If you live in the U.S. how did you spent the extra hour we were given back last Sunday? If you don’t live in the U.S. how would you spend the gift of an extra hour? I cheerfully admit, I spent mine sleeping and lying in bed listening a recorded book. The gift was too precious to waste being productive.

I did go to the gym in the afternoon. When I checked the wall clock to see if they had changed it I remembered a boss I had over twenty years ago. Every Spring and Fall he would go to everyone’s office and change the clocks for them. It was a simple but friendly thing to do. It just goes to show we’ll never know or guess what people will remember about us years later.

Do you have any little memories like that?

Please read!!!
**
If you are an owner of a dog that belongs to a ‘dangerous breed’ category and you also have a child or a visiting small child please take this as a warning.
**
Don’t leave your dog with a small child unattended under any circumstances!!!
**
Only one little moment was enough for the following to happen.
**
See the photo below …..
**
**
**
Thank you!
**
The Dog

The attached picture?

 
If you could take a test that would tell you how long you had to live would you take it? I wouldn’t. My choice would be to keep living fully until I quietly slip away in my sleep. I also don’t believe that a quiz about lifestyle can predict longevity.

According to a recent study people who

• avoid smoking,
• exercise three and a half hours a week,
• maintain a body mass index of less than 30 (i.e, who aren’t obese) and
• eat a diet emphasizing fruits, vegetables and whole grains

cut their risk of diabetes, heart attack, stroke or cancer by 78 percent.

I do all of those things but my chances of living to 98 are still pretty slim I think. Two of my grandparents died in their 60s, my parents died in their 70s, one grandfather made it to 81 and only one grandmother made it to 98. And that grandmother was obese, got her exercise moving her fork to her mouth and ate anything that tasted good. Go figure.

What about you? How long did your relatives live?

Do you think Lucy’s advice is worth 5 cents? I do. It reminds me of the Buddhist attitude:

It’s just fear (or loneliness, anger, frustration, whatever). Don’t let it jerk you around.

It’s a quick way to step out of the drama of our lives and get perspective. It doesn’t say not to feel emotions, just don’t let them dictate our response to external events.

I had a chance to practice this the past couple of months. We had a heavy hail storm early last July and it pockmarked our two-year-old 4Runner badly enough that we decided to go through the hassle of getting it fixed.

 
We drove to Santa Fe and talked to one of our insurance company’s preferred providers, which guaranteed that they would do a satisfactory job. We said we knew they would be swamped with other hail-damage jobs and we were willing to wait to bring it in. They told us August 17th, about five weeks later. It sounded like a reasonable plan and when we brought it in they said it would take a couple of weeks, three at the maximum.

I’ll spare you the details. We finally got it back this past Tuesday, after slightly over eight weeks. They did do a good job…the car looks like new again…and the insurance company was easy to deal with, but after the first month it was hard not to feel a bit jerked around by the body shop. My husband phoned after the first four weeks and they told him they had about 31 hours of painting to do. When I phoned two weeks later they said they would start painting the following Monday. Somehow that didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Anyway, we talked to them a couple more times to check the progress, and I was about to switch into my cheerfully firm, “I need to talk to someone who will take responsibility” mode when they finally said it was done.

Would they have finished faster if we had been more assertive? Possibly, but our main concern was to have it done well, and that they did. Towards the end I was generating enough energy to start pushing a bit more, but we were managing fine and didn’t need the car yet. I was starting to be bothered more that they seemed to be taking advantage of our patience and that the car wouldn’t be there if we needed it. As I said, after two months it was clearly time to start being more assertive but it turned out to be unnecessary. We’re just glad it’s done!

It’s now off our list and it’s time to move on.

I like the above comic because one of the disadvantages of my new TV/DVD system is I have more remotes to keep track of. It’s good mental exercise.

comics.com

comics.com

The generation gap works both ways, of course. A girl came to my door a while back and asked if she could use my phone to call her mother. I said “Sure” and pointed to our dial wall phone. She looked puzzled so I asked her if she knew how to use it. No. So I dialed her mother for her.

comics.com

Geek: a slang term describing a person as peculiar or odd because he/she is deeply interested in one or more things including those of intellectuality, electronics, etc.

I’m sure some people think I’m a geek because I have some technical expertise. My husband, on the other hand, is happy to let me handle the TVs and VCRs in the family. He just wants to watch the local weather every day and wants the process to be simple. “Just tell me which button to push, Jean.” If we’re going to be gone when his program is on he lets me do the taping.

So when the TV stations switched to completely digital this past summer and I had trouble recording some of them he said it was probably because the stations didn’t have enough power or bandwidth (I can’t remember the exact explanation) and forgot about it. His station came in fine. His background is in experimental physics and he knows a lot about electronics, so I accepted his explanation.

Until the new fall programs started I didn’t care enough to check our assumptions. When I did I found out we had been completely wrong. The stations were doing just fine, it was my new recorder that couldn’t pick them up.

In the meantime our faithful, repair-free old CRT TV was finally acting flaky after 25 years of service. Sometimes the picture would keep rolling upwards, sometimes the picture was half “snow”.

So I started to look online for DVD recorders and TVs. They had to have a good tuners, and the sellers had to have satisfaction-guaranteed policies. Then we had to go to Santa Fe last Monday to check on a car that had been in the shop for six weeks (that’s another story that I’ll write about later), so we started looking at DVD recorders and digital TVs there. I had assumed we were still gathering information, but when we went into Best Buy and asked the salesman about tuners, he phoned one of the fellows on the Geek Squad. The fellow came and took over. He was quiet and knowledgeable, our kind of salesman, so we ended up buying both a new recorder and a new TV, with two-year Geek Squad support for each.

That’s our kind of store, one that respects technical expertise. It understands that it’s good business to use the term geek with pride.

Okay, there are 20 letters there. So there would be 12 left after we remove 8. But what common garden crop has 12 letters? I couldn’t for the life of me think of one. I had to wait for the next issue to learn the answer.

To see the eight letters that need to be removed and the garden crop, click here.

Duh! I had to laugh…I “should” have thought of that. It was a great reminder that we can’t always believe everything we think…it’s a good idea to check our assumptions from time to time. And I’m doing just that right now, thinking about what other assumptions I habitually make that may not be true.

Do you ever do mental housekeeping like that?

How important are goals to you? They’re often touted as great motivational tools… they’re one way of spicing up our lives. But the activities that have brought me the greatest joy have been the ones that I’ve made long-term commitments to, e. g., participating in a marriage, raising a child, blogging, etc. They’ve been activities that have kept me learning and growing with the added advantage of valuing the process, the present moment, rather than chasing after some future achievement.

What about you? What makes you feel fully alive? What has brought you the most joy in life?

 
How do you feel about chronic complainers? Would they be allowed into your view of heaven? I drew this cartoon because I felt sorry for Kathy:

 
 

cheerfulmonk. Creative Commons license.

 
What do you think? What would your view of heaven be like?

The prime minister of Bangladesh has ordered male government employees to stop wearing suits, jackets and ties to save electricity.
—BBC News

It’s good to read that a bit of sanity is starting to influence men’s fashions.

Yea, Rummuser for showing good sense and good taste.