MY LIFE AS A BAR CODE

By Linda Wood Rondeau

 When I first moved to Jacksonville, I took on part-time employment as an “associate” (new world term for store clerk) in a local department store. My official department assignment was Point-of-sale (new world term for cash register) where I scanned products, totaled purchases and where once in a while people actually paid with cash.

I remember my first part-time job as a store clerk in W.T. Grants. I worked 20 hours a week after school and evenings and did some register work. In those days, prices were on the tags. The cashier put the amount in and totaled the amount of sale including figuring out the sales tax and manually adding it into the total charge. 

Customers handed the cashier cash and the cashier had to figure out the change, counting it to herself as she removed it from the drawer and counting it back to the customer. Cashiers had to go to the office and get their “drawer” for their shift and hand the drawer back in when the shift was done. Shortages were a “no-no” and a cashier could be penalized if her drawer came up short because she miscounted change. Cashiers had to be “bonded” in the event of theft or lost money. One thing for certain, cashiers became very proficient in basic math.

As I scanned and hit buttons that do all the brain work for me, I thought about how many aspects of our lives are managed by barcodes: store coupons, credit cards, preferred customer cards, bank accounts, identification cards, and even medical services. Try to get through a day without swiping something into a machine that calculates our vital statistics. Heck…we can even open up a charge account by simply putting in our social security into a service pad. 

Yikes.

According to “How Stuff Works:

"UPC" stands for Universal Product Code. They were originally created to help grocery stores speed up the checkout process and keep better track of inventory, but the system quickly spread to all other retail products because it was so successful.

“UPCs" originate with a company called the Uniform Code Council (UCC). A manufacturer applies to the UCC for permission to enter the UPC system. The manufacturer pays an annual fee for the privilege. In return, the UCC issues the manufacturer a six-digit manufacturer identification number and provides guidelines on how to use it.”

I must admit, I like the convenience of less brain activity, especially as I age. But I can’t help but wonder what I’ve lost in the process, besides my math abilities.

Winner of the 2012 Selah Award for best first novel The Other Side of Darkness/Harbourlight,  LINDA WOOD RONDEAU, writes stories of God’s mercies. Walk with her unforgettable characters as they journey paths not unlike our own. After a long career in human services, Linda now resides in Jacksonville, Florida.

Linda’s best-selling Adirondack Romance, It Really IS a Wonderful Life, is published by Lighthouse of the Carolinas and is available wherever books are sold.

These books are also available in ebook format along with her other ebooks by Helping Hands Press: I Prayed for Patience/God Gave Me Children and Days of Vines and Roses. Songs in the Valley is scheduled for release this fall by Helping Hands Press.

Readers may visit her web site at www.lindarondeau.com or email her at lindarondeau@gmail.com  or find her on Facebook, Twitter, PInterest, and Goodreads.  

   

Storing in a Cloud

By Kevin Parsons

What is the deal on this 'Cloud' thing, anyway? Let's say I have four bars of silver I want to store safely. I go to my bank and say to Kent, my banker whom I trust, and say, "Kent, store these safely." Kent says, "Sure," and we put them in a safe deposit box. What's the first word in safe deposit box? I know, you hate it when there's a test right away...  but the answer is safe. And where is the safe deposit box? ( I swear, this is the last test question.) In a safe. When I store stuff in there, I believe it is pretty much...safe.

Now we store our computer data in a cloud. When was the last time you looked up into the sky, saw a cloud, and thought, "Now I feel safe." In fact, you might have said, "Oh, oh," and hurried to take the laundry inside.

And how do they store it in a cloud? When Kent stores my bars of silver, we put them in the box in any order. But my data, as we all know, is 5Gb of x's and o's. I studied and found that Gb means, 'Gazillion billion.' So somewhere, to keep my data right, someone has played a gazillion billion games of tic tac toe. And my information has to be stored, 5Gbs of it, in order. Get one tic tac toe game out of order and your picture of a dancing bunny in a garden of dandelions becomes a Picasso painting of Lecter Hannibal square dancing. 

Have you ever tried to set anything in a cloud? I've flown and an airliner flies right through it like it's condensation or something. I know data is weightless, but still, how could a cloud hold it?

When I bought my iPad (a tool of Satan), the friendly geek with piercings and tattoos in designs and places I never imagined informed me that they would store all my information for free. Cool. How much data? He broke it down into Geezer terms; "Lots and lots of it." No more flash drive. And when has a flash made you feel safe? Flash in the pan? I digress.

However after a month I exceeded my storage space. They would be happy to store my data for $10 a year. Two months later I needed to pay $25 a year. Six months, $100 a year.  At this rate it would be cheaper to hire someone to copy everything down with a pencil on a legal pad. And are there illegal pads? Just wondering.

Won't we run out of clouds soon? And why don't I see clouds with x's and o's on them? If we have a cloudburst will it rain down in bytes? And why isn't there a guy I trust to help store it?

Maybe I'll just get my own cloud and store my data in it. I've got a better idea.

I'll just store it under the mattress. 

Follow Kevin's 50 States in 50 Weeks Tour

http://kevinbparsons.blogspot.com/

Writing Down the Memories

I’m a contemporary romance author, but at one point I considered trying a story set during WWII. My 85 year old mother-in-law is the only remaining family member from that generation so I called and asked her to write down things she could recall from living through the war.

            Somewhere in our conversation she either misunderstood or simply changed her mind because instead of telling me about the 40s she started writing her life story. It turned out to be one of the sweetest blessings of my life.
            My mother-in-law has always talked freely about her life growing up in small rural town in Ohio, one of eight children from parents of Hungarian descent. This memoir however was full of new insights into her life that surprised and delighted us all. When I got her forty pages, handwritten on spiral notebook paper, I called her and she explained that she was unable to sleep one night and just started writing about her life. The more she wrote the more she enjoyed remembering. I told her I would type it up, edit it, then send her several copies. But as I typed a wonderful thing happened. The words were so true to her, so typical of how she would speak that I couldn’t bring myself to make it all pretty and proper. Reading it in her words was like sitting beside her and listening to her tell the story. I did correct spelling, double check street names, and names of friends, but basically I printed it as she wrote it. We designed a cover – a picture of our gazebo which is her favorite place to sit – then placed the pages in a small three ring  notebook and sent them to her.
            What a treasure those few pages turned out to be. Our family will forever have her story at our finger tips. A glimpse into another era, to the person she was beyond Mom, Grandma and Great Grandma.
            Mom’s mother was colorful Hungarian woman who told wonderful stories about growing up as an immigrant. Over the years various family members promised to write down her stories, or get her to tell them into a recorder, but sadly no one ever did. Now she’s gone and so are the stories. My parents are both gone and I can no longer go to them and ask questions about relatives or about their childhood. Fortunately, we have diaries and journals that my mother kept but nothing from my dad.
            As writers we need to find time to capture these pieces of family history before it’s too late and  encourage our older relatives to write down their past. A few things I’ve learned about getting relatives to participate - don’t give them a fancy journal to write in. They’ll be reluctant to mess it up and the pretty pages can be intimidating, making them feel they need to write a proper book. Better to give them a small spiral notebook and a pen. Start on a holiday and ask them to write down special memories from that day. No need to worry about nice sentences, or starting at the beginning of their life. That too can be daunting.
            Once you start collecting those precious moments of their lives you’ll have a family treasure you will cherish for generations. Don’t put it off. Time is rushing away. I’m starting my own personal remembrance file today.

                                         

             Lorraine Beatty
             Visit me at: Lorrainebeatty.com
             lorrainbeatty.blogspot.com/                                       https://www.facebook.com/#!/Lorrainebeattyauthor

Bringing Back Sunday Dinner

By Tracey Lyons

Perhaps the most wonderful times of my life were the Sunday dinners my grandmother, Lina Davis, used to cook. Now mind you, Grandma Davis was not a culinary wizard. She was a bare bones, meat and potato kind of cook. A left over from the depression era where food was scarce, but company came in abundance.  Sunday dinners meant the warm comforting smells of pot roast, mashed potatoes and gravy made from a dry mix. It was all so good to me. Those dinners meant a hearty meal with family that I loved dearly.

As I started a family of my own I decided I wanted to keep the Sunday Dinner tradition alive. So for years I hosted Sunday Dinners. Everyone in the family usually dropped in.  My sisters would bring their families, and on the special occasion when my brother visited with his family from California, the house filled to the brim. The cousins would play with the toys in the living room while the grownups hung around in the big open kitchen catching up. My dinners always had something baking in the oven filling the house with smells reminiscent of the days spent at my grandmother’s.  The dining room table would be extended with extra leaves, mismatched chairs would be gathered around so everyone had a place. I always brought out the good china and tablecloth.  The centerpiece always had candlelight.  My dining area was filled with family, laughter and love.

Now that my sons are grown I’m hopeful they will carry on the tradition of the occasional Sunday Dinner. My family is filling up with daughter-in-laws and grandchildren. We don’t live as close as I would like, but the best times are when everyone gathers at our home for one of those special Sunday Dinners.  I still bring out the same china we used when the kids were little. There is always something wonderful cooking on the stove top and in the oven. My sons come to the kitchen to help prepare the meal while their kids play in the living room.

Sunday dinners are just one of those age old traditions that never wear out. I hope everyone has experienced them in their lifetime.  Do you have any wonderful memories of Sunday dinners you’d like to share? If so I invite you to leave a comment below. 

Bio

An avid lover of books and historical romances, Tracey has been writing romances for almost thirty years.  She holds membership in Romance Writers of America, Novelists Inc. and Liberty States Fiction Writers.  Tracey and her husband live in downstate New York with two dogs and four chickens. When not busy writing, and doing research for her books, she is busy making her husband crazy with renovations on their 1800’s farm house.  To learn more about the Women of Surprise sweet historical romance series visit www.TraceyLyons.com.  Visit Tracey on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TraceyJLyonsAuthor. Tracey is also published in contemporary romance. You can learn more about these books by visiting www.traceysorel.com.

The Women of Surprise historical romance series. Amazon/Montlake

http://tinyurl.com/btc55ts

GEEZERS THINK

By

David K. Crabtree

 CG (certified geezer)

     I’ve decided to turn over a new leaf in 2013, 

although I was very happy with the leaves I turned over in 2012. No matter. The New Year is always a time for forging ahead with bold thoughts and ideas. Seeing the situation that this Country is in, I have come up with a new way to approach…anything. 

All you have to do is to apply the concept of “Geezer Think”

© Yanc | Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Image

 This method, which has been in the testing phase since the early 1800’s, applies none of the complicated, intellectual, critical thinking, and I might add, overrated, and high tone ways to look at a problem. 

Nope, “Geezer Think” will revolutionize the way problems are solved whether it be a crisis in the middle East, a school board needing a decision on funding allocation, or if it’s a good idea to plant another acre of corn or beans. It doesn’t matter. “Geezer Think” solves all problems in a quick decisive manner, and without a strike, another committee, or an Executive Order.   Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? That’s only because it’s too logical. 

Here’s the concept.

     Let’s say you need an insightful decision about, oh let’s say plastic bags for groceries. Seems that many State and local governments are banning the single use plastic bags we all get anytime we buy something. You know those bags don’t you. They are the ones that rip two steps before you get in the house, spilling the leeks all over the front porch which is covered in wet slimy leaves. A Certified Geezer or CG would have asked a simple question to those decision makers. “What did we use before paper and plastic bags?” All geezers worth their salt will instantly remember totes made out of flour sacks or some other piece of cloth. Nothing was wasted was it. So, here we are a hundreds of years later and we are once again using…wait for it…cloth bags.

© Khanga | Dreamstime Stock Photos &Stock Free Images

 All the controversy, hearings, committee minutes, protests and squabbles could have been avoided simply by asking a CG. You see, we remember. Not all at once anymore, but generally or with a bit of time and a wee dram of whiskey. Take something like parental responsibility. 

A CG knows that they had to pay the price to repair that broken window when their youngster and his friends decided it would be fun to throw rocks at the neighbors cat, sitting peacefully on the inside ledge, looking out of the window. We made the kids wish they were never born by having them rake the neighbors leaves, shovel snow from their driveway, or Heaven help us, paint their new fence. Now a days, the kids think we have “people” for that. Most often though, the “people”, are still Mom and Dad. There is a line between discipline and cruelty of course, though today it is often some “administrator” that’s making the mark very fuzzy, rather than the parents who generally have a view unobstructed by bureaucracy.

    “Geezer Think” turns out to be a combination of Yankee frugalness, Southern practicality, Western resourcefulness, and of course that simple logic I mentioned.  The point is that decisions, business and personal, are made so complicated that we are unable to move ahead.  If we would ask, and follow, the advice of those who have been there and done that, the Country and our own lives would be better off.

David

I am the youngest of three sons and was born in upstate New York. My mother, an immigrant whose family escaped from Germany in the mid-1930s, became a registered nurse. My father, a Mainer and noted architect, moved to the young family to a suburban town outside of Boston, Massachusetts. While taking night classes at Boston University in order to get into their School of Communications  I was advised that my draft number was about to come up. So, including a year in Vietnam, I spent 10 years in the Air Force before going to work for a number of commercial airlines in the production and materials management areas. Later, as the airline business waned, I moved into technical writing. Currently I write novel and work as a consultant in the security field. I have been married for over 40 years and have one married daughter.

Writing seems to have been a part of my life. From an early age, I would make up stories or write songs, but rarely keep them. The urge finally got to me and I have actively written since the early 70s. I also have been a writer and editor on numerous organizational publications, newsletters and technical manuals. “Destiny and Decision” was my first full-length novel written for publication and is the first in the “Wands of Merlin” series.  I also expound on some daily topics at www.dkcrabtree.wordpress.com

I enjoy a wide variety of leisure activities including riding my motorcycle, leather work, and photography. Some of my photographs can be seen in the Gallery section of my website www.dcrabtree.com or at my blog www.krabtree.blogspot.com  

Books by David K. Crabtree currently available in print or Kindle.

Cleaning Out The Junk Drawer

By

Gail Kittleson

            Housecleaning was not a huge priority as I grew up, and the junk drawer sat at the bottom of the list. Actually, there was no list. Anyway, if someone dumped that drawer out, we knew things were desperate.  

            About two weeks ago, my husband greeted me with, “It’s three degrees this morning—a degree warmer than yesterday.” Blizzard conditions prevailed over each weekend, and officials cancelled school on three consecutive Mondays.

            On March 21, we teased friends and neighbors with a tongue-in-cheek “Happy Spring!” On the twenty-second, I noticed a sign on Main Street:

PICTURES WITH THE EASTER BUNNY

MARCH 23, 1-3

            You’ve got to be kidding me.

            That day, we reached a high of twenty-two degrees, and a violent wind pierced even Thinsulate outerwear and fleece mittens. People walked bent-backed, if they walked at all.  A highway scraped clean in the morning wore an ice coating by afternoon, from blowing snow that melted under the traffic flow and refroze.

            I know, you’re sick of winter, too, so why am I reminding you of it? Trust me—there’s a writing point here somewhere. And it’s about that junk drawer.

One thing winter is good for . . . hunkering down with your work in progress. You can’t leave the house anyway. This past month I did just that—hunkered down. And it was one of those periods I could sense my skills sharpening.

On one of my first go-back-through edits, all of a sudden, a light shone . . . it was easy to spot backstory and wipe it from the face of the earth. Thousands of words went by the wayside—that is, into the backstory file I keep for this particular story, just in case I need them, you know.

That file overflows with all that stuff you can’t use right now, but don’t want to toss in the wastebasket. So you throw it into the drawer, where moth and rust corrupt. And then, some winter when the cold, cabin fever and degenerate thoughts swirling in your head become unbearable, you decide to clean that baby out.

Somehow, on that day, it’s okay to get rid of the stuff, now infested with dust, dead insects, and an unidentified sticky substance. Afterward, you clean the grime from the bottom of the drawer, and replace (in an organized fashion) a few remnants that might actually be useful some day.

Your satisfied sigh echoes through the house. You did it!

That’s how I felt after that strong edit, razing retrograde, redundant ruminations from my first three chapters. What possessed me to think I’d needed them in the first place? As I reread those all-important chapters, they seemed lighter . . . fresh . . .free . . . and much more effective.

Ahhh, the joys of winter.

About Gail A late-blooming writer, Gail Kittleson has instructed ESL and writing, facilitated grief workshops and women's retreats, and enjoyed being a wife, mom, and Grandma. She and her husband live in northern Iowa and do some wintering in the Arizona mountains. Her goal is to empower her readers. 

 

W're All Grown-Up Now

By Dawn Sinclair

As all grandparents will testify, there are benefits to having appreciative grandchildren. By which I don’t mean they say thank you constantly for all you give them because let’s be honest there is a limit to how many times you can slip a kid a backhander without him expecting it as a right.

I know this for a fact because when we were kids, both my husband and I used to visit our respective grandparents in order to top-up the Saturday morning cinema funds. (It’s one of those quirky coincidences we’ve discovered in our backgrounds over the 42 years of our marriage). Had our grandparents not been forthcoming with the loot, we’d have had to find less comfortable ways to get in than through the front door of our local flea-pit and indeed both of us recall doing so on the odd occasion (never at the same time or we’d have met long before we did – 16 and 18 years respectively).

Grandparents are handy to have as a back-up to parents, it’s true, but when I said “appreciative” I was in fact referring more to their appreciation of our diverse talents than the money in our pockets. For some reason, and I speaking for myself here and not for everyone else, our own children are not in thrall of our talents in the same way the grandkids are.

Perhaps this is due to the fact that our talents have been learned gradually in front of them, while they were doing more important things like making height-notches on the door frame or easing wallpaper off the walls surreptitiously right under our noses. Never mind the fact that they were too busy honing their own skills and coercing their parents into appreciating the genius behind the excruciating noises they were making doing it to notice mum’s efforts at becoming the next Agatha Christie or dad’s frustrated attempts at drumming using empty boxes and a couple of spare bamboo twigs.

Indeed, our own offspring were probably mortified by our unending attempts to grow up quicker than their kids because we were hardly more than kids ourselves when they joined our household. So holding us in thrall was never part of their remit and to this day, they are less impressed with what we’ve achieved than our grandsons are.

Grandparents are supposed to be go-to guys in times of crisis. “Mum and Dad grounded me so can you explain to them I only did what they were doing at my age?” or “There aren’t that many years left for you to have the energy to watch me play soccer Granny and Granddad – and if you don’t come, I’ll have no one there cheering me on.” Or “All the other kids are going to France this year but Dad says we’ve got to cut back and stay with you two for the whole summer – I’ll try not to make your lives hell but you’ve got to understand folks, it’s not my fault I got hormones!”

We want to oblige, of course, but we mustn’t let down all the other grandparents out there. It’s our sworn duty to maintain the illusion that “We’ve done our fair share of raising kids and now we’re just going to have all the benefits without the responsibility”. Ha! What a get-out clause (thanks to all our predecessors). I am sure there are paragons amongst you who don’t ever use the expression “We love being grandparents because we can give them back when we are exhausted” but it is one tradition that I am happy to maintain.

However…

There are definitely moments which make everything worthwhile – every favour granted, every slight taken, every joke at our expense easy to swallow and every “Yes” worth a million “No”s.

For instance, when a grandchild looks up with rounded eyes and says, “Wow, I didn’t know you’d even heard of rap Nanna” upon listening to a song I’d written being performed by a really cool dude 40 years my junior. Like for instance, when a grandchild tells his best friend in front of you, “This is my Nanna – the one I told you about who writes books.” Or like for instance, the day your grandson tells his granddad “I want to to be as good a drummer as you one day Granddad”.

I am sure all of you have instances you can quote like these but I sincerely hope every one of you grandparents can say that they recall the day one or more of their grandchildren said “I love coming to see you because are so cool Nanna and/or Poppa”.

Certainly happens to us all the time. Thanks Michael and James!

Poems:

http://www.angelfire.com/journal/dawnspoems/sitemap.html

Songs

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_music.cfm?bandID=368732

Novels

The Eternal Question

Children of Hamelin

Both available on Amazon.com (Kindle)