Why I Spend Less and Less Time Online

  To be honest, in the nineteen nineties I spent a considerable time each day online. I was home with four children, one of whom was a baby.  The internet allowed me to research curricula for homeschooling, download educational and entertainment for my children, and to stay in touch with friends who were similarly encumbered at home. The internet was instrumental in my finding part time work which meshed with my responsibilities at home. It also allowed me to keep up with a considerable amount of medical continuing education with a minimal impact to everything I needed to do at home.

      After two thousand, I continued using it a great deal.  It can be an excellent research tool even when the information you have derived is anecdotal. It can, in those events, help you to formulate plans and identify areas in which more genuine study is required. The internet has also provided me from time to time, the chance to correspond with true leaders and front and center individuals in fields in which I have an interest.  It also became an excellent adjunct in home schooling and aided our children in research while selecting their universities. When I taught college, the internet allowed me to achieve much more in a short period of time.

        I noticed recently that people have started telephoning me at home again. In fact, what I noticed is that my voice mail was full on a couple of occasions. One of them told me, "I know you haven't been online as much".   Well, this is true.  Although I embraced Linkedin some time ago, and at one time I owned a number of Yahoo Groups, I have never been a member of Facebook. I dislike the potential for breeches in family security, and I don't like their terms of service. Yes, I actually read those.  It's fairly easy simply to read about someone on Facebook and actually compile quite a dossier on them, if you wished to.  I don't have the time to Twitter incessantly, although a few of my friends do.  Some of my kids have used Instagram.  I like Blogger, but a lot of the social media platforms have a great deal of chatter, but are not necessarily interesting or valuable to me.

         For a time I virtually abandoned the television and only obtained news online. Lately, I have found that a great deal of online news is simply incorrect, inaccurate, or massaged to advance a particular agenda, particularly when it's something I personally know a good deal about. The other reason I am spending less time online is that there is a great deal of communication hostility. Time online used to be fun. There have always been trolls online, but now, even on Linkedin, it can be difficult to express an opinion on anything without being stalked for a time by someone, using their actual name or a pseudonym, who needs you to fall in line with their opinion. They plan to harass you until you fall in line. I cannot recall a time in the past where your having an opinion which differed even slightly from someone elses was a cause for such attention, particularly when I don't really have unusual views.

       I know that my publisher has always wished I would embrace social media whole hog. I honestly can't see that happening.  What I see is more and more people pulling out of living their lives and failing to make needed changes in their real lives. More and more people live almost a half life online.  I have friends who photograph all their meals and place them online.  I am not saying that their recipe for meatloaf is not online worthy. I am saying that I don't know who needs to see their entire diet plus snacks including their calorie counts, which are off, by the way.   I also see that while people join online groups, they tend to join groups with the like-minded.  This way, the delusional reinforce themselves,  the progressives reinforce themselves, etc.  No one is getting better in their persuasive arguments with one another.  Too many times, their interactions with others is highly charged, emotional, and not well considered.

            I don't know what the long term effects to society, our culture and the world will ultimately be, but I am guessing that it's not good.  I also don't think that an unnatural dependence upon the cyber world is confined to millennials. There are plenty of people of every age whose interactions with people are almost exclusively online.  The internet is a tool, and it is indeed a promising one. However, we need to be more carefully considering how we use it personally. The online acrimony is likely to  worsen in an election year, as are the inaccurate news reports.   If it does, you may not see me online for awhile.  I'll just be at an undisclosed location working on a novel.

There Must Be a Rift in the Space Time Continuum !

           

Someone used a stun gun somewhere on the Earth's underbelly and apparently now we have a rift in the fragile space time continuum.

 


 Something happened this week which made me wonder if we are witnessing a true and cataclysmic breach in the space time continuum.   It's not that I dislike Roseanne Barr. I think she is a brilliant comedienne. She has keen observation skills, great comedic timing, and her show showed us aspects and dynamics of the American family not shown to us on other programs. I have no doubt that she is a highly intelligent woman. However, I generally don't agree with her take on politics. Why would I?  She has been a long term comedienne, producer, director, stand up comic, comedy writer etc. and I have been a nurse and a college instructor. We have lived very different lives in very different places, and no one who is even reasonably intelligent expects everyone to think exactly as we do.  However, this is what happened this week.  Roseanne Barr made a statement in which she endorsed the election of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican residential candidate. When she did, she said that America would be lucky if Trump won (the presidency) because then "we wouldn't have Hillary". She clearly opposed the election of Hillary because "the rule of law matters".

               I can't vote for Hillary Clinton under any circumstances. I will likely need to vote for Mr. Trump simply to block the possibility of electing Mrs. Benghazi who violated the law by hiding her e-mails from her employer the State Department.in a private server contrary to law.

                Could the world be so fractured, so up ended, so toasted that I am on the same political side as Roseanne Barr ? I too think that Mr. Trump wouldn't do anything to  hurt America, where the team we presently have seems to make a habit of it.

                It must be a mammoth time warp....



              

On Keeping An Open Mind: The Joy Is In The Journey

        

 

  In this life we would best beware of saying that a particular action is "something we would never do" or "somewhere we would never live" or a trip we "would never take". Life has in interesting way of providing the exact circumstance for which to have us eat our words. Perhaps this is God at work demonstrating for us that although we have free choice, that he is in control, and will provide the opportunities for such choices. I remember that one of my friends who was most certain when we were teens that she "would never divorce" and of course, she has, twice.  I have also done a number of things I believed I would not do. Today, I was remembering one of them.
               Some years ago now, my husband, our four children at that time, and myself were living in a large suburban home in Virginia. The home was lovely, and it was a relatively easy commute for my husband to work and for our kids to go to Tae Kwon Do, Civil Air Patrol and flying lessons etc. There were also several universities within commuting distance when the time came. Still we were looking for larger acreage where we might build and where our children might know the joys of raising animals and perhaps horses.
               I perused lots of land ads in a variety of newspapers and occasionally on the internet. A particular ad surfaced at the time, and because the cost per acre was reasonable, we decided to take a look.  The land was a couple of hours from our home. It was a bit like an expedition just to go up and look at it along with all the kids, the youngest of whom was still a baby.  The road to the property was winding, hilly, hazardous, and a bit foreboding.  In some parts of the mountain trail trees on both sides of the road created a canopy over the cars. In summer, that would be nice, but in winter, I could see that collapsing trees could block the road.  There were almost no houses visible along the road, although I later learned that there were a few quite a distance off the road that were simply not visible from it.  On one of our first expeditionary trips, we saw a black bear. In winter, on the way up there, one could see a dumpy little village. I remember telling my husband, "I could never live up here. There is no shopping. There are no restaurants. I'll bet the power goes out a lot in the winter. It has the nature, but no essential services and not even mail delivery !"
               The land itself was gorgeous and very reasonable for that time. My husband wanted it, and I did not. In marriage, one of the most important skills is the skill set of compromise, and so we did. We decided to purchase the property "simply as an investment" because we could clearly never live there. We believed that the property would soar in value as time passed. Perhaps we would sell it as the kids neared college.
However, it didn't take long before we were making signs for our first farm. Our young daughter was drawing floorplans for "the new house at the farm".  It took time, but each element fell into place, and we built a home before moving there.  A few years later, we sold that farm at a profit and went on to build another, with more money down this time.
              I still rather regularly drive that same mountain trail.   There is still a canopy of trees protecting the roadway which is quite glorious in summer.  Trees fall into the roadway quite regularly in winter, which is the reason most people from these parts have a truck with a chainsaw in it.  We often see bears, but work hard not to inadvertently invite them to barbecues.   While our children were growing up, the "dumpy little village" I mentioned disappeared one structure at a time.  When we invested in the region,by building a home there, others did too. The comparative market analyses improved and people who owned properties either sold them or borrowed to replace and upgrade them.  The road department straightened out some of the hair pin curves and graded the road a bit better when it was next paved.  Families built country homes or farms on larger acreages just as we had. The parts of the trail that were gravel road were also eventually paved. The power still goes out rather frequently in this area, but what do I care ?  We have some solar with a battery array and we have a generator for true emergencies. The kids, before they went to universities, did get a chance to raise puppies, alpacas and now horses.
            How do I feel about living in the area ?  I think it's the best place we could have chosen.

       This is your reminder that reasonable risks exist to be taken. Whether it's a new job, a new home, a new area, or anything else, we should try to keep an open mind.  Don't do things you don't want to do, simply because the opportunity exists, but don't talk yourself out of the things you want to do because you simply don't have all the puzzle pieces in your hands just yet.  Take reasonable risks Sometimes the joy is in the journey.

Thoughts on Firearm Practice Safety

    

     If I Were to be Honest, I would tell you that I believe that ownership and proper practice with a firearm is an important part of life.  It also helps to keep us safe particularly in rural locations, from rabid animals, and from animals of the two legged kind, particularly since I cannot carry a SWAT team in my pocket.  However,  regular practice with a firearm is not completely safe either, and we must conduct ourselves accordingly.

         Please see my post today from another one of my blogs,

  Rational Preparedness

Saturday Mornings Long Ago

             

Funny how I remember it all in color.

   
         If I were to be honest, I believe that the best thing that we can do with our children is to give them our time, but not necessarily give them things.  On Saturday mornings when I was a child, my father was at home.  My mother would be catching up and taking care of my younger brother. My father would have his own catch up projects and errands to do on the all too short Saturday. In those years most everything was closed on a Sunday so there was a big push to finish one's shopping and errands on Saturdays. Things were usually busy and often shops were crowded.  On those days my father would take me with him.  Sometimes we would venture into Montgomery Wards or Sears but often we would go to any number of individual local hardware stores. My father often had a list of things he needed in order to complete his own weekend chore list. In those small hardware stores I remember fuses, nails, wood screws, cleaning implements, welding supplies, mouse traps, silver polish, wire, copper for plumbing, electrical supplies, wire for fencing, chains and ropes people used to tie dogs, and lots of shovels and gardening implements. The stores would smell of linseed oil, dirt, and sometimes what I later learned was the smell of small amounts of fertilizer. Some of them smelled like sweet damp wood, a smell I learned much later, most often meant termite infestation of the building itself. In those years, hardware stores were often disorganized and did not have the neat and clean appearance that so many of them do today.

                 Had you asked me at the time, I liked going places with my father, but I was not a fan of hardware stores.  My dad would teach me things and speak to me as if I were another man. He didn't sugar coat or make assumptions about my vocabulary or my intelligence. He assumed I would understand, and often, I did, or I learned something. Sometimes, he would actually have me look for something for him while he would talk to the proprietor about something else. At the time, I would much rather have been looking in dress shops or toy shops with my mother, who would always stop during shopping for a snack, or a drink during the trip. Dad always had a mission and he wouldn't stop for a coca cola or a hot chocolate as my mother would have. In fact, when I asked to stop for a soda, I learned a lot from my father who related in detail the hazards of sugared carbonated drinks to tooth enamel long before it was fashionable to do so.

                 Most Saturdays my father took me with him, often to the Montgomery Wards, then a hardware store, then the tire shop, and then to another town to yet another hardware store to find the ever elusive part he needed for something. We would get home at around one o'clock where my mother had lunch waiting. Often a Saturday lunch was open grilled cheese from the broiler with bacon on it. In summer, it was often a large shrimp salad with french bread. At home with meals we all drank water. We had hot tea afterward. I don't think I had fast food until college.

               I don't think that anyone thought very much about the man who brought his six year old daughter to the hardware stores every Saturday.  I realize now that I benefited immensely from this time.   I watched him drive his standard shift Jeep from the front seat, as child safety and booster seats were not yet required.  The one time we had a near miss my father's arm stretched out in front of me preventing me from hitting the metal dash board on my side. It is no wonder that my cars have a standard shift today and that I taught all my own children to drive one.  Although I don't function on the level of a contractor, I do know the difference between a wood screw and sheet metal screws.  I know how to measure and I am able to maintain most things on our farm.  When a lock ages, I am able to change doorknobs and locks pretty quickly.  At least some of this is due to the choice one man made in 1965 to take his skinny little daughter with him each Saturday as he completed his household errands.

            As I take my young grandson with me sometimes I often think about the lessons he may be garnering from this special time. Sometimes some of our greatest investments are made inadvertently.

The Launching of a Sibling Blog

          

       You might think it strange that someone who already has four blogs has started yet another.  Doesn't she have enough to do, especially since she is nearing a deadline for yet another writing project, a paid one no less ?   The fact is that each of my blogs has a different purpose and each taps into a different place.  I don't eat in the living room, or sleep in the bathroom, so in the same vein, each blog is a different room of sorts where we address different ideas, thoughts, and sometimes feelings.  Rational Preparedness is a blog that was created as a consequence of my podcasted radio program where I talk about issues of preparedness. Listeners wanted a place where they could refer to the names of products and their contact information for things I'd mentioned in the preceding podcast. When time constraints made it impossible for me to continue the program, listeners asked that I, at least, continue the blog.  The blog continued, and shortly after, I wrote a book called Rational Preparedness; A Primer to Preparedness.  The Rational Preparedness blog then became an arm of the promotion of that book and in addition, a place where I could elaborate on and extend some of the ideas I had introduced in the book.

                 What I Learned from Daniel, was actually my first blog.  I started it a few weeks after my twelve and a half year old son's sudden death. It was a way of journaling, staying sane, and perhaps sharing the process of our recovery with those who'd also known  losses and might even be helped by my musings. I had no way of knowing where it might lead. This blog continues, but also became a book entitled    What I Learned from Daniel.  Whereas the blog is primarily about my life and the life of my family and remaining children following Daniel's departure, the book is squarely about Daniel's life while he was here on Earth.

                 Jane Becomes an Author is a light hearted and honest assessment of how difficult the life of a new author is, especially in a period of time in history where book publishing has radically changed in the digital age. I usually enjoy the writing portion of the tasks. I do not enjoy some of the promotion, the begging for reviews from famous people, and the rewrites of passages which might have seemed to me to be the best paragraphs in the book. These are my thoughts on the process of becoming a professional writer.

                Life After the Rescues is an informational blog concerning our farm and the animals of many varieties who came to us as rescues. It shares ideas about animal management and also our thoughts when their lives finally come to an end. Our lives have most likely been enriched by the animals even more than they have appreciated being here with us.

               I plan to continue all of these blogs as appropriate.  Sometimes a thought, an issue or a problem doesn't fit well in any of these other blog homes.  Then, there might be a comment, a complaint or a yarn here.  Thanks for coming.