NATIONAL DAY OF UNPLUGGING.

Whoo boy. I was planning on blogging about the high pay our teachers get when I discovered it was National Day Of Unplugging?

I kind of did a double take and thought we need a National Day Of Unplugging? What is it?

I went to their website and found pictures of people giving up their electronic devices to do such things as:  play, listen to the birds,cuddle, salsa and so on. It never occurred to me there is such a need out there that we should have a national recognition day. I look around and see people leashed to their phones or have devices permanently sticking out of their ears.

I can see where that could be a problem.  John Tesh says 4 out of 5 people take their phones to the bathroom with them. And,  people check their phones on average twice an hour. Hmm. (I heard his comments some time back, and I hope I have those numbers right.)

We older people are thankfully less addictable  and less in need of immediate sensory satisfaction, me thinks.

The challenge is, can you give up, starting at sundown tonight, anything that buzzes, rings, clinks, vibrates, beeps, chirps, etc. until Saturday night at sundown?

http://nationaldayofunplugging.com/.

I’ll concentrate on the high pay our teachers get tomorrow. Gotta go answer my email. Hmm, I think I am addicted to my email and blog. But, not in the bathroom.

I leave you with a few words from Thoreau:

Men say they know many things;
But lo! they have taken wings, —
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that any body knows.

He was a master of defining independence and nature. There is a lot to be said for that.

CONNECTION ADDICTION

Being disconnected from a machine, if it were an iron lung, for instance,  poses serious consequences. Being disconnected from my computer, the Compac Laptop I’ve used almost exclusively for my blog these past two years, has left me anxious and insecure. How can I function without this device? Silly, I know. I have approximately 4,000 pictures on this machine. An entire book manuscript is in my Compac. It seems a good portion of my recent life’s effort resides there, and I had no idea how upsetting it would be to contemplate its untimely death. It put-put-putted, grew hot to the  touch, and began gasping its last breaths.

Yesterday, after doing some online trouble shooting, we took it to the Geeks.  The processor, the likely culprit,  slowly “frying”, even they can’t fix.  They would have to send it out.  I decided to buy an external hard drive, download everything and load it into the little Toshiba I bought last December before I went to Thailand.
I’m very grateful to that little machine-now. I’ve been able to blog somewhat over these last few weeks, without the resources encapsulated in the Compac. The mini-Toshiba glitches with an over-sensitive finger pad; I couldn’t get my email because of connection problems. It doesn’t show my pictures in a comfortably large format. But, it saved me from making a hasty decision on my long term replacement and contains a 140 gigabyte hard drive.

I own an external Western Digital hard drive, pictured above. It weighs about 2 pounds, has a 500 gigabyte capacity and is nearly full. Kind of boggles the brain that at one time “we” thought 64 megabytes was all we would need on a computer. (Remember Commodore 64?) Next to the Western Digital sits this tiny, about 6 ounce, Clickfree Drive. It also has 500 gigabytes. Its advertised as clickfree because you plug it into your old computer and it automatically downloads everything you have. It was like trouncing down memory lane to watch all my pictures load by list, Atchafalaya Alligator Tour, Chiracahua National Monument, Old Family Photos, flit, flit, flit. Oh, rescue feels soooooo good.
Two hours on the phone with AT&T and my connection problems are solved. Hey, I’m back in business.