Category: Musings

Thirty Days of Thankfulness

I missed the blogosphere bandwagon yesterday, not realizing the current posting ‘fad’ focuses on expressing what I’m thankful for in a daily dissertation.  So please pretend that today is actually yesterday, the first of November in the year 2011.

I am thankful for my family.

Terry, Derek and Rachelle (Dec 2010)
  • Thankful for My Husband, Terry.  More than twenty five years of love and friendship, through thick and thin.  He never ceases to amaze me with his brilliant musicality and compositional talent.  His recent interest in the culinary arts means I come home to a new delectable food adventure nearly every evening.  He overcomes his disabling chronic illness each day, never succumbing to depression or giving up the fight.  He tilts windmills with home remodeling contractors and global corporations peddling home appliances.  He is passionate and compassionate and I love him dearly.
  • Thankful for My Children, Derek and Rachelle.
    • Derek, and his wife Royna, just returned home after a four day visit with us during the last weekend of October.  Number One Son came into the world busting the Apgar scale, despite an arduous labor ending in an emergency C-section.  Even though he didn’t learn to walk until fourteen months, he never slowed down all the years we corralled him.  He excelled at nearly all sports, having an uncanny sense of balance and an intuitive understanding of body mechanics, such that he competed nationally as a judoka in her early to mid teen years.  His true artistic gift surfaced late in high school, blossoming under a mentor at community college.  His talent for art and love of video games led him to the Guildhall at SMU and landed him an excellent placement even before graduation late last year.
    • Rachelle, oh how I miss you.  I haven’t seen you face-to-face since last January.  The wonders of the Internet at least allow me to listen to your concerts live, but it’s just not the same as being there.  At least I’ll get my daughter fix in three weeks when Terry and I drive to North Texas for our third annual Moss Migration for Thanksgiving.  Rachelle’s gift for vocal performance surfaced almost before she learned to talk.  I caught her singing as a baby and toddler almost more than she did talking.  Years and years of choir drudgery and exceptional vocal mentors honed her magnificent mezzo soprano.  As she approaches the last semester of her undergraduate degree in musicology at UNT, she is gearing up for a round of auditions (and the attendant travel) to various graduate schools around the country.
  • Thankful for My Extended Family.
    • My Father, who is always willing and able to help with demolishing a dying pine or trimming back a few limbs on my oak trees or any electrical wiring project that crops up.  He readily supports my bread baking habit, where he reaps the rewards in loaves of fresh home-made and home-baked loaves.  He also tags along on some of my astronomical adventures courtesy of the local Astronomical Society.  I have a general class amateur radio license thanks to him.  My troubleshooting talent can be directly traced back to me tagging along with him while growing up, as he fixed all many of items for family and friends.
    • My Mother, who inspired me to read at a very early age (three or four) and instilled a love of all kinds of literature.
    • My Uncle, Ron, and his wife Treva, are an inspiration and an example of a blessed marriage.  Ron and I feed each other’s addiction for the next great book to read to the chagrin of our spouse (I’m sure).  Ron’s watercolors keep winning awards at various galleries across the Midwest and East Coast.  Someday soon I hope he returns to writing that next great short story, novella or novel that I know is lurking just below the surface.
    • My Aunts, Melody and Jan.  Melody, my mother’s sister, lives close by, within an hour’s drive in Topeka.  Jan, my father’s sister, lives farther away in Ohio, between her brothers (one in Kansas and one in Virginia).  Both of these women hold special places in my heart and fond memories from my early childhood.
    • My Cousins, starting with the paternal side of the tree, Wendell, Eric, David and Katy.  Since I was the oldest cousin (from the oldest offspring), I got to see each and every one of you grow-up, from infants to adults with families of your own.  Katy, the youngest, tied the knot just this past June (on or very near both my daughter’s birthday and what would have been my grandmother’s eighty-ninth birthday).  Wendell and his wife Kristen recently became the proud parents of twin boys, William and Logan.  On the maternal side of the tree, I have many cousins, some of which I’ve reconnected with on Facebook and others who remain in obscurity.  Since my mother was somewhere in the middle of six children, I am not the oldest of the cousins on this side of the family tree.   Oldest to youngest (by family group): Roberta, Peter, Rebecca; Tracy, Kelly and Phillip; Brandi and Summer; and, Charles and Anne.  I know I’m missing some in the above list, mostly because there are cousins out there who are younger than my kids and I’ve only met them or heard of them once or twice.

Even though 2011 marked the first year of my life without a living grandparent, I am grateful for the time I had with both my grandmothers.  Doris, my father’s mother, passed away last year, and Juanita, my mother’s mother, passed away in June of 2005.

Juanita and Me (at my high school graduation)

Quotes on Families:

Families are like fudge – mostly sweet with a few nuts.
~~~ Author Unknown

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.
~~~ George Bernard Shaw

One of life’s greatest mysteries is how the boy who wasn’t good enough to marry your daughter can be the father of the smartest grandchild in the world.
~~~ Jewish Proverb

Family life is full of major and minor crises — the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce — and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It’s difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.
~~~ Thomas Moore

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.
~~~ Alex Haley

Far-Out Transportation

Strange how craziness infests my best intentions.  I started this blog entry Monday to recap an interesting weekend experience.  Now, I find myself approaching noon on Thursday with no progress on the blog front.

Last Saturday morning, I attended the  Annual Driver Training for all Advantage Vanpool Drivers in Kansas City, Missouri.  We left our vans for their annual inspection by the KCATA mechanics at their garage and took a bus to the facility for breakfast and training.  The Vanpool Coordinator handed out updated policies and procedures for reporting accidents, maintenance and safety.  Two of the biggest changes included a complete moratorium on the use of any kind of personal electronic device (PED) while driving (violating this policy would result in the termination of the vanpool) and when returning a loaner van, we are too top off the gas tank and remove all personal items and trash.

Our instructor had trained hundreds if not thousands of people to drive, from high school teenagers to 86-year grandmothers.  He also taught commercial drivers education and is a native of the Kansas City metro area (in fact, Noland Road in Independence is named for his great-great-grandfather).  He recently retired from a long career as a teacher and coach and now consults to keep busy.

Four hours later, I survived the videos and enjoyed our instructor’s anecdotes without nodding off more than once.  We returned to our vans via the bus and I drove back home to Lansing.

That evening, I took my father and my husband to the October 2011 meeting of ASKC at the Gottlieb Planetarium.  The featured guest speaker, Jack Dunn of the Mueller Planetarium in Lincoln, Nebraska, spoke on the last Shuttle flight and the future of human space flight and exploration, mentioning SpaceX and Virgin Galactic by name (and showing us some prototypes via video on the planetarium’s dome.  He claimed even Amazon’s Bezos is investing in private space exploration, but information on that venture is hard to come by (or not as it took me like ten seconds to find Blue Origin’s website … I just need some help deciphering their logo).

Prior to the Dunn’s presentation on far-out space tourism low Earth orbit vehicles, we learned about the Gottlieb Planetarium’s spherical projection system from it’s director.

As we were leaving, we admired an old fire truck, street car and noticed an Amtrak train with vintage Pullman cars waiting to leave the station.  Fascinating mix of old and new transportation separated by mere minutes and/or light years.

I had hoped to report the status of star visibility from Union Station, but clouds obscured the night sky and reflected the abundance of light emanating not only from the Crown Center area but the Power & Light District to our north.  I have two more opportunities to report from a location other than my backyard – tonight and tomorrow night, but with my son and his wife on the road from Texas to attend a wedding Friday evening, I probably won’t get the opportunity to make another entry in the Great World-Wide Star Count this year.

A Year in the Life of My Blog

Last year, a few days after my birthday, I scrapped my MySpace blog, mostly due to interface changes, and ventured here to WordPress with a backup blog at Blogger.  My original intention was to journal my astronomical adventures here and do some inspirational topics on the backup site.  While I didn’t blog daily, I did manage to craft over two hundred blog entries here (this being my 225th).

Cygnas (the Swan)
Cygnus (the Swan)

In honor of my original intention to explore the heavens, I wanted to encourage everyone (and motivate myself) to participate in this year’s Great World Wide Star Count.  Don’t be shy!  Anyone can participate and it doesn’t require any equipment beyond your eyes.  This project is an annual survey of the night sky, held this year between October 14th and 28th (7-9 pm optimal viewing window) to record how many stars you can see in the constellation Cygnus (the Swan) in the northern hemisphere (follow the link above if you reside Down Under).  This helps map the spread of light pollution.  I plan to get out my telescope (for the first time this fall) and view the beautiful blue/yellow double-star Albireo. I can’t tell from the survey’s website if they are affiliate with the IDA (the International Dark-Sky Association), but I’m doing my bit (via this blog) to raise awareness about the value of dark skies and their preservation and restoration.

And now, a brief retrospective of some of my favorite blog entries (indicated with asterisks) from the past year and a few popular (according to the stats) highlights:

Autumn Reveries

I am so tired I literally cannot see well as I write this blog entry.  I felt the need to preserve my tiredness for posterity by sharing the highlights of the first whirlwind weekend of October 2011, which coincidentally corresponds to my birthday.

I planned earlier in the week (still in September) to attend the Friday opening night showing of Courageous with my hubby.  Since I ended up driving the van for the workday commute last Friday, I got home early, around 5:15 pm.  While changing out of my work clothes, I received a call from my uncle, who is visiting Winfield, Kansas for events surrounding Homecoming at his alma mater, Southwestern College.  I’ll spare you the details from the thirty minute conversation and instead refer you to last month’s post about interfamily technical support.  I dispensed what help I could and we headed south to the Legends, making a quick stop at Subway for a bit of supper.

With a good fifteen or twenty minutes to spare, we were surprised to learn the movie was nearly sold out and we ended up seated in the second row of theater eight.   While Terry and I thought the movie was good, we did not think it was as great as Fireproof or even Facing the Giants. It suffered from scrambled subplots, sprawl and heavy handed preaching at the expense of good story. There were a few laugh-out-loud moments. While the theatre was packed, but you could tell you were ‘preaching to the choir’ from the composition of the audience.

Saturday, the first of October, we had planned to board the dogs and head south to Wichita to visit Terry’s life-long friends after the recent death of several family members, with the intention of attending the memorial dinner Sunday evening.  As noon approached (and the cutoff for dropping off the dogs at the kennel), we learned one of the family members thought they had the flu, and since neither Terry nor I have received this year’s flu shot yet, we opted to do a marathon trip on Sunday rather than expose Terry to potential viruses.   I canceled the boarding and Terry canceled the lodging, which left us with time on our hands.

Terry wanted to take me out for a birthday dinner, since my actual birthday would be spent driving to and from Wichita to attend a funeral.  I struggled for an hour trying to find someplace relatively close to dine at, finally deciding to try Stone Canyon Pizza in downtown Parkville, Missouri.  We drove through a beautiful fall later afternoon along K-5 and Missouri 45 only to discover upon arriving in Parkville that the city was overrun with an Octoberfest and locating a parking spot close enough for Terry became a pipe dream.  The backup plan became Zona Rosa and we eventually ate at Abuelos, a Mexican restaurant (not my first choice for cuisine, since I despise cheese, but they were convenient and not overly crowded and we got front door parking on a Saturday evening).

Terry suggested that we drop by High Noon Saloon to listen to Southern Reign.  We arrived shortly after the first set completed, spoke to the band members briefly, then found a table and enjoyed the next two sets.  I surprised myself by ordering a hot chocolate as my first drink, since the door to the Saloon was propped open and the temperature kept falling quickly as the night progressed.  I must admit that hot chocolate proved to be one of the best, if not the best ones I’ve ever drank.

I spent most of Sunday morning recording DVDs from the DVR (same way I spent Saturday afternoon once we decided not to drive to Wichita).  I even sneaked a watch (without the hubby) of the season finale of Doctor Who (more on that later in the week) and the latest Star Wars: the Clone Wars.  Terry woke up before noon and we hit the road by one o’clock.  Having forgotten that Kansas recently raised the speed limit on Interstates from 70 mph to 75 mph, we made record time down the turnpike, savoring the autumn beauty of the Flint Hills.

Many friends and family attended the memorial service and dinner, including half of the decedent’s high school Class of 57 (all eight of whom drove up from Oklahoma on Sunday and planned to return that night).  Of the two hymns we sung a capella, I loved singing In the Garden, which had been my great-grandmother’s favorite hymn.  I received several complements on my singing, even though I haven’t sung regularly in months and tried to keep my volume as soft as I could without sacrificing pitch and phrasing.  The dinner, provided by the host restaurant (Yaya’s Euro Bistro) proved delicious and soon afterward the guests began to depart.  We tarried long enough to briefly speak with our grieving friends, then hit the road north, shortly after eight o’clock.

I drove the first leg of the trip, stopping briefly at the Matfield Greene Service Center to get some water for Terry.  His poor digestive system needed some heart burn relief via Alkz Seltzer.  I spied a couple of interesting paintings of sunflowers, my favorite being the one below:

I continued driving north and took a brief side trip to Emporia for my one birthday treat of the day:  ice cream from Braums.   Terry drove while I enjoyed my butter pecan waffle cone, returning to the turnpike.  The clear skies shone with brilliant stars, such that I even asked wistfully if Terry could drive without the headlights just so I could enjoy such pristine dark skies.  He ignored me and kept driving safely.  Soon after finishing the cone, I fell asleep.  I drug myself out of my dreams after we crossed over the Kaw River east of Lawrence and stayed awake until we pulled into the driveway at a quarter past eleven.  I stumbled upstairs and crashed into bed, but failed to fall back asleep until after midnight.

After such a jam packed weekend, I dreaded the five o’clock alarm that would set me off on further adventures, this time for my employer, with a business trip to the Windy City aka Chicago (a misnomer if you consider the factual data that points to Dodge City as the windiest city in the States).  In fact, I’m finishing up this blog post in my hotel room after a long day of work and travel.  I’m so looking forward to more than five hours of sleep.

Sevens and Seventy-Sevens

I rarely turn the radio on in my car.  I will when I’m driving the van, because forty-five minutes is a long time to maintain a conversation.  But when I step out of the van and start up my car for the two mile drive home, there just doesn’t seem any point to turning on the radio.  The fall weather this week begged me to open all four windows, though, and crank the volume.  So I did.  I caught the tail end of a Scorpions song on 101 the Fox (don’t ask me which one … it was probably “Rock You Like a Hurricane” … but I’m not entirely sure).  The next song immediately grabbed my attention, as I hadn’t listened to it for years.

The Grand Illusion (Styx 1977)
The Grand Illusion (Styx 1977)

First, let’s take a giant leap backwards to the late 70s, specifically July, 7, 1977, the release date for the seventh album of a band I couldn’t get enough of in my early adolescence . . . Styx.  Back then, I barely knew what rock ‘n’ roll was.  Heck, I hadn’t even officially made it to the ‘teen’ years yet at that point.  But over the coming months, you couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing “Come Sail Away” or “Angry Young Man” or “Miss America” or, as I heard last night “The Grand Illusion.”

I’ve played piano since I was five (more than forty years), so I naturally gravitated to Dennis DeYoung‘s compositions (my all-time favorite being “Castle Walls” from this album, but my favorite to perform is “Pieces of Eight” from the eighth album released the following year).  And, yes, I could play at least the opening to “Come Sail Away” from memory when I was in high school, along with the Entertainer, which was still popular thanks to that movie with Newman and Redford starring in it.

So even though I arrived home mid-way through the Grand Illusion, I sat in the garage, with the windows rolled down and the stereo blaring until I reached the bubble-bursting end-of-song stanza below:

America spells competition, join us in our blind ambition
Get yourself a brand new motor car
Someday soon we’ll stop to ponder what on Earth’s this spell we’re under
We made the grade and still we wonder who the hell we are

Back in the late 70s, before the recession (and heat wave) of the early 80s, and the dot-com bubble pop that followed later (was it the 90s or the 00s?) and now the ‘Great Recession,’ I can really feel the pain of these words.  Does America still spell ‘C-O-M-P-E-T-I-T-I-O-N’? or have we outsourced it all?  Are we blind to ambition or just blind?  I have yet to purchase a ‘brand new motor car’ and probably never will.  I’ve been pondering for decades what spell we’ve deluded ourselves with because I still don’t think I’ve made the grade and I think Roxy has more of an idea who she is than America does right now.

So I’ll close with a quote from my aforementioned favorite song from the Grand Illusion album, something I previously  consider a mantra, but have long since moved on to something more positive, encouraging and inspiring (check out Phil. 4:8 for my ‘life verse’):

Life is never what it seems
And every man must meet his destiny

To Scream or Keep Silent, That Is the Dying Question

Scream by Edvard Munch
Scream by Edvard Munch

September went into a tailspin about a week ago.  I can’t remember the last time I actually received personal good news from family or friends.  Death or dying and depression crowd around me, jostling for position and attention, blotting out my surroundings: beautiful sunrises and sunsets, crystal clear night skies bursting with twinkling stars, perfect weather any southern California native would drool over.

I woke up this morning after having tossed and turned and lost the skirmish with my sheet and pillows.  Apollo couldn’t wait to jump up and greet me with a wagging tail and unconditional canine adoration.  Roxy slept on, sprawled on the floor, oblivious to anything but her dreams of breakfast.  I rubbed the crusty, dried sleep from my eyes, slipped on my reading glasses and woke up my Nook to see what had happened in the wider world while I pretended to sleep.

I soon read the sad, tragic news of the death of Sara Douglass (aka Sara Warneke).  I discovered this astounding Aussie female fantasy writer a half dozen years ago and loved everything she wrote, especially Threshold, the first novel I found written by her.   As I perused the various postings on Twitter and Facebook about her passing, I found her blog post from March 2010 she entitled “The Silence of the Dying.”  I took a few minutes to read the entire post, after which I couldn’t help but shiver, especially after the seemingly prophetic nature of the most recent Doctor Who episode “Closing Time” wherein the Doctor seems to fall apart (emotionally) as he approaches the day of his death (flashback to the start of this season and the “Impossible Astronaut“).  He even utters some dialog containing the words ‘silence’ and ‘dying.’

After reading Sara’s thoughts on how modern society sticks it’s head in the sand with respect to death (and the dying), I pondered my own situation.  Part of my September tailspin centers on a sharp worsening in my health.  Par for the medical course, I’m running the gauntlet of various tests, procedures and eventually a biopsy (scheduled for mid-October), all of which amounts to endless waiting for results and the accompanying anxiety.  Just as Sara describes in her blog post, I prefer to keep silent, as I don’t want to appear ‘weak’ by complaining.  Of course, at this stage of the ‘game’ I’m not in much pain or discomfort (not compared to what Sara or other cancer victims endure).  And I must put up a good front for my husband, one of the chronically ill routinely maligned or ignored by modern day society.  He needs me to be ‘strong’ and I will remain so as cheerfully as I can.

Normally, I look forward to the beginning of October and the advent of autumn with peace and joy in my heart.  Of course, the fact that my birthday occurs the day after the first of October wouldn’t have anything to do with that would it?  But this year, no birthday cake with sputtering scores of candles will great me.  Instead, my husband and I will travel south, to his home town, to console and support his life-long friend and his wife in the sudden and unexpected loss of her mother, so soon after his mother’s death.  Oh, and their dog died last week in the midst of all this family tragedy.

I am full of unanswered questions and troublesome, uncomfortable thoughts today, ones that I wish I had the courage to shout out on a street corner to the self-absorbed oblivious passersby.  Rather than deprive a homeless person of their accustomed spot, I will jump up on my bloggity soap box instead.

From a Christian worldview, I can understand some of the silence surrounding death and dying.  Jesus conquered the grave, therefore, it follows, that we can sweep this whole messy business of dying under the proverbial rug.  (Yes, I’m being sarcastic).  Yet, even Jesus wept (and raised Lazarus from the grave).  Jesus also suffered, but not silently, and died, nearly alone, on a cross we nailed him to, at a crossroads dung heap outside Jerusalem.  Two thousand years later, we’ve sanitized and compartmentalized dying, hiding it from ourselves so we can ignore the writing on our own walls.

I ask that you stop for a moment and spend time, yes, that very precious commodity you can never, ever get back, with a friend or family member who is dying.  Don’t send flowers, or stuffed animals or Hallmark cards.  Give them comfort.  Don’t expect them to put you at ease about their situation.  Embrace the truth.  For you know, it’s not ‘if’ we’re going to die, it’s when.  We’re all dying.  And I, for one, will not go silently into the night.

An Evening at the Family Tech Support Opera

The names have been changed to protect the innocent, except in the case of my daughter, who has an understanding and equally sarcastic nature comparable to my own. And I’m just as guilty as those family members I poke fun at below in seeking their expertise with respect to technology of a different flavor.  The generation that preceded me has years of hands-on experience applicable to the infrastructure we depend on everyday (electricity, plumbing, mechanical know-how, etc.), while I’ve spent years storing up knowledge of a less concrete kind (aka information technology).   Frequently, I reinforce to all family members when they come calling that “I don’t do hardware” so as long as we keep things soft, I’m all ears and ready to help.

One night this past week, after a dinner, my husband and I decided to watch The American, a movie starring George Clooney, something we’d recorded to DVR several weeks ago and just hadn’t gotten around to watching.  Thirty minutes into the movie (with more dead bodies than dialog), I received a text message alerting me to an e-mail from a family member (while we can both claim to be of the Baby Boomer generation, he was in the vanguard, while I squeaked in the rearguard), who had just purchased a Nook Color, detailing some of his frustrations with the accessories.  I grabbed my own Nook Color and logged into my Yahoo mail account to retrieve the entire message (too slow via my dumb phone).   Since I had recommended the Nook Color, and the anti-glare scratch protector accessory in question, I felt chagrined by his difficulty in wasting two of the expensive covers in two attempts to align and adhere to the Nook Color’s screen (without bubbles or dust or grit getting between the protecting plastic and the glass screen).

Since the movie bored me to tears, I grabbed my phone and headed upstairs to my library (formerly my daughter’s ‘green’ bedroom).  I called my frustrated family member and caught him mowing his lawn.  I volunteered to send him my spare anti-glare screen protector (I applied mine correctly the first time which is a miracle … see ‘I don’t do hardware’ above), but he declined.  We spoke briefly about his buying experience and lack of wifi at his home.  He returned to his mowing and I called B&N customer service to learn more about how (and if) ebooks purchased from B&N Online could be synced to the Nook Color in the absence of wifi, using only the mini-USB cable and his wired home computer.

Rather than return to the movie, I finished reading Leviathan Wakes, the scifi space opera selection for September at the GoodReads SciFi & Fantasy Book Club.  I called the family member back, ready for a long call on how to download ebooks and transfer them to the Nook Color from your computer.  He had already attempted to use Adobe Digital Editions (ADE), which is required for checking out ebooks from most libraries (see this excellent “how to” article created by the Kansas City Public Library for more information).   ADE correctly recognized his Nook Color, but no matter what we did, we couldn’t drag an ebook to his device.  I gave up on that and promised more research (which I did the next day, turning off wifi on my Nook Color and successfully dragging newly downloaded ebooks to it from ADE).

Next I helped him download public domain ebooks from Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks, going step-by-step (and ‘blind’ in my case, doing it all from my memory) from where the file was downloaded on his computer, to finding the correct folder on the Nook Color’s virtual drive (the J: drive in his case), even renaming some of the epub files to make them easier to find on the Nook and wrapping up the process with the ‘safely remove hardware’ feature of Windows Vista (another ‘amazing’ feat of tech support, since I’ve rarely ever used Windows Vista and relied on the theory that Microsoft programmers were inherently lazy and didn’t change the dialog boxes much between Windows XP and Windows Vista).  Shockingly (well, not to me anyway), he had never used the Safely Remove Hardware feature before.

In the midst of this long phone call requiring intense concentration on my part, I heard my phone blip at me several times.  I assumed I received some text messages or other e-mail alerts.  Imagine my surprise when my husband opens the door to my library holding his phone out to me telling me it’s our daughter.  Wondering why she couldn’t just talk to her dad while I was otherwise occupied with my own phone, and worried something horrific had occurred (stupid, I know, but I’m a mother), I put the other family member on temporary hold and took my husband’s phone to my other ear.  The first words out of my daughter’s mouth were:  “The text in this table keeps bleeding past the table boundaries …” Can you see my eyes rolling up into the top of my head?

Once my brain rebooted from the overload, I told my daughter I’d call her back in about thirty minutes and also told her to e-mail me the document she couldn’t format correctly.  Returning to my other phone call, I reviewed the process two more times with him, watching (well really listening to his astronaut-esque recitation of what he was doing in the absence of a video feed) perform the download/transfer process successfully twice.  I gave him a couple of tips for re-arranging and removing items on the Nook Color home screen and called it a night.

I returned back downstairs, to wake up my laptop so I could fire-up Word in anticipation of rescuing my daughter’s document.  I checked my Yahoo e-mail account but had not received anything from her.  I called her and she thought she had sent me the e-mail with the document attached, but had forgotten to click the send button.  My eyes rolled up into the top of my head again and came back down when I finally received the e-mail.  With her still on the phone talking to me (I put it on speaker phone so her dad and I could both listen and talk to her while I typed), I deleted a couple of misused drop caps and inserted some hard paragraph marks in the overloaded table cell, saved the file and returned it to Rachelle.  She’d already left her computer but returned and didn’t like where I’d put the hard paragraph marks so I let her in on the secret (which works whether you use MS Word or OpenOffice like she does):  To insert a hard paragraph mark, hold down the Shift key and then press the Enter key.   Terry and I said goodnight to Rachelle and I went to bed to dream of something other than ones and zeroes, bits, bytes or anything remotely related to information technology.

For those looking for free or cheap ebooks to purchase and download to your Nook, here’s a handy list of my favorite frequently used sites:

Amy Pond Outshines the Doctor

Perhaps being turned into a giant wooden doll while trapped in a dollhouse stored in a scared boy’s cabinet left Amy with some unresolved anger issues.  Last week’s forgettable episode, Night Terrors, disappointed on many levels (weak story and acting on the part of the bit players).  Creepy Doctor Who episode I hope to forget sooner rather than later.  Thankfully, last night’s episode, The Girl Who Waited, provided excellent science fiction (including  a time travel paradox unresolvable by either the Doctor or the TARDIS) and phenomenal acting from both Karen Gillan (as Amy Pond) and Arthur Darvill (as Rory Williams).  While this episode doesn’t contribute much to the overall story arc for this season (the Doctor’s death), the character growth glimpsed in both Amys and Rory will knock your socks off.

A great stand-alone episode of Doctor Who I highly recommend for your viewing pleasure.

Doctor Who Returns after Summer Break with ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’

"Let's Kill Hitler" aired on BBCA 08/27/2011
"Let's Kill Hitler" aired on BBCA 08/27/2011

I suffered through some disappointing summer science fiction television recently (most notably “Falling Skies” on TNT).  But all that is behind me now with the return of the Doctor and the best ‘bad girl’ in any time or space: River Song.   Amy and Rory continue their quest to reunite with their daughter, Melody Pond, also known as River Song, although her parents are still coming to grips with their daughter’s incorrigibility, knack for mad-cap adventures and an obsession with the Doctor not of her own making.

And River, as Mels, Amy’s BFF from childhood, who coins the episodes title ‘Let’s Kill Hitler‘ when she finally meets the Doctor, after Amy and Rory destroy a wheat field with a crop-circle calling card.  Holding the Doctor and the TARDIS at gunpoint, Mels corrals everyone into the TARDIS for a trip back to pre-war Berlin.  Mels manages to shoot the TARDIS and forces a crash landing in Hitler’s office, interrupting a shape-shifting humanoid robot containing miniaturised humanoids has assumed the form of a Wehrmacht officer and attacked Hitler.

And it’s at this point where Hitler becomes a minor impediment to the ongoing conflict between the newly regenerated River Song and her immediate assassination attempt on the Doctor, Amy and Rory kidnapped by the miniaturized humans, and a dying Doctor.   Hitler is locked in the cupboard by Rory.  My husband and I laughed repeatedly on that dialogue.

The tiny robot-occupying humans reveal themselves as time-traveling Justice Department personnel who mete out punishment to infamous criminals by snatching them in the last seconds of their life and torturing them for thousands of years for their crimes.   They switch gears from Hitler (they arrived too early anyway in 1938) to River Song, who has a criminal record including killing the Doctor.  So now we spend the last thirty minutes of the Doctor’s life arguing whether River can be tortured for killing the Doctor when he is in fact still alive.

Best bit of lore gleaned this episode about the Silence (spoilers follow, obviously):

Robot Amy: Records Available

Doctor: Question.  I’m dying.  Who wants me dead?

Robot Amy: The Silence.

Doctor: What is the Silence? Why is it called that? What does it mean?

Robot Amy: The Silence is not a species.  It is a religious order or movement.  Their core belief is that Silence will fall when the question is asked.

Doctor: What question?

Robot Amy: The first question, the oldest question in the universe, hidden in plain sight.

Doctor: Yes, but what is the question?

Robot Amy: Unknown.

This episode did not have the impact of ‘A Good Man Goes to War‘ (but how could it with the big reveal of who River’s parents actually were).  However, I loved it (as I do most Doctor Who episodes) for the great writing, story-telling and acting.   I know where I’ll be every Saturday evening … wherever the TARDIS re-appears.

Book Review: Divergent by Roth (4 Stars)

Divergent by Veronica Roth

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Welcome to Post-Apocalyptic Chicago, where the trains never stop (even to take on or drop off passengers) , the streetlights go dark by midnight and Lake Michigan is now the Marsh. The surviving remnants of humanity think they’ve found the cure for war in the five factions: Amity (the peacemakers), Candor (the honest), Erudite (the scientific), Dauntless (the brave) and Abnegation (the self-less). Choose your path (for life) when you turn sixteen or live destitute among the faction-less, a fate worse than death for anyone raised in a faction.

We meet Beatrice as she approaches her sixteenth birthday, the day of her aptitude test, designed to help her decide what faction she will join. Raised in a prominent Abnegation family, she feels like a constant failure because she isn’t self-less enough. Beatrice struggles to be the first to serve others or lending a helping hand, not always thinking of others first as she’s been taught. Her aptitude test confirms her confusion, when the results are inconclusive and she’s labeled secretly by her helpful Dauntless tester as Divergent and advised never to tell anyone that she is.

At the Choosing Ceremony, Beatrice watches her brother, whom she considers a perfect living example of Abnegation, choose Erudite. Through this shock, she strives to select between Abnegation (and her family) or Dauntless (and never seeing her family again). She chooses Dauntless and soon Tris flies free, proving to herself and all her doubters that she believes in ‘ordinary acts of bravery, and in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.’

The Dauntless initiation process taught Tris fighting skills, forging friends and enemies, and facing her fears. But her Divergence, her uniqueness, gave her the tools to fight for the helpless. For all her inner struggles with her perceived selfishness, Tris excels at self-sacrifice.

Many reviewers compared Divergent to The Hunger Games and I will grant some small similarity. But I liked Divergent much more for its intelligent plot, nice character development, affirmation of core values, re-iteration of corrupting influence of power (or the pursuit of controlling power) and I even enjoyed the innocent romance.

A very quick read (and hard to put down once you start) which I highly recommend Divergent to teens (and adults).