Future Poltergeist

 I want to share some of my favorite pictures of this past year. Right before we went up to Camp Van Vac this year, news broke about a comet that would be visible to the northwest, after sunset. I knew that this would line up perfectly with our nightly sunset watch and it did. We dutifully went out several nights and saw it. I got to play with the nighttime settings on my camera and I got this dandy. 

 I don't know if I've done a "things I'm thankful for" in a long time - or ever. Today seems like a good day to change that. I'm thankful for: My family, of course. I'm thankful for my children who are (often) wonderful. And my lovely wife. This past year has been a taxing one, with all of us stuck at home together. But I've come to appreciate them more than I think I would have if this was a typical year. (I'm also thankful for headphones, both theirs and mine.) The family I don't live with. I'm thankful for my brother and sister, who are both wonderful people. I'm thankful for my mom, who is also wonderful. I don't get to see them nearly as often as I'd like to and this year drove that home. The same is true of my aunts and uncles and cousins and so on. My friends, who I'm still attached to thanks to social media. Places like Facebook have their downsides but being able to quickly talk to so many people I hadn't seen i...

 One of the strangest things about being stuck in the pandemic is how completely unhooked from the normal passing of time I've become. Before the plague struck, the routine was largely: M-F, everyone leaves in the morning and comes home in the afternoon. We spend the evening together (over a shared meal or otherwise) and then go to bed with some thought to the next day. Sat/Sun, usually an outing. Possibly out for breakfast or brunch. Watch a sporting event one of the afternoons, possibly both. Sunday night has a feel of getting ready for the next week of work or school. This is no longer true. The FP Gal and the kids still have school and work but it's different. No one leaves home so it doesn't feel like they've broken away to a different thing. They simply go down to their various rooms and do their thing. The kids filter up at various times every morning and I try to keep the boys quiet. I see the ladies at lunch and again later in the afternoon when they're don...

 It's been so long since I've written anything that I should probably say something about how we're all doing.  Relia is now a teenager. She has a good, tight group of friends with which she is in constant contact. They're all good people and I'm very happy for her. She is artistic and capable and frustrated whenever she's told she can't do something Right Now. I'm impressed by how she will decide on a project and then jump right into it. At the moment she is leaning towards being a psychologist (psychiatrist? therapist?) and I'm sure she'd make a great one. DF is ten and loves gaming. He plays video games whenever he has a chance and is thinking of going into the field someday. In many ways he is a copy of me. Physically he looks like my younger twin, except he started growing his hair long at a much earlier age than I did. I'm sometimes frustrated that he isn't reading the same books that I did at his age, but he is a reader. In third g...

 Yesterday featured something unusual for this blog: a new post. Over the weekend I realized that I wished that I'd been blogging through this whole pandemic. It would have made for a nice record of this time period. I'm not sure why I didn't. Several people suggested keeping a diary. The fact that I didn't is purely my own fault. When I told this to the FP Gal she simply told me that the best thing I could do would be to start writing now . Which is what I'm doing.  I don't want to make the classic mistake where I promise that I'll do this every day and then fail to write a single new blog post ever again. What I'm doing is quietly deciding to bring the blog back from the dead and . . . write some stuff.  This used to be a habit of mine and I know that people used to check the blog daily to see if anything new was there. Maybe that will happen again, though no promises! In any case, it feels good to do this.  See you tomorrow!

 This past summer, I read some articles on the importance of buying physical media. Music on CDs, movies on DVDs and books in hard copies. There are several reasons for this, the most pointed one being that we live in an age where various people of influence have started to decree that some of things of the past should be kept away from people of the present. If you don't agree with them and still want to watch 'Gone With the Wind', you cannot depend on it being made available to you. Buy your own copy and the decision is completely in your own hands. Another good reason to actually own the goods, especially with movies and TV is that we don't know when things will drop off the face of the earth and become completely unavailable. Check out this article about one person's attempt to watch the movie 'Cocoon' earlier this year. It's unavailable to stream and long out of print. (The writer eventually buys a used DVD copy for $25.) 'Cocoon' was a pop...