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.