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.

First, the Archives that used to live in the sidebar as Categories and Monthly listings as with most blogs has been moved. You see, this blog, as I am in life, is not like most others despite the typical layout and besides that—I have more future intentions for my sidebar than just for simple navigation. Therefor I have moved all the Archives from the sidebar to an Archives Page, the link to which lives at the top of the header with the other tabs. I figured that this is a much more presentable way of doing things and I also figure that if the reader is looking for a post(s) from the past or all the posts from a specific category then they won’t be much interested in the main page anyway.

The second change which is much more subtle I suppose is the new Pages section that now lives at the top of the sidebar. This will be filled with more selections than the one you currently see but for now you will see a Page called Plugins. No, these are not plugins I have built since I am not up to that point yet in doing code and may never be for that matter. Rather, this is a Page of the plugins I currently use (activated that is) so if you’re wondering how some function is accomplished or why things look the way they do, here is where you can find out.

The last but probably most important change (to me anyway) is the header image that graces the top of every page in this blog. The blog theme is called Misty Look by Sadish Bala with some small functional changes by yours truly to accommodate some of the plugins I have installed and also to correct some bad navigational code for single posts. But the header image in Misty Look I have exchanged for one of my own. I took this picture a couple years ago when my honey and I were exploring the surrounding territory one Spring weekend. And going with the original theme’s “Misty” appearance, I softened it up some. The most important part of this image however, is the little guy sitting on the right hand bank of the small river, apparently just enjoying the Spring day and just thinking about this and that and the other thing. For those of you that may not recognize him, it’s Walt Kelly’s rather famous Pogo Possum. You can read up on these two by following the links I have provided but suffice it to say I have that little possum sitting on the bank of that river for some very personal reasons that include my father’s life as well as mine. I’m very glad he’s there. The standard attributions and copyright stuff is down at it’s usual location at the bottom of the footer. That’s all the changes for now. Thanks for dropping by.

As an ex-cold war submariner who, along with his fellow “bubbleheads” (on both sides by the way), spent an average of 300 days out of the year poking holes through ocean depths (along with generally ruining their health) doing their absolute best at trying to keep the world from blowing itself up, I find it increasingly disheartening when I read about the other areas today such as North Korea and whoever happens to be pounding on the table over in the middle east territories attempting (or perhaps already succeeding) to develop and test nuclear weapons. Possibly the kind of nuclear weapons that were first developed by the US and the (then) Soviet Union…dirty ones!

Long after our two countries laid down their horrible weapons of mass destruction (and I absolutely refuse to delve into what events may have caused that to happen), these (censored) people want to start it all over again and by what I’ve seen over the past many years, these particular governments absolutely do not have anywhere near the awareness, discipline, objectivity and presence of mind that the two superpowers of the cold war can be credited with. After all, we decided to make a change for the better and it’s worked so far. I understand things don’t always pan out but at least we’re still trying.

In the article, North Korea had this to say:

The North, however, said it will “never use nuclear weapons first and strictly prohibit any threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear transfer,” defending its nuclear weapons as a protection from “the U.S. threat of aggression” and a measure “to safeguard peace and stability on the Korean peninsula.”

I’m sorry, but that’s like saying “trust me” and when it comes to nuclear weapons capability…I didn’t even trust us.

Now with Iran saying that it’s pursuit of nuclear technology is only for the purpose of providing power to it’s people the phrase “you’ve got to be kidding” comes readily to mind. I’m sorry folks, normally I’m a person that’s fairly open-minded with an mostly objective point of view but when it comes to “pursuit of nuclear technology” by these two countries alone, you might understand when I say I tend to have a rather dim view on the whole thing.
In my opinion we’d be very foolish to trust in anything that they said.

Since I’m always trying to see the possible consequences of future actions, the Australian news site, News.com.au has an interesting “what if” article in the Courier Mail section on the current problem of sanctions against Iran for it’s push for nuclear technology. I recommend giving both articles a read over..

I don’t usually like to include this sort of post in the blog however, with my particular type of service background, I needed to let out some of my anxiety. Most people won’t understand where this anxiety comes from but there is some who understand it all too well.

We had a saying during the cold war that if a nuclear war ever did occur, Ground Zero was the best possible place to be.

A nuclear war (anywhere) would be the most devastating war the human race ever unleashed upon itself.

It would also be the shortest.

I’d hate to think that me and all my underwater cohorts had all our time and effort wasted for us.

I agree with Walt Kelly:

We have met the enemy…and he is us. (Pogo)

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