Living In the World, Not on It

I am often mystified by the penchant that people - especially women - have for wigging out about aging. I have never been that way. I did not get upset over age 25 (I've seen  this happen, over turning a whole 25 - that is nothing! You are still a baby at that age! But it happens. It happens to some at 30 but again, I couldn't figure this out if I tried. 35 seems to not generate too much notice, strangely - if you are going to have a canary at age 25 and 30, why leave out 35? Or is it denial, because now your friends are all joking about the Big 4-0 looming in sight. When my mother was approaching  40 she was coming unglued. I never could figure it out. Her date of birth is 9 January 1941. She never did the weird anti-aging thing her mother did (subtracted two years from her birth certificate - big deal. If you want to hide your real age, take off five or ten years, not two ) or what my father's mother did - she was "39 and holding" her whole life. I remember ...

I know, I know, how much music do I need to be happy? All of it! Every note, every bar, every sung word. Well, no, that is not accurate, either. There is plenty of music I intensely dislike. But not much of it. Soundtracks, rock, bagpipes, Scottish music, Irish music, hard rock, punk, alternative, some mild rap (very little, admittedly, but I do very much enjoy Wonderful Tonight (Featuring Lateef) by Fatboy Slim), one country song, The Devil Came Down to Georgia, classical, some opera, Big Band (40s music), 50s music, 60s music, NO disco - absolutely not, 80s, 90s, most recent music, but no bubble-gum pop. This includes Britney Spears, Lady GaGa, a whole host of unsavory music makers that really - it turns out - aren't making music! That's right. Think you are listening to a wondrous new artist with the posed moves and a whole huge backup group? The answer is not a unanimous yes any longer. Thanks to a heinous device called Auto-tune, you too can sound like a rock star...

This is NOT to malign Luis' keeping - such as it was - of the house when I went into Mo'town over Christmas. It looked like London after the Luftwafa came and laid waste to it. No, this time, although the duration was almost three times as long in the St. Clare's hospital, he really did not let it get as totally out of control as it had gotten the last time. When I'd asked him on the way home how it looked it, he said, "It's terrible - just awful." No, not his idea of a joke. Luis sometimes can be a momentarily immature little pain in the ass (it happens to the best of us - I won't grace you with MY failings but that is one bloody long list, let me tell you); but most of the time, like Spock, his logic is not in abeyance when it comes to certain things. He knows the exacting manner in which I prefer - operative word is  prefer  because I cannot always manage it once it reaches critical mass - to acknowledge the house as being clean. Well and t...

How much has music changed in my 45 years of living (46 years of living in late January when I have my 45th birthday)? The changes in the entertainment industry are incredible and almost with equal power to medical changes. I had read once that the medical community's advancements were the spearheading forces that drove all other areas of improvement: the entertainment community got their improvement from medical miracles. Now those miracles in other areas are almost completely driven by the entertainment industry. So let's take a little trip from 26 January 1968 to today (9 January 2013 - you would not think much'd change between now and 26 January of this year but the CES Convention in Las Vegas which is either the successor to ComDex, a positively enormous computer technology convention that used to run in November (well, it did when the five of us l=went there in 1993 for fun. ComDex has disappeared but Luis and weren't sure if CES was its new incarnation o...

Uh-huh, you read that right. And no, I'm not on vacation in the Sahara or even out of my house in northern New Jersey. And we'd never get anything that  freaky here. If anything, we have an ice storm suspected to be visiting on Thursday evening. Wahoo. No, I'm here, with the fireplace blazing, wearing a layer of heavy stuff and wrapped in a blanket shivering my ass off - at least some of it, I hope - and stuffed with aspirin, not my usual poison. But with the flu and the body temp of 102* [I have not yet figured out how to put in diacritic characters in here as yet], how much would I do besides shiver one moment then roast the next; yikes. And the aspirin has thus far proved ineffective. I usually wait for the first three days to elapse before medicating in any fashion, but this is a high enough fever to dispense with hoping my body will flush it out. I caved this morning. I'm achey and have pain most if not all day, so a fever makes every waking moment a slice...

I love the Old Farmer's Almanac: Farmer's Calendar In many ways, plowing snow is hard work.The hours are unpredictable, and breakdowns or getting stuck are possibilities. Still, I can't think of a better way to to enjoy midwinter's night. The cold is bone-chilling and the snow is mounting up at the rate of two inches per hour, but I'm warm and secure in the cab of my plow truck. I usually wait until the storm is over so that I have to plow my customers only once, which saves them money, but this storm is a blockbuster and I'm afraid that if I war, my pickup won't be able to handle the heavy, wet snow. Except for the occasional plow truck that I meet on the road, I have this wonderful world of white to myself. The night is peaceful and beautiful. I'm mesmerized by the reflection of my rotating yellow beacon on the fast-falling flakes and by the hypnotic, rhythmic slapping of the wiper blades. Snow-laden tree branches bend over the road, forming ...