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Hey, Walt, how's your chad hanging?
I have been sleeping through the night these days, but tonight I'm up
for a little nocturnal silence. Shortly the atomic clocks in the house
will reset themselves, giving me an extra hour to look out over the
lights of the dark valley. The street lights stretched out below look
like stars, and the valley is like a mirror of the sky. A little poetic
moment there.
We'll still have to reset all the digital clocks on all the gadgets
around the house in the morning. There should be some sort of
standard for setting time on an appliance. Each one has some
unique pushbutton pattern, and I get performance anxiety going
from one to the next. Apple should be in charge of all that. My
iPhone is the first cell phone I could figure out myself. These
electronic things don't have to be so alien. Don't even get me started
on the madness of the digital TV experience.
But I suppose I'm just another one of the dinosaurs not born into our
high tech world, but having it thrust upon me. I have a lot of
company. Each new generation gets busy with the workaday world,
and the next thing they know, some youngster is teaching them how
to operate all the labor-saving, read: labor-intensive, devices. It's
happening to daughter Cindy, and I am enjoying a good laugh at her
expense after all the ribbing I took from her. It seems that none of
us will escape the world in familiarity. A little social commentary
there.
So, the atomic clocks just flipped back to 1:00, and a light rain is
making tinny tapping sounds on the aluminum patio cover to
acknowledge the moment. November is still unpacking its bags, and
today will be the first day that temperatures won't reach the nineties.
The transformation will be complete with the Tuesday elections,
when the losers scuttle off to a crevice, like the scorpions around
here do, and hibernate until the heat of the next primary season
awakens them. I think there is a Hai Ku calendar moment here
somewhere.
Time to go back to bed, having experienced and noted the evidence
of whatever cusp it is that is going on around here.