Tag: Changes

Mundaz Wandering Thoughts

Sort of funny how we use the word charge and how its meanings has shifted.

We used to say things like, “Then he charged at me,” or, “That animal charged me.”

More often for a while, we heard charge in, “He was charged with the crime of soliciting,” or “He was charged with drunk driving.”

Later, charging things via credit cards were in vogue, such as, “I’m going to charge it for now, and then I’ll pay it off later.”

Now we say, “I didn’t charge my phone and now it’s almost dead. I have to find a charger.” Imagine hearing that forty years ago, if you’ve been alive that long. What were you charging in 1985?

Of course, imagine back in 1970 if someone asked you, “Do you have a laptop?” You’d think they were crazy, asking such a question.

C’est la vie.

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Fridaz Wandering Thoughts

Mom and sis are coping and adjusting, per usual. Mom is an interesting case. When she’s doing well, she’s happy on her own. When she’s doing poorly, she gets crabby and wants visitors. But her crabbiness repels people, so they stay away. Not a good dynamic.

So many things must be tended for Mom. The emptying and cleaning of her house, of course, and then putting it on the market. Those are expected, straightforward, but work. The matters causing the most headaches and frustrations are these modern matters. Changing phone plans because Mom’s phone was on Frank’s plan. Canceling her internet and cable. Those things were done online, through passwords and account numbers and usernames and things like that. Mom has it written down but it’s all been changed so many times because they changed systems or the passwords expired, or it didn’t work for God knows why, as Mom would say.

Then there are the prescription drugs. Sam’s Club is Mom’s pharmacy. Frank was her delivery system. Now sis is her delivery system, but sis doesn’t have the time to make regular runs like Frank did. These things can be delivered but the co-pay must be paid for. Does Mom have a credit card on file? Yes, she does, she says, no, you don’t, the pharmacy replies. Back and forth they go, driving sis insane.

It all makes me think. Mom is but twenty years older than me, and the way my health is trending…LOL. I think, I must be better prepared. Sure, passwords are written down and secured but they must be found by whoever is taking care of me at that point.

Maybe it’ll be AI or a bot assisting me by that point. A Medibot. Watching AI and bots in action at this stage, though, I’m not reassured. Maybe, maybe, they’ll have it worked out in twenty years.

Time will tell. Always does, doesn’t it?

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Satyrdaz Wandering Thoughts

The honeymoon is over.

Sis is angry with Mom. Mom is angry with her. They are, as they have done for decades, growling at one another. Accusations sometimes come out about what’s going on. Sis thinks Mom is being obstinate. Mom thinks sis is being mean.

Growing experiences from the new living arrangements are certainly expected. Both are intelligent and know this. As with so many things, there are components of making these adjustments. It’s one thing to intellectually know something, yet something else to intellectually understand and accept it, and still requires some emotional and physical facets to adjust to make it all work. It’ll take time. Patience and anger will rise and fall like waves beating on the shore. The adjustments will be found.

I hope.

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Thirstaz Wandering Thoughts

My thoughts are wandering as I sit in the Pittsburgh Airport, looking out at the rain, eavesdropping on others’ conversations. Most of my focus keeps shifting to Mom’s paperwork. Her paperwork is just like our paperwork.

Pulling out every bill from 1998 on, I laugh. Notes are on sheets of paper and bills. Who was spoken to, time and date, result. Most simply end like that. No further updates. There are insurance and banking papers, visits to hospitals, doctors, and specialists, and the ever-present pile of warranties.

We are the same back home. For the last how many decades, paperwork was needed for ‘just in case’ reference. Bills and payment records could go wrong, and it was incumbent on us to prove what we did. Even then, that sometimes isn’t enough and required we the customer to scale the corporate ladder past the drones and managerial kings and queens until a person was reached who could overrule the bureaucracy.

The paperwork at Mom’s has some interesting personal choices. Lot of paper clippings for things done by her children back in 1970 through 2010. Yellowed, brittle clippings of newspaper death notices for family members and friends. Crisp sheets of white papers in file folders with emails from family printed out. Things from me from my last days in the military in 1995. Travel information for visits in 1998, 2005, etc.

Mom is now battling Verizon. We’ve all been involved in this fight. It’s classic enshittification. Gotta sign in to do anything with them. Calling them? Hahahahaha. What a joker you are. Should be a stand up with your own HBO or Netflix comedy special. Calling them provided us with a window when it would be okay to call them. Mom had it down to fifteen minutes and counted it down to one, phone in hand, doing little else. The appointed minute arrived. Mom moved her hand. “Oops.” Gone! Her new wait time to reach them was eight hours later.

Meanwhile, we parsed Mom’s crazy notes for userIDs and passwords. Several were found for Verizon. None worked. One sister then went through the ‘Forgot Password’ route and tried to change the password. Hahahahahaha. Easier to turn an apple into a ruby.

This is modern life, yeah? At least in first world America, and maybe only among my family. I, of course, cheat. I maintain a spreadsheet of passwords. 112 lines. They’re for my accounts and my wife’s accounts. If that thing ever falls into the wrong hands, it’d be disaster for us. It’s encrypted and password protected. Every time I go in for surgery, I remind my wife of the password.

All of this has cause us to resolve, do a pare down. Purge paperwork and warranties. Get ruthless about it, and damn the consequences.

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Fridaz Theme Music

So we come to Frida. Frida’s here at last. However you might feel about it, the day is sure to pass. Might go slow, might be low, or it could be blindingly quick. Whatever happens on this day, there could be some that make you sick. But if you persevere and get through again, you might come away with a win. So try a smile on your face, then set your pace, better yet, make it a grin.

Yep, it’s Frida, October 17, 2025. 45 F in Ashlandia around my home, we’re learning toward an upper sixties high. 70 F might be found for some. Depends on the winds and the air, the clouds and the sun. As of now, sunshine is dashing off the huge old oak’s golden leaves across the street, startling brilliant against an unmarked blue sky.

Awoke from a solid night of zee and some startling, vivid dreams, and arose in a spirited mood. Thinking about the past, present, and future, The Neurons gifted me with a Bryan Adams song which captures my Frida energy. They projected “Summer of 69” into my morning mental music stream, offering a rocking early morning. Feel free to look back and sing along, if you’re old enough to look back, and know the words, ‘course.

Coffee is plowing the body with its offering. Hope grace and peace climbs out of the shadows and leaps forward to help us all as we launch into the No Kings protests this weekend. Just for the record, the Ashland No Kings II rally doesn’t have permits, but many are planning to be there to exercise their rights.

Here we go. Cheers

Mike Johnson Accuses No Kings Protesters of Blatantly Exercising First Amendment Rights

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1982

Daily writing prompt
Your life without a computer: what does it look like?
View all responses

I’ve lived without a computer before. It actually wasn’t terrible. Yes, I’m now spoiled. Personal computers have been life changing.

But jump back to 1982. I was in the U.S. Air Force, stationed at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, an island that belongs to Japan. Commodore’s VIC 20 had us abuzz about computers. While we could easily see how it would make many things easier, shopping wasn’t yet on the menu. Nor was getting news updates. It was only toward the end of 1983 that I began learning about the concepts of ‘bulletin boards’, the Internet, and the worldwide web.

So back then, we watched television. Movies were watched via VHS tapes. That was the latest, greatest tech move for us, and such devices were still running close to $1,000. But we had one to help us weather the lack of entertainment inherent in being overseas. Remember, this was before satellite TV, too, for all practical purposes. All that stuff was just coming out, as were microwave ovens. They were also huge, bulky, expensive machines, but we purchased on of those, as well.

It’s hard to believe how fast everything changed. In late 1983, I bought my first CD player. It played one CD at a time. Returning to the U.S. from Japan, we gave our VHS player to my wife’s parents, and bought ourselves a new, smaller one with more features, including a remote control. That was the same year that I bought my first computer, a small but heavy Kaypro. Running at 4.77 megahertz, with a tiny green screen, it ran on CP/M and offered minimal RAM and two floppy drives that used 5 1/4 inch disks. It was a wild scene. We learned how to add RAM, make things faster, and double our floppy disks’ storage. Ten megahertz machines were being touted as possibilities, along with 64K of RAM and a 5-meg hard drive and 16 color monitors! Wow!

Back before that, we read. A lot. Books were checked out from the library, and research was done at the library. I subscribed to multiple magazines, such as Writer’s Digest, Autoweek, and Road & Track. Went for walks, played sports, read newspapers, which were delivered daily. When I lived in San Antonio, Texas, I subscribed to both the San Antonio Light and the Wall Street Journal. Even with the computer and VHS player coming along, and the CD player, and DVD players, most of that didn’t change. We still visited malls to shop, and used Sears and Spiegel catalogues to make orders, calling in to toll free numbers to put the order in. Board games like Risk, Life, and Monopoly were popular with us, along with Trivial Pursuit, and card games like Tripoli and King on the Corner, and Solitaire.

No, the big change came when the Internet finally fired up. My experience with it began in 1991, when I came back from Germany. Slow as hell, to be sure. Connections through modems which had to be hooked up. LOL. That changed fast, too, as built-in modems came along. I was both a Compuserve and AOL subscriber. Email was a new, exciting idea.

Then, suddenly we went to 256 colors and beyond on our monitors. The mouse became popular. 100 megahertz machines were being sold. I remembered buying and installing a 100-meg hard drive, and laughing. How was I ever going to use that much storage? It seemed so excessive. By then, our floppy drives were down to three-inch little colorful things. Now, we’re like, floppy drive? What the heck is that?

Going online was a wild scene back in the mid 1990s. Weren’t many websites in those early days. The games were something else. Research, news, and sports all became much more accessible. Then, boom…social media. That’s when things really flipped.

I’ve gone a few days in 2025 without my computer and without the Internet. Like before, we read, played games, and went for walks.

Just like it was 1982, just forty years ago, when I was younger, and so was the personal computer.

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Satyrdaz Theme Music

Satyrda, September 27, 2025. 72 F and sunny with an autumn blue sky. 88 F is the expeceted peak temperature for Ashlandia.

Another night of dreams means another hour of recording the details and thinking through meanings. Meanwhile, The Neurons served up “Changes” by Yes. Not just for the closing of another coffee haunt, but several other local restaurants put up permanently closed signs. Both were good sources for vegan and vegetarian meals, which made them good for me and my wife, who is a vegetarian who eats fish and eggs. One was GoBowld, a terrific place for fresh organic food. I think it lasted less than a year. Second one, Sauce Whole Food which lasted several years before closing last week, another good place for fresh, tasty food with unique fusion blends, gone. Both were located where other businesses have cycled through, trying and failing to make a go. The locations seem fine but appear to be cursed. Anyway, all this prompted The Neurons to put “Changes” into my morning mental music stream.

My wife collected fruit and vegan cookies for Steve’s wife, Andi. Steve passed a week ago. Andy has multiple food allergies so they took this route. My spouse purchased a used basket from Goodwill and put it all together with a bow on it. We’ve made arrangements to deliver it to Andi today.

A whole pineapple is the centerpiece but it’s hard to see behind the shiny plastic. There’s also someone’s offering of homemade plum jam.

Pleased to see that the court ruled multiple statements Mike Lindell made about Smartmatic and Lindell’s bogus stolen election claims are defamatory. You’d think that would be lesson for Lindell and the whole stolen election contingent, but no, many of them don’t learn. They’re just like their master, DJ TACO Trump. Instead of learning, they’ll claim the legal system doesn’t work or the deep state didn’t give Lindell a fair trial.

May peace and grace find its way to us and lift us up and carry us on into a better life. Till then, I’m relying on coffee. Here we go. Cheers

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Sundaz Theme Music

So we have come to another Sunda. This is September 14, 2025. Thirty days hath September (just checked in my head), so tomorrow reaches the month’s halfway point. With the month’s end, we dip into 2025’s final quarter. It’s 65 F. Rain is in the clouds competing with the sunshine. Wind and trees are into a brisk dance.

Autumn is making solid inroads into our Pacific Northwest outlook. Today’s high will drift toward the mid seventies. My wife said, “I don’t mind it if the temperature drops but I dislike it when it’s so dark in the morning. I miss the morning light.” I totally get that and agree. As she went on to point out, the daylight savings situation doesn’t help, with us facing longer hours of early darkness as we begin our days.

My wife and I are trying to plan a trip back home for Mom’s 90th birthday do. However, my spouse said she experienced flashes of light in her eyes the other day as we went around Crater Lake and descended. She wants to have our eyes checked for problems before committing to flying. She’s not had incidents since that day, a week ago yesterday, and it was storming that day, with thunder and lightning. But she’s quite risk adverse. Having her eyes checked is the prudent thing to do.

I read a Politico piece titled, Trump loves AI, and the MAGA world is getting worried. It’s an interesting topic. I’m not surprised MAGA is generally against AI, as they tend to be people who dislike change and are slow to embrace technology. AI promises both fast change, and it’s advanced technology. Of course, Hollywood and television has fed us a dystopian diet of dire developments from AI. We have fears laced with worries baked into our cultural soul.

Other than that, I turned away from the news. It’s Sunda, a slow news day by design in the digital age. It’s more of a day of recap and reflection. I decided I’d do the same. I don’t know how the rest of the world does these things, but I’ll do it with a cuppa coffee, do some writing, read a book, clean, and converse with my wife. It feels like a good chillin’ day.

I dreamed of many cats last night. As I was digesting all that nocturnal churn, Papi and I went out for an early dose of sunshine and deep breathing. That ginger floof acted kittenish, galloping about, tail swishing, and then bounding into the house and across the rooms as I walked in behind him and laughed at his antics. With the sunshine and Papi’s attitude affecting them, The Neurons burst into the morning mental music stream with “Beautiful Day”. This is a U2 song from 2000, before this mess in America flared to its aggravating proportions. I played a U2 melody yesterday. Normally, I don’t present music from the same group two days in a row but this one worked for the moment, and I let Der Neurons’ choice stand.

Coffee has made incursions into my body. May grace and peace be with you and me and the world today and always. Cheers

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Two Dreams to Mention

In the first dream, I was traveling with friends and my wife. A small group, I don’t know the travel’s purpose nor the means. At one point, we encountered a storm. Seeking refuge, we found a house. The house unlocked. We went inside. It was solid, warm and comfortable, but completely unfurnished. There was one book in there. A soft-cover trade book, it was open to a page.

We decided we’d stay there and outwait the storm. Meanwhile, we each went by and checked out the book. I don’t recall any name, title, or colors associated with it. But when we each read the book, we discovered it was different for each of us. I thought it was a thriller/adventure. Someone else thought it was a cookbook. Another deemed it a book of poetry. I read through the book quickly but when I came back to look at it again, it was a different book. It looked exactly as it had and was still open to a page, but its contents were completely different.

We’d stayed in the house longer than planned. Although no food was there, we didn’t get hungry. In fact, we were all in very good moods. Despite the lack of furniture, we were well rested. But we decided to move on if the weather was good. The weather was good. After going out and looking around, I realized we were in a different location. Another noticed that the season was changed. Trying to figure out what was going on, we went back into the house. Through testing and talking, we concluded that the house was a time machine and also moved through space. (Yes, like Doctor Who‘s TARDIS, except this was a house, not a phone box.)

A young couple, people we didn’t know, arrived. Like us, they were taking refuge from a storm, We decided not to tell them what we’d learned, to see what they discovered on their own. Then we’d compare notes.

Dream end.

In the second dream, my wife and I were sitting at a small metal table by the side of a road. Another woman was with us. We were chatting. The table was right off the road’s shoulder and the road was lousy with traffic. At one point, my wife saw a big box truck coming. As it went by, she said, “Oh, there’s the artichoke man. I want to catch him and tell him something.”

Leaping up, she ran after the truck. I was wondering if she caught him and what she was telling him, when a second artichoke truck, identical to the first, roared up the road. This was on a hill and a tight curve. He was going way too fast. The driver slammed on his brakes. He went into a skid and fishtailed hard into a hillside. My wife’s body went flying through the air. She landed on some rocks on her back, her head dangling backwards, unmoving.

I leaped up. A car went by, down the hill, oblivious to the scene. Shouting at the person at the table, “Call 911, call 911,” I looked up the hill. People were running to help the truck driver and another car involved in the accident. I sprinted toward my wife, thinking, I’ll check for her pulse and look for breathing, but I don’t think I should move her.

Dream end.

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Satyrdaz Theme Music

We are socked in with fog in Yachats. No blue sky or sunshine has made their whereabouts known. 57 F now, a high of 65 F has been proclaimed as an afternoon promise. All this is much different from yesterday. Guess we were getting spoiled and things needed to be changed.

We played rousing and enthusiastic Mexican Train last night. The domino game has us enthralled. I was leading until like four hands from the end. Then my friend surged ahead and beat me by a few points. Nevertheless, I was delighted with winning four rounds. Gave me such a high.

After discussing politics and health matters, “Reflections of My Life” from 1970 was brought up into the morning mental music stream by The Neurons. Marmalade wrote and performed the reflective soft rock song. The group had other hits but I never owned any of their albums.

I stayed hooked on those lines, “The world is a bad place, a terrible place to live, oh, but I don’t want to die.” Sums up a lot of the inherent conflict in our many attitudes about life, death, commerce, and politics.

We’re planning a road trip up the road to the aquarium and greater coast exploration. Breakfast is being finished. We’re talking about a friend’s recent fast-food visit. He went into order and encountered a machine asking him for his order. A voice announced it was ready. He picked it up from a racked cart. Never encountered a person, which bummed him. He then went through the drive-thru next time. One person was encountered, to accept payment. I shared my imagination’s output: robotic arms putting the order together in the back, delivering a bag of food to a conveyor belt that carries it out to the customer.

I’m moving on wings of coffee. Hope grace and peace find a way to carry you through the day. Cheers

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