Now if we bought these same items a few years ago the receipt for said “in between” shopping might run about 12 inches long listing our items, cost of each beside each one, subtotal then savings deducted, tax added and then the total. Probably have the name/number of the store plus date and time on the top. No big deal right?

But these days?

This looks more like a nightly cash out of a clerk’s cash drawer after a busy day at the local Rite Aid instead of a receipt for some “in between” groceries and a few sundries.

So this is one of the ways we’re saving our planet’s environment I take it?

The Bush administration has put a two-year stop to solar energy projects on federal lands in Arizona and other Western states while it studies their environmental impact.

Source: Bush administration halts solar energy projects on federal lands: Phoenix Business Journal

Yeah right. This is the same Administration that’s pushing domestic oil drilling in some of the last true wilderness areas left in this country regardless of the environmental impact but their worried about the impact of these solar energy projects?

If this isn’t a ploy to obtain more time for pushing domestic oil drilling then we’re all living in the Matrix and I’m Morpheus. At this point I wouldn’t doubt in the least that this current “oil crisis” was purposely manufactured by our own government in order to further convince Congress and the American people that domestic oil drilling is the only solution.

I must be in a bad mood or something but this sounds like a whole lot of BS to me.

Many thanks to Grandad. This absolutely horrendous, disjointed post is all his fault but he’ll probably blame it on K8.

And here we go….

I seem to be getting older these days. Not only am I getting older but it seems to be becoming a habit, a perpetual thing if you will. Knowing full well that it’s always a changing world out there, I began to feel that dreaded sensation of old(er) age that life was beginning to pass me by. I just didn’t seem to be attracted to all that new and interesting stuff out there. A mere 5 years ago, life at home was nothing like it is now and things like having a PC and being connected to the Internet hadn’t been part of my life for at least 4 years at that point. When I finally came to live with my honey in old Stove Pipe City, I was more than way behind as far as the old WWW was concerned and my disabilities from my time in the service had begun to take their toll. In short, my health was lousy.

But being a veteran of the Cold War, serving as one of those strange, stubborn, thickheaded, tenacious, twisted breeds of Navy men called submariners (who are always on the best bad behavior), it didn’t take too long to pick myself back up from the stresses of taking care of my folks, getting back to work and start building my life back up again. I even enrolled in the VA and let me tell you, life as a veteran hasn’t been the same since.

Even so, every night I still dreamed of the ocean mist in my face as I stood watch on the bridge of that submarine during the rare times we were surfaced, watching the reflections of the sky dancing on the surface of the water and thinking how beautiful the day was and of all the destruction those nuclear weapons we and other subs carried hidden from sight under the ocean could do to this world, erasing these beautiful days forever. One saving grace was that my boat was a “fast attack” and our job was to prevent just such a thing from happening…and we did.

We pause from this utterly disjointed, meandering post in order to change the subject entirely…

An oddball and an “off the subject” thing I might mention (so I can use up several tags at once) is that I was born in 1959 and this makes me one of those boomers. In fact a lot of these folks my age and up go around advertising this fact quite a lot lately and even more of the same age that hate the word boomer and spend a lot of time making sure everyone knows it. And strangely enough a lot of these folks have blogs out on the WWW. In fact, we have a regular blogging community having adventures in SEO, metrics systems advertising and spam protection using Akismet and Spam Karma. They’re blogging about the going green, clean energy, global warming, warm winters, the weather and hernias. A lot of them also have WordPress installs because they decided to “do it themselves” no less and these bloggers have learned all about wp plugins and the havoc a bad one can cause, upgrading from WordPress 2.1 to WordPress 2.2 to WordPress 2.3 and hacking their own themes. So who says you have to be young to do this?

I find these blogs to be the best reading around with a ton of great info and insight to be found. A regular digital democracy by jeezum!

I call these folks (and myself) BC Bloggers (Before Computers).

We now return you to more of the same boring nonsense as before…

So one morning, shortly before the holidays, while reading a new Yankee Magazine I found myself taking interest in my surroundings again and with a gift of a digital camera from my wonderful lady, my fascination with gadgets came flooding back. Another item I received also helped peak that fascination was my first set of hearing aids. One disability I ended up with from my time spent poking holes in the ocean was being deaf and since this particular form of deafness is self perpetuating, I began to realize that if I was going to hold down a job, I needed to be able to hear. Logical thinking on my part I thought.

By the way, do me a favor and don’t call me hearing impaired please. I’m deaf…period! Thank you very much.

And so came my first pair of hearing aids (complete with remote control no less) and life in general changed drastically–I now could hear the comments made behind my back. Made life at work a great deal more interesting for those so called friends of mine and their brilliant ideas. All of a sudden they found themselves on the business end of my subtle, dry, sarcastic wit and humor as I quietly stabbed them with their own misc nonsense.

Getting back to what I was saying…at home with the cats, I was just thinkin’ on how I just might finally want to get me that new computer so with hearing aids in my ears I began to peruse the local community at large to see if there was anywhere nearby where I might do this. Okay…there wasn’t. Up here in the Northeast Kingdom by the Canadian border where the local environment, the seasons and the amenities thereof hasn’t changed for the last 50-60 years, I decided the only way to get this new PC was to order it online. My lady was nice enough to let me use her computer to do so.

Too make an already too long post short…

Six months later, DSL finally came to our area (yup, 2004 and all we had was dial up) and with DSL…the blog was born and I was back in business with all my backwoods tech yearnings at full steam. Of course I started with a first post and quickly followed with a few misc posts but then went on to more specific subjects like absentmindedness, at which I excel, posts about space and science and basically ending up wandering all over the place with my various ramblings which entirely confused any readers that happened to stop by thus establishing my reputation as a complete knee biter. Google became my best friend and I even managed to take on a few blog projects put forth by Liz Strauss. I managed to survive them as well (just kidding Liz).

I wrote up posts about my lady’s Long Meadow Farms Quilts (her long time quilting business), quilts, quilting and stained glass. Just so you know, I test each new quilt that she makes by sleeping under it. Good God, I hope she doesn’t read this.

Things have slowed me down of course. I spent quite awhile at the VA hospital in Boston, MA for an endoscopy and surgery for instance and while I was there I spent the initial recovery wandering around as best I could, gazing out of the various windows at the grand vista that was Jamaica Plains…okay, maybe not exactly what one would call a vista but it was better than gazing at all the old farts like me laying in bed in various stages of decomposition. That can get to you after awhile so the hallways and various lounges were the places the hospital staff often found themselves searching after they finally noticed that I had been missing for a day and a half.

Once, while gazing out one of these windows, I noticed that part of the window had been cut out and had been replaced with one of those flat panel LCD TV’s that’s replacing the old CRT sets these days. There was a live interview with an author of some best selling book going on at the time and in my slightly drugged state I remember thinking that this author guy was a real windows live writer. I found out later on that some other author, in a fit of jealous rage, tried to burn down the poor guy’s home and although the local fire department was able to save most of his property, they said it was a real scribefire.

Amazing what you can learn in a hospital. Even more amazing what one will go through to get just three more tags taken care of for the sake of two extremely bad puns.

So there you have it. After starting 3 new sites and keeping one of them, through the 1st writings of nearly 15 years ago to finally publishing on my own blog, seeing my blog referenced in the news section of the online version of Time Magazine, through snow days, spring and Springfield….I’m finally done with this unbelievably horrendous, disjointed, discombobulated, post!

I may not exactly be the person of the year, but you can just call me the ultimate tag warrior! Now where’s my pogo stick?…I’m outta here!

Disclaimer: Of course a few of the tags and categories had the same name which means I really need to weed these things out and none of the tags/categories are necessarily related to the various horrendous, disjointed post subjects. And since I use these tags for my Related Posts feature I decided not to list all them at the bottom of this post for obvious reasons.

Oh yeah, and I simply could not find a way to use Firefox/Thunderbird and JT Evening News so I…wait minute, I guess I used them after all. Good deal!

Did I pass?

Update 11/15/07: It has been pointed out to me that I haven’t tagged anyone with this meme yet. This was strictly due to the fact that whatever brain cells I had left fried for good after I finished this horrible thing. In short, I had to take a few narcotics and pass out on the floor. But now it’s morning and it seems not all brain cells died in the fire of the moment and since my friend Cat stopped by to comment and had the audacity to state that she had over 100 categories and it would be too much hard work…after I managed to shoehorn over 100 tags and categories into the above post…consider yourself tagged Cat!

I also tag Elaine, Emma and Micki as well since I admire these ladies as writers and also because I haven’t given them any reason to harass me lately.

And yes…I was scrutinized by the originator of this meme, K8 and I did indeed pass. Almost makes it all worth it.

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

And here’s my small contribution to the cause:

Arctic Melt Opens Northwest Passage

Climate models had projected the passage would eventually open as warming temperatures melted the Arctic sea ice—but no one had predicted it would happen this soon.

“We’re probably 30 years ahead of schedule in terms of the loss of the Arctic sea ice,” said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.

“We’re on this fast track of change.”

I’m looking up at a plaque that resides upon the wall above my computer desk. It’s a relatively bad relief of a nuclear Fast Attack sub surfaced at the north pole. The name of the sub is called the USS Silversides, one of the “stretch hull” versions of the Sturgeon class of nuclear powered fast attack boats that were the workhorse of the US Naval submarine force during the 70′s and 80′s, a very volatile time of the Cold War in it’s last two decades. On this plaque is inscribed “North Pole. On Top Of It all. ICEX 81. USS Silversides”.

What we were doing up there is irrelevant but the point of mentioning this at all is that we surveyed and plotted the underwater “ice-scape” of the Arctic ice pack surrounding the north pole for a hundred miles around and more and I can assure everyone, since I was the one who initially came up with the technique for effectively plotting this strange and extremely hazardous underwater ice field, that there were no kilometer wide open areas of water anywhere within several tens of miles surrounding the North Pole. My boat had to punch through over 4 feet of ice (a “thin” spot…for a sub that is) just to gain the surface.

Now, 26 years later we have this:

(Photo source: National Geographic News)

North Pole, July 20, 2007? For most of us, swimming a kilometer (0.62 miles) in under 19 minutes is a lofty, if not impossible, goal. But swimming in below freezing water?

When British endurance swimmer and adventurer Lewis Gordon Pugh dove into the icy waters of the North Pole on Sunday, he had two goals in mind: become the first person to swim in the North Pole, and draw attention to global warming. And that’s just what he did.

Gordon swam one kilometer in 18 minutes and 50 seconds in temperatures of minus 1.8 degree Celsius (28.7 degrees Fahrenheit), ?the coldest water ever swum in.

“I hope my swim will inspire world leaders to take climate change seriously. The decisions which they make over the next few years will determine the biodiversity of our world,? Pugh told the world media after emerging from his icy dip.

Pugh, who swam in a water hole once covered by thick polar ice, said “I am obviously ecstatic to have succeeded, but this swim is a triumph and a tragedy: a triumph that I could swim in such ferocious conditions but a tragedy that it’s possible to swim at the North Pole. ”

Source: National Geographic News Photo Gallery: Week in Photos: Space Geysers, ”Fossil Fish,” More

Whether by some natural cycle of things, man-made or more than likely; a combination of both, global warming is very real and from the point of the general population, it’s not trying to slow the process down or attempt to reverse it that matters. For the average human on this globe, it’s preparing for what may turn out to be a major climatic shift. And not just for ourselves but much more importantly, preparing our children and grandchildren who will have to live in what may turn out to be a very different world than the one we know now.

Even if global warming doesn’t turn out to be as severe as some predict for the long run, we need to instill the idea into our children that it is our responsibility to take care of this world we call home and not to interfere in it’s natural processes by polluting it’s biosphere with the waste products of our apathy. This is our home and the home of countless other species as well and we, the people, are the ones who can make our world a safe haven for all life forms on this planet or we can be the ones to ruin it.

A short, cold swim for a man, a great decision for mankind. Let’s hope we choose wisely.

Technorati tags: Blog Action Day, Global warming, north pole, submarines, submariners, Cold war, USS Silversides, Lewis Gordon Pugh, northwest passage

The ever questionable Wikipedia defines writers block as this:

Writer’s block can be closely related to depression and anxiety^{[citation needed]}, two mood disorders that reflect environmentally caused or spontaneous changes in the brain’s frontal lobe. This is in contrast to hypergraphia, more closely linked to mania, in which the changes occur primarily in the temporal lobe. These processes, and their implications for treatment, are described in neurologist Alice Flaherty’s book The Midnight Disease.

Full article

Hmmm. That’s funny, I don’t feel depressed. Maybe a bit down because one of my disabilities from my time in the service is now making my future uncertain. Well, let’s step back and look at that again:

• Feeling lousy
• Medication for above making me really woozy
• Missing work again
• Can’t even do most household chores
• They changed my GI doctor at the VA so I have to start all over

Alright, I’ll just have to be honest about this. I am feeling down and it’s obviously affecting my ability to come up with my usual outstanding content or perhaps just the word content is a more accurate. So I sat down and decided to just write a post like this one. Seems to have worked somewhat.

But wait…there’s more to this that meets the eye as the above article continues:

However, another interpretation of writer’s block, sometimes confused with scant output, is given in the book Silences, by Tillie Olsen, who argues that historically many women and working-class writers have been unable to devote themselves to, or concentrate on, their writing because their social and economic circumstances prevent them from doing so.

Okay, I can well understand about the working class on account of I’m one of them but women? Why are they more prone to writers block? So I looked around on the web in search of why this might be but to no avail. Plenty of women writers writing about writers block but no reason why women are more susceptible to writers block. Considering that all female writers are not necessarily comprised of young, married women with kids (although that hasn’t even appeared to stop any of them from writing and writing well), I have not found reason one why this should be. Perhaps I should ask Liz, Sara and Emma if they know.

Either way, it took me all day just to decide to write this up. Sometimes it seems that just beginning a post with no idea what I’m going to write about and letting it find it’s own way is often successful. At least something comes out. It’s kind of fun watching where it takes me as if my mind and hands were a separate entities.

So in order to keep this thing from wandering too far afield and getting into territories completely unknown plus the fact that it’s time to watch a movie, I shall end this now. Tomorrow is another day and a trip to VA to see if there’s something that can be done about this situation of mine.

This just might be what’s supposed to happen…ya’ never know.