What time is it?

By Dan Barber

What time is it... a simple question but with many answers. When I was a child and my Mom would tell be to get up out of bed and get ready for school, I might have been prompted to sleepily ask… “What time is it? She would respond, “It’s time for you to get your butt out of bed!”

Time is very important in our lives because we have a time when we are born, a time when we live, and a time when we die. Time itself may be eternal, or maybe not. The experts say that everything will end one day, but no one will be around to witness it. We weren’t around when time began, and I agree with the experts we won’t be around when the giant clock of space stops running.

I live in the desert and believe that the longer one lives in the desert the easier it is to be entertained, probably because there aren’t as many distractions out here as there are in a city.  I can sit in the shade for long times watching lizards do pushups on a hot rock. I can also stare at a huge granite boulder and wonder if it looked the same a couple of hundred years ago and will it look the same two hundred years into the future… when a giant boulder out here split in half a few years ago it was big news… at least to us here in the desert.

We have some of the cleanest air in Southern California and the night skies are light-pollution free, so I can stare off into space at night and wonder how small and insignificant we all are. When all is done and the grand ticking of our universal clock ceases the human existence will only have lasted for a fraction of a second… hopefully we will have left our mark by understanding and appreciating the time we’ve spent travelling through life, space and time.

Many philosophers in our history have sat and pondered the meaning of a lot of stuff, time being just one of the subjects. When I sit around pondering and enjoying stuff like hearing the laughter of my grandchildren playing, a clean blue sky or the antics of a desert lizard, some might think that I am just wasting my time… I don’t agree, I think that I’m enjoying my precious time because one day none of us will have any of it left.

What will they think of next?

By Dan Barber

I just discovered a new invention… a smart trash can!

Diane and I just went to the Commissary to pick up a few things we needed for our dinner tonight. For those who don’t know what a Commissary is, it’s a grocery store for military people. Anyway, Diane also needed to go to the “7-Day store”… military jargon for a convenience store that is open 7-Days a week… I am going to have to learn to speak and write using regular English when I retire next year… Sorry, I’m old and tend to be easily distracted which can cause me to ramble.

Anyway back to the new invention…I parked in a spot where Diane bumped into a cement trash can last year which caused very expensive damage to her computer operated vehicle (pick-up truck)… she is damn lucky the very expensive airbags didn’t deploy. I was able to wire her plastic bumper up to keep it from falling off and her hood wired shut so it wouldn't fly off while she was driving down the highway. The cement trash can didn’t suffer any damage.

The person in the 7-Day store who Diane reported the accident to said “Don’t worry we are going to replace those trash cans with “smart trash cans.” When Diane related that story to me today, I asked, “What in the hell is a smart trash can?” She said “it beeps when it’s full of trash.” I asked, “Can’t somebody who works at the 7-Day store like a “trash retrieval specialist” (janitor) just look in the trash can to see if it needs to be dumped?” This is an example of our conversations these days… Diane usually tells me something incredulous, and it might take me awhile to catch on.

A couple of years ago Diane bought a trash can that we don’t even have to touch to open. It has a sensor when you wave your hand over it, it opens. I explained to my younger grandchildren that the trash can in the pantry likes to eat little kids… and demonstrated it to them by waving their little hands over the lid of the trash can so it "could smell them." The demonstration scared the crap out of them and helped to keep them out of the pantry until they got a little bit older and discovered that grandpa is full of BS, rambling again, sorry.

I don’t think that I will purchase a “smart trash can” until they teach it to separate the regular garbage from the recyclable garbage, automatically roll out to the street without prodding on trash day so the “Trash Retrieval” truck driver can crush the smart trash can with a claw while he or she dumps it in the back of his or her truck.  Heck, the garbage can even stay in the can for a week as it won’t even stink… because I can line the trash can with the newly invented odor eliminating trash can liners!

I think the smart thing for the 7-Day store to do, would be to keep the cement trash cans so people can’t knock their expensive plastic “smart trash cans” out of the way so they can drive through the store… they would have to change the store’s name to a “Proceed Through the 7-Day Store”… in civilian speak “Drive-Through Convenience Store,” open 7-days a week.

Living Life One Day at a Time

By Dan Barber

The countdown has started. In the past few years I have tried to slow down and enjoy every day as it came. At times in the past I marked off days on the calendar like a mad man until a set goal or event was achieved. I finally realized by doing that I didn’t enjoy each of those days as I should have, they represented just another day.

Have you ever come to realize that chasing a goal was a lot more fun then actually reaching the goal?  Later in life I realized that if you find the greener grass on the other side of the hill you may have to mow it.

Sometimes my goals were well worth achieving. It might have been getting married, the end of a tour of duty with the Navy, it could have been graduating from a school, or the birth of a child… now it is the end of a career.  I will be retiring from the Navy for a second time on the final work day of September 2013… the first time I retired from the Navy was in July 1989 after serving 20-years on active duty. This time I will be retiring from the Navy after marking off another 20-year career, but this time as a civilian employee… in May of next year I will be getting a 40-year federal length of service pin, which will probably end up in the “junk” drawer with the rest of my career memorabilia… what is important to me is the fact that regardless of the consternation of some politicians I will start collecting 3 federal government pension checks, Navy, Civil Service and Social Security.

I look back on the days of my life thinking they have gone by in a flash… maybe I regret not taking the time each of those days to enjoy them as I might have at the time.  There are the memories of special moments in those days that I have saved in my mind that I hope won’t fade away.  For example one of those special moments I experienced was on an airliner as I was headed home from Vietnam, we were flying over the Pacific Ocean at night, and I swore to myself that I would not forget the reflection in the plane’s window at that time because it meant that I was headed home and it was one of the happy times in my life.

Maybe the days aren’t as important as the memorable moments are… the special moments we will always remember… it’s possible we won’t remember the date, time of day or even the year, but the moment will stay with us forever… when we met our spouse, (July 8, 1968… the same day I originally joined the Navy), the day when I first got to hold one of my children or one of my grandchildren.

There are the sad moments of course, but hopefully the millions of happy moments will outweigh the sad ones.  I mentioned in an earlier post that perhaps our experience in Heaven will be the ability to relive the wonderful moments of our lives as if it were the first time.  My father told me this in a dream about two weeks after he passed away… my Dad never lied to me.

That idea of Heaven sort of makes sense to me of having an eternal life without sorrow or worry, but only happiness.

When I start on my retirement career next year I may not have to mark off each day on the calendar, or even know what day of the week it is… hopefully on purpose. But I will strive every day to collect as many memorable moments that I can so one day… you know, experience them as many times as I want in my future ‘after-life.’ And in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy every working day that I have left.

What have I accomplished?

By Dan Barber

I believe that personal accomplishments come in many ways. When born we are an immediate accomplishment… of our Creator, we are also an accomplished dream of our parents and of those who will love us during our life-time.

I watch my grandchildren’s accomplishments continuously, when they learn new skills or use their imagination to entertain themselves or others. I am very proud to watch my granddaughter’s exceptional athletic accomplishments while playing fast-pitch softball… not only for her fielding or hitting skills but most importantly for the sportsmanship and kindness she shows to her teammates and rivals from other teams. All of my grandchildren are accomplished in their own way as individuals.

Other family members have accomplished skills that I can only envy… but in a way that makes me proud to be related to them.

I enjoy celebrating the accomplishments of my family, friends and co-workers. I am filled with pride when I see the young Officers and Sailors where I work when they receive recognition for their accomplishments while serving our country.  I feel a special privilege by being able to take photos of the awards ceremony to share with all.

In an earlier blog I might have mentioned that some people measure their life’s accomplishments with money or possessions. No one has figured out how to take their material wealth to the afterlife.  But we can be a bit immortal if we leave behind good memories of a life well-lived.  Will you be remembered for your kindness? I hold dear the kindness and joy my loved ones share with me, I would even say that they are richly accomplished because of that generosity of sharing with me. I can only hope that I can be remembered by my family and friends for having those same generous attributes.

Accomplishments are in us all.

What is true about our life or meaning?

By Dan Barber

The other day I had a conversation about faith with one of my granddaughters when she asked me what I believed… Did I believe in God or Science?

I explained that I believed in both because I feel that science cannot exist without God, and maybe God can’t exist without science. 

In the news recently a story was broadcast about some physicists working on trying to recreate the Higgs Boson also known as the “God particle”… or the spark that science claims created the universe in a “Big Bang.”  The scientists stated that they discovered the particle… but couldn’t really see the spark because it was rediscovered in a mathematical formula… we just had to believe they were right, in other words we just had to have “faith” that their discovery was real.

The other night on one of my favorite TV programs, one of the physicist characters told his physicist roommate that his mathematical formula only worked because he had to create several other universes to make it work.

“Faith,” another word or belief in something, or maybe the hope, that something exists without physical proof. I was told in my Sunday school class when I was a child that no one could see God, but we know that He exists, we just have to accept Him and have faith.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have a conversation with God everyday. I thank Him for allowing me to wake each morning so I can have another day of doing what I really enjoy.  I thank Him for the beauty of the Universe that he created from the wonderful “God Particle.”  I thank Him for creating this great planet for all his earthly creatures to live on. I thank Him for the conversations that I can have with my grandchildren who have the faith that their grandfather is mostly right in what he says. I thank God for the laughter of my grandchildren when they laugh at grandpa’s stories and jokes. I thank God that I can still learn from the wisdom of my family and friends.

Science says that we carry our ancestor genes, but I also believe that we carry on genetic memories. When my oldest granddaughter was a toddler I would take her out for a walk and observed when she would spot a pretty little pebble. She would stoop over pick it up, spit on it to see if it was shiny then if collectable put it in her pocket. When I was a child and my grandfather would take me on walks I remember seeing that same process, but then it was my grandfather, the avid rock-hound, doing the collecting.

Yes, I believe that God and Science are inseparable.

What is time, and how is time defined?

By Dan Barber

I just watched another one of those TV programs that tries to educate us in 60 minutes… no, not that program that has the stop watch running in the opening credits…

The program’s premise was, “Is time for real?” I don’t know if it is real or not, I do know that time is ‘relative’… old relatives think I’m young and young relatives think I’m old. My brain still thinks that I can do the same things I did as a kid, like throw a ball across a baseball field from right field to the left side of home plate on a straight line. I tried that once and only once because my arm didn’t cooperate and took about two weeks to stop aching. I tell my wife that if she tried to do that martial arts sweep kick to my face that she used to show off with, her leg would fly off from her body.

Time has a way of putting things into perspective for us. As we get older, it tells us that we have to put the brakes on to our youthful miss-adventures, for example we can’t jump off the roof of a house anymore without causing serious damage to our bodies.

Time also speeds up or slows down depending on our age. When I was 8-years old, it took the darn clock above the chalk board in my class room forever to reach the end of the school day. Also, it took forever for the school year to reach summer vacation. Then when class was dismissed for summer vacation it was a time for great celebration for us kids and Summer seemed to last forever for both kids and parents… then when school starts back in the Fall it was and is a great celebration time for the stay-at-home parents and a time of dread for the kids.

Fast forward 30 years and it is now time for the grandkids to be out of school and at home for the summer. When my daughter tells me that her kids are driving her crazy with their fighting, I just smile and say “payback is hell,” she replies by sending her fighting kids to my house for a time-out! My son also sends his kids to my house for a ‘vacation’… I’m not sure who’s on ‘vacation.’ I guess parenting is a life-long commitment.

I am now facing a dilemma. Next year I can choose to retire or continue working. My short-term memory is starting to affect my work, I can no longer multi-task like I used to. I have always made a practice of doing routine tasks immediately so I don’t have to worry about them later… the problem now is I forget that I did the routine task five minutes after I completed it… this goes on in a cycle 3 or 4 times each morning until I write a note to myself to stop!… it’s done!

I look forward to going to work every morning because the work I do I still find very interesting, I fear that I will become very bored if I stay at home everyday. Diane, my wife wants us to travel. She plans for us to buy a motor home and hit the road like Gypsies… I worry that we will get lost somewhere in Death Valley in the heat of summer and the motor home will break down. The grandkids worry that they will no longer have a place to spend their ‘time outs’ or Summer ‘vacations.’

Another worry that I have is that we won’t be able to afford to travel and we will sit around home every day getting really bored until the grandkids show up… time really slows down where there is nothing to do and there is too much to do.

Why are we in a Big Hurry?

By Dan Barber

Each morning on my 8-mile commute to work there are many vehicles speeding along passing me. But it seems that when I arrive at the traffic light those speeders are setting there waiting for my arrival. Also, I’ve noticed on more than one occasion that we all arrive at work within seconds of each other. Why waste that gas and risk a possible expensive speeding ticket for just a few seconds of time.

If speed is their need, they might want to consider that all of us are speeding along on the same path and we will all reach the untimate destination eventually, some will arrive at their final destiny sooner than others… I would prefer to reach it much later in life.

I used to have that need for speed. Before I reached the age of 18 I was one of those traffic violators. I received a letter from the California Department of Motor Vehicles telling me that if I got one more ticket for speeding I would loose my driver’s license until I reached the age of 21… as a 17-year old kid in California and not having a license to drive was a fate worse than…death?

Well maybe it’s not that bad, but since that DMV warning, I tried to become a very responsible driver. In the 40 plus years since, I’ve only received one speeding ticket. Perhaps the older we get the slower we get. I recently asked Diane, my wife, to “hurry up,” so we could get somewhere, she replied, “I am hurrying!” That struck me as very funny because she was moving real slow… my new pet name for her now is “Slo-Mo.”

I guess the kids now are just the same as kids have always been… they want everything right now, or as I call it “instant gratification.” It seems like just yesterday when I was sitting on my grandparents front porch thinking that my life was about to be over because my Mom and Dad were moving us out of grandma and grandpa’s house in Omaha Nebraska to a new home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. But when you’re 5-years-old that 5 mile distance might just as well be as far as the moon is from the earth.

During a cross country trip once, I took my wife and children by the old neighborhoods I lived in as a child. Everything seemed really small. When I was a child and had to walk to school in the Iowa snow it seemed to take forever. Actually the school was only about two short blocks from my old house. We then drove the 5 miles across the bridge over the Missouri River to my old neighborhood in Omaha… everything there also seemed really small.

I guess when we are small and believe that we are the center of the universe, everything is bigger, better and everlasting. But when we travel at the speed of life to our eventual destination we come to learn that we are not immortal, but just a speck in the infinite universe traveling on a planet that is speeding through space along with our galaxy at nearly 830,000 miles per hour, and with the earth spinning at the equator at around 1,000 miles per hour and orbiting our sun at more than 660,000 miles per hour.

Maybe it would be a good idea to slow down and enjoy the majesty of our existence while we still have the time.

What is Rattling Around in Your Head?

By Dan Barber

I have stuff rattling around in my head constantly… I can be easily distracted which causes me to sometimes take a little longer in accomplishing assigned tasks, so I apologize to my four or five followers of my Saturday Morning Post blog for being late, or sporadic with my posting. And please forgive me if I am repeating my self, or becoming abstract in my thoughts… I am starting to do that more and more these days.

I think the older we get, the more we start thinking about the “after-life” or the hope for one. I do believe that we have an after-life, or a “forever-life”. A few years ago my father was being kept alive with medical devices. My mother, along with my siblings knew that he didn’t want to continue living like that so we decided to have the hospital turn off the equipment and let our father pass.

For a few weeks after that action I worried about my part in the decision until I dreamt that I was having a conversation with my Dad and I asked him, “If we can bring you back to life, do you want to live again?” He said no, he added “I am able to relive the joyous moments of my life all over again as if it were the first time.”  After that I was able to find peace in the knowledge that my Dad was having the, “Times of his life” in his Heaven.

Many years ago I thought it would be a good idea to write a science fiction story about some ancient alien beings that created a device to gather all knowledge that would never be lost and these alien beings would be immortal if only in memory, or “knowledge”. The title I thought about was the Gathering of Data… or the acronym G.O.D. I thought that a good way this device could use to collect the data would be to implant a soul into every living thing or being. So upon death, the information could then travel back to the creators to be downloaded into the Gathering of Data… told you I had weird stuff rattling around in my head… Now whenever I watch the “Discovery” or “History” channel on TV, some of the stuff aired rekindles some of my ideas that I once had about my story idea. One physicist, Stephen Hawking, claimed on one of these TV programs that nothing can escape a black hole, not even knowledge… I thought well there you go, the Gathering of Data!

The more I wrote my science fiction story the more I thought about the need for a conflict. I decided that to create a conflict, the Gathering of Data would download the information from the recently arrived soul and then send out the recycled and hopefully blank soul to other living beings to gather more information. Here is where the conflict starts… some of these souls, weren’t blank, they retained some memories from their previous lives or even the memory of being with the Gathering of Data… GOD!

Recently, I had another dream. This dream involved my grandmother who passed right after my daughter was born. I remember the day my grandmother died. Earlier in the day she sat in a lawn chair holding my infant daughter while watching me work on my car. Later that night I got a call from my Mom telling me that my Grandma had died.

I dreamt that I was viewing my Grandmother in her death bed with a person holding a baby next to the bed. It was like viewing a painting through thin gauze, but my Grandmother was moving and the person holding the baby was comforting her by telling her that this was the resurrection of life.

So you see I know that we have an after-life or a life-forever… enjoy your today-life, and please forgive me if you believe I am being blasphemous… I do believe!

Pay Attention to Your Life

I believe that if one sells their soul for fame or fortune then they will eventually have hell to pay… whether you have faith or not, our history shows us that this statement is true.

There are those who obtained what they thought was very important to them only to discover that it caused great pain.  Perhaps they reached the pinnacle of their life early and then had to live on for many years on the downside of that high to the end, always missing what they once had.  How many once famous people have recognizable faces but seem to be adrift because no one cares about them anymore because their talent burned itself out, or they no longer have a purpose in people’s lives.

I thought that I had a goal once… a goal that would have destroyed me and the ones that I love if I had achieved it. Fortunately I discovered the path towards that goal was fun, but the goal was not really my life’s purpose.  For a long time I thought that I needed to have someone write a script for me to have a personality or purpose. I discovered that I have a whole team of writers giving me purpose. My entire family is the team who give me my personality and purpose. I am very grateful for that discovery. My destiny was and is my family. Our children and grandchildren give us our immortality if we can leave them with good memories of us and life lessons that they can pass on to their descendents. Only then will the memory of us will live on long after we are dust. I like being referred to as Husband, Dad, Grandpa, Brother, Uncle, Cousin and Friend. But with some of the grandkids living just across the street one of the titles can be exciting. There is currently a television advertisement on when a little boy cries out “Grandpa”… that startles me every time, it will wake me from my nap quicker then anything because I think that something has happened with one of the kids and they are seeking my help!

As I stated in an earlier blog, if our heavenly reward is to relive our life experiences over and over again as if it was the first time, then we need to create as many good experiences as we can right here on this earth. Don’t drag dreadful experiences to the grave with you because wouldn’t it be hell to have to relive those bad memories for eternity?

A very smart young lady that I know told me that it is very hard going through life being angry all the time… it is much more fun to be happy.

I was once required to attend a self awareness seminar at my work several years ago… the one thing that I can still remember from that experience was the question that was asked..."at the end of your life do you want to say I wished that I had spent more time at work, or more time with loved ones?"

In my work I have to read and watch a lot of news. I can see the hurt, that perhaps well meaning people, can have on others because they are trying to push their own values on to the masses. I see politicians trying to twist the truth around to fit their needs.  I thought that I had one way of looking at things once until I happened to have a hate spewing (self-proclaimed) Marxist professor for a required Sociology Class and a quiet and very polite Political Science professor directly following.

Because of the type of job I have some people ask me what my political leanings are, I reply it depends on the issues. I do know that some of the news that I digest each day makes me feel really sad. Sometimes I get angry, and sometimes I can’t help but think how some very smart politicians can think that the masses are really stupid.

I see conservative pundits every day bad mouthing “public employees”… I am a public employee, most of my adult life I have been a public employee. First serving in the U.S. Navy for 20 years and now working for the Department of Defense as a civilian employee. I tried working in the private business world. But quickly found out, in my case, that private business owners sometimes aren’t very loyal to employees. Working as a “public employee” you work for the public, and for the most part the public is very grateful for the service that is provided to them

I recently read in a liberal leaning newspaper that a mock congressional hearing was held by a former house speaker and her only “expert” witness was a law student who wanted the government to pay for her birth control. Many people took this seriously and became really upset about it… or at least is seems they are really upset... maybe it is just an act.  My thought was “o boy” I can’t wait to see how the late night comedians handle this one. But of course if they did anything with it or not, I wouldn’t know, because I can never stay up late enough to watch.  I imagined that the lines would go something like this… “Apparently the law students at Georgetown law school are learning how to screw people, and like a good lawyer they are just trying to get someone else to pay for the malpractice insurance.”

Until next time, pay attention to your loved ones, think for yourself and be aware of the lessons others are trying to feed you...and live everyday like it is your last day… one of these days it will be.

What beholds our future?

By Dan Barber

Every week I read a lot of news from many sources, and from the news that I read this week I would like to make a prediction.

I predict that a new technology will be invented within the next year and shortly thereafter will be made available to the public, and because of the clever marketing of the company who owns the new gadget, people will camp out on hard sidewalks for a week or more just so they can be the first person in line to buy this new miraculous ‘doodad.’

What kind of prediction is this you might ask? Not much of one, because we see this scenario in the news quite often.  What isn’t in the news is that the ‘doodad’ has become obsolete almost immediately because the same engineers in the same company who created ‘doodad’ has now come out with a new and improved ‘widget,’ which the company’s marketing folks will convince hoards of people to pitch their tents on Main Street so they may have the honor of being the first person on their block to replace the old ‘doodad’ with the new ‘widget’… am I boring you with this story? I’m certainly bored.

Some technology is really great.

When I was returning home from Vietnam, I needed to call home from the Philippines’ to let my wife, Diane, know that I was on my way home and would be there in a couple of days. The call only took a couple of minutes, but cost me nearly a quarter of my weekly “tax free” income of a Navy second class petty officer in 1972. We didn’t have the convenience of free calling cards or cell phones with unlimited minutes. 

A massive improvement in communications was just appearing on the horizon.  Pay TV (cable) was a major source of debate between politicians, and the broadcast executives representing the 3 national networks, and the Federal Communications Commission.  Public meetings were even held so the average person could let their feelings on the subject be known. See how that has worked out. 

We can now sign up for “cable/satellite” TV, the Internet and our home and cell telephone service all with one company!  Because of the new technology of cell phones you can even save a bit of money by not having a landline phone at home.  The monopolistic telephone companies can no longer charge us whatever they can get.

Now my wife can talk to her sisters and cross-country friends on her phone for hours, or until the battery dies, for just one low monthly fee of just a quarter of a week’s pay. I also have hundreds of channels to surf through on my big flat-screen high-definition TV while at the same time surfing the World Wide Web on my cell phone, or any number of new thing-a-bobs I might be willing to camp out to buy at any number of big box discount department stores. But because of where I choose to live, I would have to drive for nearly an hour to get to one of those big box stores… a fact I am rather proud of.

To the horror of those network television executives back in the late sixties, because of all this new technology I can record what ever I want to watch, even out in the middle of the Mojave Desert without a 100’ tall TV antenna, whenever I want to watch it… and I can even fast forward through commercials.

Sometime in the future those unsightly telephone, television and electrical transmission lines that scar our landscape will be a relic of the past when every newly constructed building, development or home will be required to be self-sufficient with its own power source from a combination of solar, thermal and wind power. Perhaps some other new source of power will be discovered and put into use. Also, the kids can also create their own TV programming, filmed of course in front of a large mirror with their latest edition of a smarter cell phone with a video camera application and broadcast those programs world wide, via the latest social media program.

This can only be possible if the “public utility” companies, energy companies and governments can figure out a way to get out of the way of each other and let it happen.

What are you going to do when everything is gone?

By Dan Barber

My horoscope read today that I needed to write… Well here is another entry to my blog spot on my philosophy, right or wrong, it’s my thoughts on the mystery of life.

I just read an article about how the web split in 2011.  First we had the World Wide Web (WWW or web)… but now we have applications (apps) and the “old fashioned web.” In an earlier post I babbled on about my phobia about computers and the new definitions of every day words that used to mean something else, but now have a different meaning altogether… like backup, server, crash, hacking, cracking etc. Language has been evolving ever since our first caveman lexicographer starting calling a rock something else besides “rock” when they discovered that they could use the rock for cracking nuts, it then became a “nut cracker.” Then an industrious clan educator painted a picture on the cave wall to educate others in the clan how to use a rock. Our very first dictionary was actually a “Pictionary” and some Anthropologists and some Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) researchers have spent their entire careers trying to figure out what our ancestors were trying to say with these Pictionary’s. 

Now we need a dictionary to tell us what acronyms mean… the Navy has had one of these dictionaries for years… I keep it nearby on my bookshelf at work. I work at the Naval Hospital Twentynine Palms (NHTP) on the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC)… in military speak it would be pronounced as Nav-Hosp 29 Palms at the Mac-Cack-See… in texting it would probably look like (NHTP@MCAGCC).

Now everywhere I look people are holding their various communications devices and typing away with their thumbs in an acronym language that is totally foreign to me. My teenaged granddaughters are constantly pecking away at their cell phones instead of talking on them. I think the funniest thing that I ever heard involving acronyms was in the Neil Simon play “The Odd Couple” when Oscar said (paraphrased) “It took me a half hour to figure out that FU on the note that you left on the fridge that said, ‘need milk FU,’ meant Felix Unger.”

When I signed away two years of my life on a contract to get a cellular (cell) phone, I told the young sales girl that I only wanted a device that I could make and receive phone calls… I didn’t need a camera, the cell phone screen was too small for me to watch TV, I didn’t need to send or receive e-mails, and I didn’t need to know where on the earth that I was positioned at any given time… although at my age my family might find that particular “app” handy when I get lost while taking a walk in my neighborhood.

Our Southern California electrical power supply utility company just announced the other day that they were going to have to cut off power to different areas of our community for several hours so they could make repairs to the electrical grid. In our local community underground chat room, people were in an uproar over what were they going to do without power… no cell phones, no television, no lights, no computers! “How are we going to be able to charge our cell phones, read our book apps on a dead reader?” Perhaps we should not be so ready to do away with print newspapers or books… all you need to read one of these at night is a candle. A fire in the outdoor fire pit would be nice while star-gazing at our pollution free desert sky is a possibility, face-to-face conversation with family or friends is could be a positive experience… no batteries or charger required.

Maybe the Inca’s and Hopi Indians, and even the “web-bot” app have it right about life as we know is about to end in 2012… What are you going to do when everything you do in your everyday life is gone?