use some different descriptive terms!).

Read more...

Is it just my imagination, or has spam greatly increased lately? I browse my junk mail folder periodically to make sure it hasn't grabbed an email that wasn't junk (and I have to give Windows Vista credit, they have become really good at filtering out the junk). There were 417 in the last 24 hours!)

Read more...