Why Is My Blog Here If I Don't Write???

I should be ashamed of myself. Left this so long I couldn't remember how to find my writing page, or whatever this is called. Time flies by and I neglect everything, but the older one gets, the faster it goes and I find now I have too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. 

But what is this blog for? Why do I have it? How do I find the time to write in (on?) it?
Well, I'm a writer, so I must have something to say. Ah, but this spot does not seem to have been, nor will probably never be for much of anything of any import, either to me or to anyone else, but merely musings when I consider something I like or dislike and have time to write it out. Much of the time a little boring even to me as I reread it. As I read other's blogs, I find I am not alone... about half the blogs I have seen (and forgive me any who read this, I don't read that many) are like mine and just stuff that might be interesting to relatives, while the ambitious ones are full of things of interest to the general public, like the wonderful ones written by knitters who want to give lots of info to other knitters. I love those. I haven't written a knitting pattern in over 40 years, so I am useless to them... too bad. l used to write patterns for 'Woman's Day' and a couple of other magazines that are gone now. I don't even have them, as in a fit of cleaning my apartment out, my daughter threw out all the old magazines, including the ones with my work in them. Ah, well, as I often say... that's the way the cookie crumbles. Now I shall go have another cookie and chat with a friend who just arrived at my door.

More later....... who knows?

Missed a Month Once More...

Behind me plays "Dountown Abbey" (I'm a bit unsure about the spelling) as I realize that once again I have neglected to write here. But then, I have a journal I neglect, fiction writing I neglect, even poetry I neglect, so why should I worry, why should I care... oh, god, singing again, you must realize dear Peggy that that voice is dreadful. Except to dear Arlo Guthrie, who once told us all to just sing, to hell with the people who said we couldn't. As for all the things I 'should' be doing, they are rife, so who cares.

THE FOURTH                 7/4/2012

The Fourth of July is tomorrow... but god knows when this will arrive in my blogspot, as I now have forgotten how to get into the writing part of my blogspot. I can find the bs... all I have written, but now where to write... probably because I haven’t written in it in ages and ages... and my little mind is shrinking with age. Oh, it is hell to get old... watch it kids, you will find out eventually!!!

Ah, but I do remember the 4th of July... so many 4ths. Used to love the 4th of my early childhood... Port Austin and the fireworks set off by Dummy DeMay and staying up late to go down to the main beach to watch, or sometimes just lying on blankets on our beach, away from the noise... where we could just see the great bursts of color above the public beach, close enough.

But my favorite fourths were in Chicago, of all places. I kinda miss the "Old Fashioned Fourth of July" we used to have in Old Town in Chicago. All of our local politicians would rally in Lincoln Park, where they set up a stage and lots of folding chairs, and people came from all over the area for the celebration... lots of balloons and speeches and games for the kidlets... and neighbors meeting neighbors and mixing with all the politicians. Old Town was a very Democratic district and an area where the 'workers' and the intellectuals met regularly... lots of Univ. people there -- artists, writers, performers, and lots of union organizers... a very fun crowd of people. Our local representative, whose name I cannot recall... was a brilliant man and very well liked... a charmer... and the whole crowd was always interesting. I miss all of them... and my daughter still talks about the fun she had at those gatherings when she was a kid. Don't think I have ever felt as patriotic anywhere else as I did there. 

Well, actually, I think maybe I might have when I saw my family names on the big memorial for the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Three of my ancestors were killed in that battle. It's a wonder the family survived considering the number of us killed during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, name any ‘Americn’ war. Of course I now feel that I should at least be helping the Occupy crowd start another revolution... god knows we need one... and will even more if very many republicans are elected to any offices in the next election... I hope most of them are thrown out, particularly the weird and stupid tea partiers... god or Buddha or Krishna or maybe a friendly devil...  someone save us from those idiots, who have no idea what this country has come through, or where it should be going. They are merely the basically greedy, little people with not much education, and less sense, who think that they should not be helping anyone else, but should have all the best for themselves. They really do not seem to have any idea how government works, but think it should work for them alone, I feel.

I am so sick and tired of the elaborate Fourth of July Celebrations put together by the powers that be, and broadcast on PBS. The Capitol lit in red white and blue... some symphony orchestra with added violins and trumpets sitting out front and crowds spilled out on every green spot they can find... always the same old raucous classical pieces with lots of drums and banging cymbals... a cannon shot or two and more banging of cymbals to finish. But, unfortunately, that is what I am left with these days. I cannot manage the long trek over to the fields on the other side of town to sit in the fog and hope to be able to see the fireworks. Too cold and too far away these days. I no longer can stand for ages on the curb waiting for Dykes on Bikes and the Pride Parade, and I am far too old to go and sit in Crissy Field, wrapped in blankets, waiting for an occasional flash of fireworks through the low-lying fog. So on with the clanging of cymbals whoever is conducting the symphony in front of the Capitol this year...... bang!

Tues. March 8... a Big Day

This is an OLD essay, written March 8, 2011, that sat around as a draft.

Today is a big day for at least two reasons. First, it is the one-hundredth anniversary of a day Jessie, my mother, the old Suffragette, loved: International Women's Day. We discussed it at our poetry group last week, and everyone is writing a poem for the day, to be read next week. In the meantime, the great intellectual in the group, David, read us a story about a Russian woman who worked and fought in Paris for women's rights. David of course, as usual, knows more about Women's Day and the whole history of the fight for women's rights than any of the women in the group. But then, he undoubtedly knows more about anything that might come up than anyone, male or female in the group. So Jessie, be reassured... the day is becoming better known and better celebrated now, and women are slowly and surely, at least in the industrial world, becoming not only better educated and healthier, but also slowly moving up the pay scale toward men. Not equal yet in my lifetime, nor in Whitney's, but perhaps in my grandchildren's lifetime. Callie could make it... after all, in fourth grade she tested in the top two percentile of children in the country. You go, Callie and make us all proud!! Jess would love you.

Charlie Rose, as one would expect, has a program with three women discussing what is happening by and with women of the world. Tina Brown, who is now editor of Newsweek is one, the woman who formed Women 4 Women, Zaineb Salbi, another is Dina Powell, who does women's start-ups around the world, for Goldman Sachs. All of them talk about the fact that women MUST be allowed a place at the table to not only help a country build itself up well, but also in all war and peace negotiations. i.e. EQUALITY... or perhaps let us show YOU how to do it, as we can do it better.

Secondly, today is Mardi Gras down in New Orleans... and as Whitney is wont to tell me, in all of Louisiana, including her little town, where their third house is located. I hope they had better weather than they expected... well, at least no reports of hurricanes and the news photos showed millions of people celebrating in the streets of New Orleans. I was sure happy to see that. God knows they need the visitors. They are rather like us in S.F... they need the tourists to stay alive. We haven't had much 'tourist weather' lately and I hope our summer is better this year then it was last year. Spring has at least given us gorgeous flowering fruit trees and some very nice blossoms. Hope it bodes well for Summer and Fall. Actually, it matters to me little, as long as the sun shines on my lovely San Francisco. So now we have Lent. Does anyone observe Lent anymore? Ah, school days, when it was fish, fish, fish.

My God, I’m Old As Babar                   

A short message on my radio the other day threw me for a loop. The morning commentator was announcing all the events and birthdays of the day and finished up with “And Babar the Elephant is 80.” Recoiling in shock, I thought, good heavens, I read those books to my children. Weren’t they ‘old’ then? I wasn’t reading first editions, Babar was an institution, or so I thought. But no, he is in my generation.

Oh dear, am I older than god? And, am I to be constantly reminded of my age by these young people on the radio, on TV, everywhere, saying in amazement how very old everyone and everything that surrounds us is?

Sometimes it scares me when I look around and see all of the things that this generation takes for granted as having been here ‘forever.’ I can remember when there was one telephone in a home. Well, not even in every home. We had one that had a separate earpiece that hung on a hook at the left side of the tall, standing phone. We children did not use the phone, it was for adults, and my grandmother was afraid to use it. She was sure it brought only bad news.

We entertained ourselves with books (my family had a full library of them), board games, and ‘playing outside.’ Oh, we had a radio, a large one, but my mother considered most of the children’s programs to be a bit ‘low class’ so my sister and I did not listen to “Little Orphan Annie” or “Jack Armstrong, All American Boy.” However, I can still sing the theme songs of those programs, as I simply sat beneath the window of the house next door, where the children were allowed to listen to everything, and heard the programs. That was my ‘playing outside.’

Oh, we were allowed to listen to some radio programs. There was one that I suppose was considered the “Sesame Street” of its day, It was a pallid little show with nursery rhymes and I suppose proper children’s stories, but I can neither remember its name nor actual form, only the theme song, which rattles around in my head, da, da, ti, da/ti, da, da, ti da/ti, da, da, ti, da, ti, da da, followed by a lovely lady opening the show. Undoubtedly a “Miss” someone, as in the insipid children’s shows that were on TV during my daughter’s era of childhood. I did not allow her to watch them, she was sent to ‘play outside.’

I moved to San Francisco at a rather advanced age and retired here. After retirement I volunteered at a senior center. My first assignment was teaching seniors to knit and crochet, as I had been a teacher of crafts most of my life. I had learned to use computers on my copywriting jobs in advertising in Chicago and owned the first Mac, a 128K, which I loved, so I naturally fell into the role of teacher of computing to seniors. There were no books on this, or rules, so I made up my own, writing the directions for turning on the computer and what to do next. We were using something called DOS, which probably means nothing to most people who will see this. It was a clunky Microsoft program, with very uncertain directions for use, which started with step three or four.

When I asked a young man from Microsoft why they were written without steps one, two and three, his answer was, “Well, everyone knows that.” I don’t think I ever got through to him that yes, all those engineers at Microsoft knew ‘that,’ but the rest of the world didn’t. That’s why I still own Macs, they always tell you steps one, two and three, with illustrations showing them, including where the ‘on’ switch is located.

Ah, I am so old I raise laughter in those younger than I when I tell them that I sat at a computer in the offices of SeniorNet surrounded by eager computer ‘geeks’ and in amazement typed a conversation with the president of New Zealand. I was ‘talking’ to that charming lady, on the computer, and not paying the phone company to do it. That was, I was talking to her until the line was broken, no doubt by a storm or some such, and we were left, still in a flurry of excitement, thrilled to have gotten through to New Zealand online. Now I chat with my friend Connie on Skype and think nothing of it.

She is always on Skype. I taught her how to use her computer -- over the phone, with me, the Mac expert in San Francisco, to her in Chicago. After a few lessons she asked me why the little arrow went up when she moved the mouse down and down when she moved the mouse up. I sat, confused for a moment, then asked where she had the cord to the mouse. Connie said she had it where the mouse’s tail should be, at the back. Such logic I had seldom seen... she was holding the mouse upside down. Well, it was just the way one would hold a real mouse, wasn’t it? Of course.

Connie is younger than I, as is almost everyone in the world. I did teach her the basics on the computer, as I have so many people, but she now outshines me. She went on to get a degree in computer usage, and teaches things like 3-D animation, etc. Things that are beyond my knowledge, as are many of the twenty-first century’s innovations. But then, when you are older than Babar, there have got to be a few things you don’t know about or understand.

Goodbye Steve

One does not have to use a last name to say goodbye to this American genius. Besides, we all called him Steve.  Now we have lost an American original... a great designer and creative genius who put his stamp on every techie move in two centuries.  We have lost a man whose ideas have circled the globe... who is known better in other countries than in his own... a man whose beautiful, intelligent products changed the life of this world. Nothing will ever be the same as it was when I was young... because of Steve Jobs. OK, I know life is not fair, but I just wish I could have given Steve my extra years to make he world a better place. We so desperately need genius like his at this time in our poor misbegotten country.

I am a writer. Steve Jobs changed my life. No more carbon paper, no more 'doing it all over,' no more whiteout. I worked in advertising, as a copywriter. We used mainframes and they were terrible. If more than four people worked on a mainframe at one time, the damned things slowed down to around 40wpm. For people like me, who typed 75wpm, it was disaster... to a VP in my office, it was hell. She threw the mainframe monitor into the hall, screamed obsceneties at the VP who bought the piece of trash and went downstairs and bought her own Mac in 1984. By 1986 every creative person in the agency had a Mac. The copywriters could cut and paste, change things around without redoing everything... and the artists, ah, every artist I have ever known... all fell in love with the Mac... so easy to work on... the perfect canvas for their work. Every creative person in advertising had a Mac in no time.

Having seen the wonderful "1984 won't be like 1984 anymore" ad, in 1985 I got my hands on the tiny 128K Mac,  I taught myself to use it, then taught myself PageMaker 1.0. I put a twelve page newsletter on one little disc... well, after switching discs... swap, swap, swap... first the system went in (the 128K didn't HAVE a system), then the program... then the disc I’d work on. I learned by doing... from the great manuals Apple wrote, with pictures of where you were, and what you were doing. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki, the original Mac Evangalist and one of the greatest salesmen in the U.S., the people who wrote the programs learned to make manuals in the 'Mac Style' and I learned easily. I work now on my huge  iMac, the latest of a long series.

Steve was the computer person with good taste and a sense of what the next thing should be... always far ahead of the field, nothing he ever did was done without his impeccable good taste. One of the people eulogizing him said: "Every time you use a computer, a smartphone, an ipad, any of the copies or any piece of technological wizardry... you are using something with a little bit of Steve it it, whether it is an Apple product or from another company.” So I write on this lovely machine with a terrible lump in my throat and instant thought of the man who created it.

I weep as I write... I shall miss you Steve, for I felt you were part of my family. There will not be another great design genius with such good taste in my lifetime... nor in my children's or children's childrens. Good bye and bless you Steve for what you have given us. My heart goes out to Steve’s family and I hope his children inherit his great good mind.

Older Than God

So, I keep trying... one more year has gone by. Nothing on earth like having a birthday on a tragic day for the whole country. Do they sing happy songs on your b/d, so they say cheerful things... no, I get mainly, "Oh, poor you... oh, I'm so sorry... is it really your birthday, etc., etc." And I can't even find Comic whatever to type this in, and the purple isn't even as nice as the old purple and the b/d is over, and I forgot to write something, so here I am now, not doing very well... and it is already the 14th. At least THIS isn't a bad day... although of late all the days are kinda bad for our poor country. The TeaBaggers are going to be the death of all of us. Where on earth did they come from. I had no idea that his sad, beaten country had so many other stupid people like dubya. But then, I am so old that I remember when we learned something in school. For example: I, unlike Sarah Palin, learned about Paul Revere -- not that "he galloped through town warning the British, shooting off his guns and ringing his bell." I learned about him warning AGAINST the British... and that they were the enemy at the time of the revolutionary war, something Sarah probably never heard of. Or that, as Michele Bachman opined, the 'Founding Fathers' freed the slaves... that Thomas Jefferson, he was a great man and he freed the slaves. Sure Michele, whatever you say, yeah, he freed the slaves. What has happened to the educational system here?  Wish he had freed that.

When I took the Mensa test in Chicago back in the early sixties, the top 2% of people in this country had an IQ of 145 or higher; sadly, by the time I got out here and was working with SeniorNet, one of the men online informed me he was a member of Mensa, as he had an IQ of 138. That's a quick slip in the intelligence level of a country, and disturbs me immensely. Of course one could never imagine that either of the two 'girls' above as even vaguely intelligent. Both of them sound and act like someone who didn't do well in school, and one wonders if it is all talk that they actually went to college or university. Then, even more sadly, I watch Jay Leno and his "Jay Walking" segments, done not just 'on the street' but many of the segments done at colleges and universities in California. The people he asks questions of rarely can identify pictures of our Presidents or Vice Presidents, or answer simple questions one might ask of a child in grade school. We seem to be raising a whole generation of dolts and idiots, to join the previous generation (that of Palin and Bachman) of dolts and idiots... all of whom paid no attention in school.

I was enormously happy to chat with a taxi driver this week who told me that he asks for an absentee ballot so that he can sit down at the dining room table with his two boys, aged nine and eleven, so that he can go over all of the candidates and all of the bills on the ballots and discuss the pros and cons of everything there, and so teach the boys how to be good citizens. He and his wife, of course, have read to the boys since they were very young children. I am so pleased that I can say that about my own grandchildren. Their parents read to them, leading to their reading to themselves and the older girl reading to her two younger siblings. So, hopefully that generation will have at least five intelligent citizens. Oh, god, I surely hope so.