Everyone needs an arrow crab

I have what's called an Arrow Crab living in one of my two saltwater "reef" tanks. Among other things he eats what are called bristle worms. Bristle worms aren't necessarily bad little creatures, but they sure can be ugly. They live in pieces of live rock - coral-like rock, full of pockets and holes and little marine critters, like these bristle worms.

Bristle worms spend most of the day hidden and out of site, until I put some food in the tank, and then they extend themselves with their little tentacles out from the rocks, searching around for the food which I gather they can smell in some way.

They are scavengers, and as such are useful for keeping tanks clean. But there's a down side. Without natural enemies, they proliferate all over the tank and pretty soon they are everywhere. So in a fit of revenge and wanting to exert my power one day, I went and got this Arrow Crab, which is known for eating among other things, bristle worms.

And much to my glee, a few days after introducing the gangly looking critter, I saw him (it, her?) eating one of these (him, her, it) bristle worms.

Live does have it's happy moments.

Old milestones

Another of life's little milestones!

It's interesting as I age, how simple little outcomes become big events. On my last few jog/walks - that's a walk, then jog, then walk, a kinda neighborhood walkabout, - sounds like some kind of Australian thingy, yes? Well anyway back to my announcement. I reached my goal of one mile! Not one mile total people. One mile jogging! Now to all those 30 year old marathon runners, that's not a big deal. But to this old duffer, it is.

I quit running when I was about 54 or 55 because my knee joints were hurting too much to continue. So I switched to a bike. After kibitzing with an old friend recently who is still running at the age of 77, I decided to give it a try again, albeit downhill. So during one of my neighborhood walks I threw in a jog segment on a downhill section and walla, much to my surprise, no knee pain! So for about the past month, I've been trying to get in a daily session, and usually I succeed in getting out about 5 times a week.

Each day after my first downhill segment I decided to add twenty or so yards to the jog part. And I kept doing that until this past weekend, running in the rain on Saturday, I reached a mile. How do I know? I clocked it in the truck. Yes I have a pickup truck! Doesn't everyone? Today I completed 1.1 miles and I'm keeping on adding more each time. So far so good. No sore knees yet and still adding distance.

Because the run has shortened the total time I'm exercising, I'm strategizing how to add additional distance or new adventures. I found a leg I can do through a section of woods that has me climbing through ravines, and over and under fallen trees. Of course I don't jog this section but the climbing, crawling and bending provide a kind of stretching that helps loosen me up before I get back to jogging a new loop.

Now isn't that just ducky?

I had this thought that with my recently discovered high blood pressure, I could be a candidate for a heart attack during one of these workouts; so I told my wife and my daughter, who lives nearby, if I disappear one day when I'm out for my exercise, tell the medical unit to look for me in that woods section out by the front of our development. If I were to fall over with a heart attack anywhere else on my route, someone would see me lying by the side of the road.

Sounds like a morbid conversation to be having doesn't it? When I was 40 I would never have had that thought let alone that conversation with anyone. But I' not 40 anymore. Sigh.

Investing in Technology

I've been blessed to have some competence with things scientific, mathematical, or technological, maybe the way to talk about it is things, or processes that have what occurs to me as systematic logic. Ever since first grade, that kind of thing has been easy for me. There's also a particular acumen with animals, wild and domestic.

People on the other hand took a lot longer to understand. From over here, it looks like you, the people over there, are a lot better at working with people than I am - probably just some childhood decision I made about myself, but a lurking sensation, none-the-less. Get to the point? What? Are you having a hard time following? Ok. Ok. Allow an old man, sorry, senior, to digress a minute will you? Back to the technology thing.

Let's take this blogging thing for example. It's taken me at least two or three years of punishing self-deprecating thinking (that voice in my head again), and after suffering through that, another couple of months of listening to the voice lecturing me, then prodding me, then finally yelling at me to get off my butt and get to it, to finally getting on with learning how to blog.

Once I finally promised myself to do so, it took about twenty minutes to find out how to do it, and to get it started. Anyone else would have just done it right away, yes? So I found myself wondering, Why would you suffer the agony of that whole process for something that took only twenty minutes to accomplish?

It occurred to me that I've finally reached my point of saturation, being overwhelmed with the complexity and speed of technological change. Just in my little corner of the world, there's Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, smart phones, video conferencing, webcasting, projection cameras, bird feeders, smartmail, bristle stars, texting, golf scopes, DCC train controls, Wii boards, K'nex, wireless 3D TV, Spotify, E-Booking, Energy-beam blasters, Viagra, dictionaries, Banshees, Thanators, and Sarcos's, to name a few.

That leaves out the old stuff like computers, instant stock trading, Windows 7, I-pods & I-phones, GPS maps, fishing poles, energy efficient light bulbs, and smart-wired houses that I've already learned about and know how to use. Well maybe not our smart-wired house. I mean it's wired of course, but so far, it's proving to be smarter than me. I mean it's still doing things automatically that I don't know how to stop or start. Nor do the electricians, or technicians or service people I call to bail me out from time to time.

But I digress again. The point my friends is the plethora of stuff. I call it stuff because I can't yet get it all classified. My grandson Evan on-the-other-hand, seems to have no difficulty absorbing and navigating through it all; while I, for the first time in my life, am calling for a truce! I can no longer keep up, comprehend, or in anyway, hope to survive the technological onslaught. Thank God for Jim Cramer! He at least tells me where and where not to invest in it.

10 years makes a difference

So here I am talking to my best friend who is approximately 10 years younger than me. He's telling me about how he's going to video himself doing certain things to post some video of himself on his blog so people can have an experience of him.

I'm thinking to myself, why does he care? Well he's got a book out and he's got some other books he wants to write so he's looking at how to penetrate the noise and get some exposure. So he's telling me about how he's buying this new "flip" video camera that he carries in his shirt pocket and uses to video himself teaching, or leading a program, or golfing etc., just the ordinary things he does, to use on his blog.

In the course of this discussion, I learn there's yet another technology out there that I don't know about - this little 1080 video camera - and there's a process by which you can take video's and post them on your blog. And I hear the voice in my head saying, "Jesus, give me a break! Another technology to master? When will they stop?

I then hear the voice noticing the difference between Jeff's (my friend) thinking and mine. He's all hyped and excited about using this new toy as he calls it, and doing this work, while my voice sounds more like it's annoyed. It's occurring in my thoughts as yet-another-thing-tp-contend-with, and I hear another voice - this voice has a different sound, as though there's more than one person in my head watching, listening, and commenting - I hear this other voice wondering, "When did it become a chore instead of fun for you? When did the fun of learning new things and doing things you hadn't done before stop being fun for you? Is that what it means to get old?"

I mean I can still remember when that same conversation with Jeff would have sent me scrambling to get one of these toys and learn how to do this kind of thing and post it on my blog. Does ten years make all that much of a difference? Does our thinking, and do our passions change that much, that quickly? Ok, so as to not make it threatening I should ask it it as "Has my thinking, and have my passions changed that much, that quickly? In just ten years?

So I know to a causal reader this isn't exactly an up sort of inquiry? It could sort of make this Senior Moment business seem a bit gloomy, couldn't it? Well not necessarily! I may not go about things the way I used to, given by newness and urgency, but I still get there - there meaning where I ultimately want to be. And there's a certain peacefulness in knowing, I mean really knowing in my bones, that I'll never get it all done.

Now, where do I find one of these Kodak flips?

Who am I?

I grew up thinking there was something wrong with me because my name was Brian. I mean all the time I was growing up there were Joe's and Tom's, and John's etc. but no other Brian's. I was 29 before I met my first other Brian and he was 15 years younger than me.

When I first went to elementary school it seemed odd to me that everyone else had a duplicate, everyone else but me. Mind you, their duplicate was a duplicate in name only. Duplicates existed at differing grade levels, from different parts of the township and occasionally even across sexes - we had a boy named Sam and a girl named Sam, which of course, was short for Samantha. But to a 7 year old boy who didn't know many girls, she was named Sam. And it took me a while to figure out the difference.

I finally asked my mother why I was named Brian. She said, "well for the first son I had, and loved so much, I needed a name that was special to me". That seemed to settle my worries once and for all.

Fred's rose

After their wives had gone to the kitchen following dinner, Fred and Sam, their elder husbands, were talking. Fred said, 'Last night we went out to a new restaurant and it was really great! I think you and Margaret would really enjoy it.'

Sam asked, 'Oh? Which restaurant?'
There was a long pause while the Fred, experiencing a senior moment, thought and thought. Finally Fred asked Sam, 'What is the name of that flower you give to someone you love? You know.... The one that's red and has thorns?'

''Do you mean a rose?', Sam asked.
'Yes, that's the one,' Fred replied. Fred then turned toward the kitchen and yelled, 'Rose, what's the name of that restaurant we went to last night?'

Life is sort of like that you know? Everything is somehow connected to everything else.

Silence

Ok, so what is there to share today? It seems as I get older, there is less to say. It either occurs to me that unless I have something of substance to contribute, or my opinion is sought, there's no reason to say anything.

All of the people in our little consulting company (Distinctions, Inc.) are younger than I and so often I hear myself thinking on our conference calls that I should just stay silent and let them figure it out, or argue it out, or find there own way - the voice-in-my-head says "been-there-done-that" or sometimes, "no biggy", meaning of course, no big deal, nothing to get all excited about, something like that. But then you knew that didn't you?

Now mind you there are times when I really do have something to say, and I do speak up. It's also a surprise to me that when I do speak, what I hear coming out of my mouth includes a measure of wisdom, sometimes a dry wit, sometimes a confronting remark, sometimes an acknowledgment of someone else. Not to toot my own horn, just the way it occurs for me. Nothing unusual or special about any of that.

When speaking with people I care about I also seem to see potential in them that they don't see in themselves. I talk to them as though my interpretation is correct and their own perception is m'shugana. In case you wondered, that's yiddish, and I'll let you figure out what it means.

Anyhow, back to speaking. So there's more silence in my head. In other words, less noise from the voice. It seems like I appreciate silence more. I mean it goes so far that I now wear ear plugs at night when sleeping, or when I go to a movie, or when in airports, or flying. Or maybe it's because the world was so, so much quieter when I was growing up, and it seems to have gotten so much noisier, I don't know. But I think whoever first said "silence is golden" was probably over 60.

Enough said. I think I'll take my own advice and shut up for now.

Old age learning

It seems as I age that more and more of my internal conversation (that voice that talks to me all day) are about how my body feels, or maybe what's not working the way it should - I can't touch my toes anymore, or, I have to wear a skull cap to bed to keep my bald head warm, because we sleep with the window open, or, my prostate is the size of a peach (it's not but that is one I hear from other men.). You know, those kinds of conversations. It also seems like this is only happening to me.

Of course, intellectually I know that's not true. But when the voice in my head is talking to me, it doesn't talk to me about "others". It just comments on me. Boring! What's boring you ask? Well the types and quantities of aches and pains are endless! And it seems, most of us, or at least I, don't have a high tolerance for pain. I don't mean serious pain! I mean just little pains, like muscles aches or headaches! From the noise being made by the voice-in-my-head you'd think I had one foot in the grave. Mind you I might, but I think I'd at least have some clue.

So over the weekend I went back to work on my HOn3 Rocky Mountain model railroad platform. I was crawling under it, around it, and through it, learning how to cast realistic looking rock cliffs and working on "reverse loop" wiring. And of course each night I found new aches to testify to my contortions.

You probably don't know what I mean by reverse loop wiring but don't worry, I barely know myself. I'm learning how to wire for DCC. That's a kind of radio control technology that allows all kinds of good stuff to happen that wasn't possible before. DCC has a more, or I guess to some guys less, complicated way of controlling polarity, which of course you need to control in order to control the direction of your locomotives - something that seems useful to do.

Anyway, two things are noticeable about working on my train platform. One, there are technology challenges for me with the DCC stuff. Nothing like sending a man to the moon, or anything like that. Nor anything as complicated as computer technology for instance, but I'm noticing none-the-less how daunting it is. It's not something I have ever been exposed to before. But when I first started looking into it, it occurred for me as something I could figure out for myself, with some reading.

So I started to read up on it. Then when I was reading, I fell asleep. So I had to read it three times to get it, than three more times to remember it enough to do the wiring work. When I was in my twenties, I could read it in one sitting, understand it immediately, and remember it for years. Of course leading edge technology when I was in my twenties was a "scientific calculator".

But it's not all bleak. The other thing I noticed is that I still enjoy the challenge and the learning. Learning is still fun. Getting older hasn't seemed to diminish that. So take heart folks. As you slide into those senior years, there are still positives to found!

2010 New Years

Last night we celebrated New years Eve with neighbor friends and our daughter, son-in-law and grandson. Of course one of the conditions of senior-hood is we didn't feel compelled to stay up to midnight although by the time we'd gotten to bed we were treated to neighborhood fire crackers at midnight so we heard the new year arrive, even though we didn't feel the need to watch the ball drop in Times Square. Down here in NC we have an acorn that drops in some local town, a kind of minature version of the Times Square thing and one that people seem nuts about (pun intended).

I recall when we wouldn't be caught dead spending New Years Eve at home. There was always a party somewhere, and it was always a night for merry making. But somehow the changing of years isn't such a big deal anymore. We did manage to create our own excitement though by getting into a spirited argument with our neighbor friends after dinner about the security on airlines because of the recent bomber that was captured on the flight in to Detroit.

Our neighbor reasoned that was more evidence that our government is incompetent and he is justified in calling President Obama "sophomoric". That didn't sit well with most of us so we went at it briefly which then led to discussions about the declining competency of the health care system. It follows doesn't it? I mean an incompetent government also causes a broken health care system. We finally resolved it all by concluding it was all about money and them that has it, in place to get more.

Naturally (I say naturally because it seemed to make sense at that moment though I can't somehow make the connection now) that whole conversation led to my telling a story about visiting NC when I was 16 to gather a truck load of holly with berries to take back to PA to make wreathes for Christmas. It was a hair-brained scheme to make money that ended up costing more than we made from the wreaths. But you know how at 16 everything is an adventure. So it wasn't really about making money after all.

Today was New Years Day and Anne and I volunteered ourselves to start taking down the neighborhood Christmas decorations in our development. Today it reached almost 50 so although on the cool side, it was acceptable working weather. The real work is scheduled for tomorrow when a hand full of neighbors are gathering with us to do the job. It seems God decided to torture us by bringing our coldest weather of this winter into town tonight so when we meet at 10 A.M. to begin the work, the temperature will be around 20 degrees.

We do our own community decorating you know. It's mostly the retired folks or seniors that take care of it, as we do of so much of the neighborhood work. You see, we're one of those self administered developments, with our own homeowners association that handles all the common area maintenance, like the mowing, and the pool, etc.

You know how they say when you reach senior-hood, you can't take the cold weather? Well it's true. Ok, so it's not actually "the truth". But there are lots of us seniors who agree it's so. So, at least to us, it seems true. So Anne and I put in a couple hours today. That way if a half dozen people show up tomorrow, we'll be able to get the remaining decorations down and stored within about an hour to an hour and a half - just enough time to freeze!

I've been reading the latest issue of Popular Science about all the new technology that's coming - something all seniors do, you know. They're predicting that bio-mechanical devices will have people living to perhaps ages like 150, maybe as soon as 2050. Wow! Hard to imagine! Not sure I want to be around that long.

Of course if it meant that we had the energy, strength, and brain functions at 100 that we now have at say, 45 - 50, maybe it would be a different thing. But imagine what that will mean to the planet - I mean if everyone started to live to 150. And combine that with rising oceans and less land mass due to global warming ... whew! Sometimes I think I'll be checking out at just the right time. For sure people are going to need to learn how to live with each other in ways they haven't yet.

Well the fish on my salt water tans want me to leave and turn off the lights so they can go to sleep. And the crabs want the same thing so they can come out and scavenge - they eat at night you know. Toodaloo.