Me and Hank Sr. Do Best Buy

by Pa Rock
Shameless Consumer

Sunday afternoon I was at the gym marching to Pretoria on the evil treadmill when my iPod up and quit. After playing with it most of yesterday, I finally gave up and decided to find a twelve-year-old to help me get it up and running. So today I took the little silver monster to Best Buy where a lovely girl named Jennifer showed me how to reset it.

Easy, peasey! That's one more thing that I now know how to do with an iPod. I am getting to be such a techie!

So after the free lesson, I told Jennifer that I would buy a base from her. It turns out that what I wanted was a docking station - a "base" goes back about forty years to my days of selling CB radios! She took my little iPod, hit the shuffle function, and popped it into a docking station. Poor Jennifer's eyes got as big as silver dollar pancakes when Hank Williams, Sr, started belting out some country hit from the 1950's.

"What's the matter?" I asked. "Don't you like hillbilly music?"

"Oh, yes." She stammered. "I like all kinds of music."

Nice recovery, Jen!

Another Weekend - Big Deal!

by Pa Rock
Chronic Whiner

I'm old enough that the days seem to fly by. I manage to stay very busy at my job, and like the rest of America, I live for the weekends. Unfortunately, the weekends also seem to fly by.

As mentioned in an earlier blog, I am busy retyping my old newspaper genealogy column, Rootbound in the Hills, into a blog format that I will then carefully index six ways from Sunday. There are two-hundred-and-forty-two individual columns in the set, and each is loaded with specific dates, unusual surnames, and strange place locations from the last century that all require careful transcribing and proof-reading. I am also copying from the original clippings, which were banged out by newspaper workers in small towns who didn't have the luxury of working slowly - so I am encountering many spelling mistakes and obvious errors. It is not a chore for the faint-of-heart.

In order to get this project done in my lifetime, I have set a rigorous schedule and am trying very hard to stick to it. I retype one column every weekday evening, and three each Saturday and Sunday. That comes to eleven a week. This morning I just finished number seventy-five, and should be through number seventy-seven by the time I collapse into bed tonight.

The day will also include weekly grocery shopping, a trip to the gym, and a sojourn to Best Buy so they can fix a mess that I made while trying to load a software program onto my new computer. Sunday will be much the same, but the shopping will be replaced with household chores such as doing the laundry and any necessary cleaning. I don't have people or pets to pick up after, but I do have a couple of dozen plants that require regular nurturance and occasional bit of light conversation. If I have letters to write, that usually happens on Sunday also. And then I also try to post to this Ramble most days.

I have considered having a nervous breakdown, but there just isn't time!

Patriotism

I didn't really need a new computer, but the devil led me into Best Buy anyway last Saturday evening and marched me straight to the back of the store where the shiny new laptops were on display and blinking seductively. A young man wearing the company shirt approached and asked if he might be of service. I told him that I wanted to look at the laptops, but that I definitely would not be buying during this visit. The young man, his name was Matt, assured me that he did not work on commission and that he would be glad to take the time to answer my questions.

Matt asked about my computer needs, and I carefully outlined the massive databases of useless information that I have compiled, along with my new-found love of blogging. I told him that I wanted a computer that I could take anywhere and connect to the Internet upon getting there. We looked at everything, with Matt carefully stating the pros and cons of each machine. Eventually the selection narrowed to one in the mid-price range that could definitely kick some cyber-butt.

It was sometime later as we were discussing software that Matt asked me what I did for a living. After stating that I was a social worker at Luke AFB, he looked surprised and said that he was in the Air Force and stationed at Luke - Best Buy was his part-time, second job. As I thought about this young airman (actually he was a staff sergeant) serving his country full-time and then moonlighting to get ahead, I realized that I was dealing with a true patriot. I told him that he had made a sale.

Patriotism isn't about guns, or religion, or lapel pins, or even Old Glory. Patriotism is about what you do for others. John F. Kennedy had it right about not asking what your country could do for you, but rather what you could do for your country. How did we lose that spark of idealism? How did we go from the grandeur of JFK to the smallness of Bush and his cronies?

America has gone off the tracks in recent years. We are now focused on getting instead of giving, greed instead of Christian charity, cynicism instead of hope...and we are poorer for it.