It took me a few seconds to recover but I knew I had to look no matter how bad it was on the off chance the dog had survived and needed help. I was shocked to see a little chiguagua running away from the scene as fast as it legs could carry it. If the dog had jumped the curb a half second sooner or later, or had run just a bit faster or slower, or the driver had swerved in either direction, the dog would have been struck by a wheel. But instead it went right down the middle of the car between the wheels. I could not believe the dog had survived and watched it run all the way down the street to make sure it didn’t’ suddenly drop dead right in the middle of it’s run.

Afterwards, waiting for the bus, I thought how tenuous life is. I know it intellectually. Yet as I ride the bus, I certainly expect to ride back home later in the day. I know I’ll die someday, but I go through today feeling pretty cocky that it’s not today. But there’s no real guarantee. None at all.

And so I look at this day a bit differently than I do a normal work day. I don’t feel quite as cocky as most days. While I don’t think today is “it”, I do look at my plans for the day. I do realize that while it’s unlikely, it’s not impossible that I may not see tomorrow. And it’s not a depressing view of life. It’s a positive introspection. To realize that the amount of life I have left it undeterminable, and I should use it as such.

I also thought today that the dog’s owner also would not have expected the dog’s life to be over. They would have expected the dog to be back as it came back every day. And yet they had no more guarantee that the dog would be around than the dog did. So I’m thinking not only do I need to live knowing that I have no idea how long I’ll be around for, but that I have no idea how long the people I love will be around for. I think I need to make some dates today to have coffee with good friends.

Life is uncertain. Eat desert first.

–Al-

The rules are that the artists are allowed only sand, water, and tools to build the works. So no internal framework, no supporting members, and no glue (though I understand they are sprayed with a diluted glue mixture AFTER completion to hold them against the elements for viewing and judging).

Turns out that Fort Meyers Beach is one of the premier location for sand sculpting. Many beaches have sand which is composed of coarse roundish grains. Much of the sand on the Florida West Coast is very fine and powdery which is easy to see. What’s not so obvious is that the grains are more angular and this combined with the small size makes the sand much more cohesive and perfect for building and sculpting.

Official Site: http://sandsculptingfestival.com/

More of my pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/asantaballa/sets/72157625881886039/show/

–Al-

More on Regina Brett

____

Originally published in The Plain Dealer on Sunday, May 28, 2006

To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me.

It is the most-requested column I’ve ever written. My odometer rolls over to 50 this week, so here’s an update:

1.    Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.

2.    When in doubt, just take the next small step.

3.    Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

4.    Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

5.    Pay off your credit cards every month.

6.    You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.

7.    Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.

8.    It’s OK to get angry with God. He can take it.

9.    Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.

10.    When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

11.    Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.

12.    It’s OK to let your children see you cry.

13.    Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

14.    If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn’t be in it.

15.    Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don’t worry; God never blinks.

16.    Life is too short for long pity parties. Get busy living, or get busy dying.

17.    You can get through anything if you stay put in today.

18.    A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.

19.    It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.

20.    When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer.

21.    Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don’t save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

22.    Overprepare, then go with the flow.

23.    Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.

24.    The most important sex organ is the brain.

25.    No one is in charge of your happiness except you.

26.    Frame every so-called disaster with these words: “In five years, will this matter?”

27.    Always choose life.

28.    Forgive everyone everything.

29.    What other people think of you is none of your business.

30.    Time heals almost everything. Give time time.

31.    However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

32.    Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.

33.    Believe in miracles.

34.    God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn’t do.

35.    Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.

36.    Growing old beats the alternative – dying young.

37.    Your children get only one childhood. Make it memorable.

38.    Read the Psalms. They cover every human emotion.

39.    Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

40.    If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.

41.    Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

42.    Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.

43.    All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

44.    Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.

45.    The best is yet to come.

46.    No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.

47.    Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.

48.    If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

49.    Yield.

50.    Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.

I can’t find a price for it but the computer system with the disk drive leased for $3,200 per month. And that’s 1956 bucks.

It’s crazy making to compare that to what we have now where it’s not uncommon for folks to have a terabyte  at home for about a hundred bucks. But this stuff was incredibly advanced for it’s time. Before this processing was mostly done on tapes. If someone needed to know how many of a product was in stock an operator would have to run a job and mount a tape which would then be read sequentially until the item was found and printed out. The idea that a production computer could reach right into its permanent storage at any point was as radical as the interplanetary internet is today.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_350.html

http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2006/09/the_hard_disk_drive.html

http://asterhost.info/amazing-facts-and-figures-about-the-evolution-of-hard-disk-drives/

–Al-

Scarlet is a very intelligent lady. She currently uses computers (Windows) heavily throughout the day and has done so for many years. She uses a desktop at work but has a personal laptop so she is no stranger to varied sized keyboards, mice, and touchpads.

She emailed me a bit worried that she would have trouble using it. I immediately replied that she would have nooooo trouble at all based on the consistent plaudits I’ve heard from the Applerati over the years and my own experience learning Macs. Certainly if she could handle those clunky PCs, the Mac would be effortless to learn.

Looking forward to her first story!

–Al-

Let me back up. We all die. Someday. If we eat badly we may die of a heart attack. If we hang around dangerous areas in the city we may die of an impromptu stabbing. If we drive recklessly we may die in a fiery crash. But if we do none of these we still die.

However, if we die of the heart attack, people say “He never took care of their diet. He died because of their diet.”

If we die of stabbing they say “I’ve told him a zillion times to be more careful where he goes. He died because he went where he should have avoided”.

If we die in a crash they say “What can he expect driving the way he did? His driving killed him”.

So even if we expect that death is inevitable and that we all die of old age eventally, there is a recognition that certain events can bring on death. And that is why I say my aunt died of stubbornness.

My aunt was 83 when she passed away. She was one degree away from being a recluse, leaving her home less than 4 times a year. She was overweight. She had cholesterol level up the wazoo! So you may think it obvious that she died of those things.

But three years ago I decided for myself that she was no longer functional enough to live unattended. I didn’t push it, but I recognized the time had come when the situation  was becoming untenable. I wasn’t ready to push the family yet, but I knew in my mind the time was coming.

Every year we get together (got together) at my aunt’s house for a “near-Christmas” dinner,  This was where we made a point of visiting her in a party mood with a timetable that did not conflict with the zillion plans everyone has for the holidays. At this last one, my sister noticed a really abnormal amount of mosquitoes. Please realize we live in South Florida so enough mosquitoes to raise our attention is a huge amount of the things. I pointed ths out to my sister and to my aunt’s granddaughter to indicate “the time has come”.

Now with their support we found a great ALF (Assisted Living Facility). I cannot praise these institutions enough. They are almost the exact opposite of what we used to call “Old Folk’s Homes”. These are organized as individual houses with 5-10 residents. They are in residential neighborhoods. You could have one next door to you. The key is that their quality of life is far beyond what we used to think of when “we need to send x to a ‘home’”.

My aunt refused to go for 4 months.

No matter what I did, what my sister did, what her granddaughter did, she refused. Sometimes in a quiet way. Sometimes in a boisterous way. But always in a concrete way. “I’m not going”.

Eventually we had the “disaster”. I got a call from a cousin that she had tried to call my aunt and gotten no response. She visited my aunt and was not able to get in, but my aunt said through the door that she had fallen and was unable to open the door. My cousin called me, I rushed over, and the short story is that we spent the night and part of the next day in the emergency room. Best as we could determine she had spent two days on the floor.

The one good thing that came out of that episode was that my aunt had no choice but to move to the ALF. She went directly from the emergency room there.

And there was a big surprise. She loved it. Within a couple of days she was comfortable. By the end of the week she was telling family how nice the other residents were. The situation seemed to have turned out much better than we could ever have hoped.

The second Friday we got a call from the ALF just to let us know that they had sent my aunt to hospital because she was complaining about upset stomach. I assumed that was the ALF being extra cautious with a new patient. But when I visited her on Saturday I immediately realized this was not the case. She was bloated and looked absolutely awful. Talking with the doctor let me discover that she had a serious pool of blood behind her abdomen. That by the time she had come to the hospital a significant amount of damage had already occurred to her organs.

Also not to belabor this episode, she was dead in two days.

What I learned from all this

(a) The ALF was the right choice. Not by my estimate, but by my aunt’s reaction.

(b) My aunt was “healthy” enough to have lasted another year or two.

(c) My aunt missed out on a couple of years of higher quality of life than she had been living by refusing to go earlier.

Those years were stolen by her own stubbornness. She did not need to die when she did. She could have stuck around a bit longer to the natural end of here life. All gone.

So it makes me think, what am I stubborn about. Are all the things I fight for worth fighting for. What am I missing out by refusing some path. I am sorry she is gone, and hope that stupid stubbornness never bring another episode like that into my life.

–Al-

What do you get when you plot the roots of polynomials using different colors for each degree? Incredibly rich artwork! Thanks to Dan Christensen for producing them and John Baez for making me aware of them. Don’t know either one, but managed to bring some joy to my day!

–Al-

Remember how long it took to get back to normal after the hurricanes in Florida and Louisiana. Remember that was with USA sized resources. Imagine trying to tackle a disaster with Haiti’s resources. Help is still needed.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1289194/Marina-Bay-Sands-resort-opens-Singapore.html

(read from bottom up as on Twitter)

–Al-

# Aw, I’m just messing, fanboys. I’m sure it’s lovely. I don’t know whether to buy one or wait until one gets issued to me by the government.     half a minute ago  via web

# Hey, maybe some of those factory workers tried ringing the Samaritans but couldn’t get through because they were holding it the wrong way? 9 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# You’re right, fanboys. It’s a fuss over nothing. It works perfectly well if you lie it on a desk and jab at the screen with your nose. 14 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Fret not, left-handed iPhone users: Apple will solve the issue by forcibly injecting your brain with a new OS that turns you right-handed. 17 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# Next week: Apple unveil a toilet you can’t sit on. 30 minutes ago via TweetDeck

# This whole iPhone 4 antenna issue reminds me of Steve Martin inventing ‘Opti-Grab ‘ spectacles in The Jerk. 30 minutes ago via TweetDeck