transposable element

holidays are not yet over (we are invited for a turkey dinner for new year’s eve) but i’m already feeling the aftermath. i’m sleepy from all the late nights, stuffed and bloated from all the feasting, and hoarse from all the gabbing. holidays are bad for the health, haha…

how are you faring? i hope you haven’t maxed out your cash advance credit cards with all the shopping?

the idiomatic expression means something like losing your sanity, but for this entry, i mean ‘marbles’ in a slightly more literal sense. here’s an email i’ve been forwarded a while back, and though i didn’t realize it at the time, it made quite a big impact on me. more on that later, here’s the email first:

3900 Saturdays

The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday mornings. Perhaps it’s the
quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it’s
the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first
few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable.

A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the garage with a steaming cup
of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What began as
a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life
seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it:

I turned the dial up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio
in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net. Along the way, I
came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a
golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the
broadcasting business. He was telling whom-ever he was talking with
something about ‘a thousand marbles.’ I was intrigued and stopped to
listen to what he had to say.

‘Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job. I’m sure they
pay you well but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your
family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work
sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. It’s too bad you
missed your daughter’s ‘dance recital’ he continued. ;’Let me tell you
something that has helped me keep my own priorities.’ And that’s when he
began to explain his theory of a ‘thousand marbles.’

‘You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average
person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some
live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.

‘Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900, which is
the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire
lifetime. Now, stick with me, Tom, I’m getting to the important part.

It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in
any detail’, he went on, ‘and by that time I had lived through over
twenty-eight hundred Saturdays.’ ‘I got to thinking that if I lived to
be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So
I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended
up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1000 marbles I took them
home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container right here in
the shack next to my gear.’

‘Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it
away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on
the really important things in life.

There’s nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to
help get your priorities straight.’

‘Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign-off with you and take
my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last
marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next
Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing
we can all use is a little more time.’

‘It was nice to meet you Tom, I hope you spend more time with your
family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. This is a 75
Year old Man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!’

You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off
I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on
the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few
hams to work on the next club newsletter.

Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. ‘C’mon honey,
I’m taking you and the kids to breakfast.’ ‘What brought this on?’ she
asked with a smile. ‘Oh, nothing special, it’s just been a long time
since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. And hey, can we stop
at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some marbles.

assuming you’d live to be about 75 (quite a feat, nowadays!), how many marbles would YOU have left? i haven’t bought marbles myself (i’d need about 2000+), but ever since i read this email, i feel like i’m constantly being nudged to use my time left here on earth wisely. for every day i spend just sleeping in or doing nothing noteworthy, i feel like i’ve wasted yet another day of my life. i get this visual that my life time is dripping like sands in an hourglass. and in a macabre way, i’d imagine, “what if this would have been my last? i spent it doing nothing.” weekends are worse, because i feel weekends must be spent in a more meaningful way as those are the days that the family is together.

a new year is approaching. 52 marbles. 52 saturdays. how are you going to spend them?

i count myself lucky that i could easily avoid hitting the malls during weekends and after office hours. it’s one of the perks of being an unemployed stay-at-home, mom, i suppose. if i go shopping, i could get there as soon as the malls open and i make sure i’m out before the after-5pm hordes arrive. i hate crowds, especially those who walk at a snail’s pace, block escalator landings, queue up hours for the littlest freebie promotional items and most of all, those who block my stroller out for space in the lift when they obviously have two healthy feet and can very well take the escalator instead. arrrgh!

my feet have been hurting for the last several months and i’m suspecting it’s because of carrying mia around. she still hates the stroller, and would rather be in the baby carrier, which is also sometimes my preference when traveling with her. beats the stroller when using the public transpo, but i think it’s taking its toll on my soles. i don’t think it’s Plantar Fasciitis. either she’s just getting too heavy, or i need to to stop wearing flip flops and get me some real shoes. or some birkies. they’re an eyesore (perhaps except for the heidi klum collection), but miles better than crocs, which somehow don’t fit my feet well anyway. i’ve seen just one shop so far selling birkenstocks here, but i haven’t check the selection. i bet there’ll be a huge price mark-up, though. darn it. isn’t is ironic that now that i’m out of germs land, i yearn for stuff made in germany?!?

excuse the typos, but i’m fumblijng with mz new keyboard. hubby came home today with a new kezboard for me, and it’s taking me a whilke to get used to it. if you think it’s sweet of him, let me tell you that it’s just because i asked him to finish our newsletter which is saved in mz computer, and he just couldn’t stand the amount of organic matter that has accumulated in the old one. would have sustained a crop to fruition, haha.

this new kezboard is much more compact (so the kezs are closer together, thus the typos) but my biggest problem is that it’s an “english” keyboard, and darn it, i’ve been usign a german keyboard for the last 8 years now! i wonder how long it will take me to remember that the z is where the y is and vice versa! arrgh!

last week, a new flash drive. this week, a new keyboard. if we had the moolah, i’d love to have an entirely new machine, but for now, gotta be happy with new spare parts !

we were at a large newly opened electronics store last week, and looking at the wares on display, it’s amazing at how many new products are now available that were virtually non-existent, say, just 5 years ago. digital slr cameras, plasma tvs, dvd camcorders, ultra portable pc’s, new gaming consoles. it’s awesome to witness this exponential development in the technology, but at the same time, as a consumer, it’s a bit sad, too.

take for example our mini-dv camcorder. it was one of the latest models available when we bought it about 5 years ago. nowadays, i think nobody would buy such a camcorder at all. a dvd video recorder, which automatically saves your videos on digital format is naturally more convenient, because then you would no longer need to lug spare tapes with you and you can easily transfer files to your computer without the need for tape drives. but if we get one of those ultra modern video recorders, what the heck are we going to do with the old one? will we be more likely to take videos during important events then? will the quality of our videos really be better? will we ever find the time to edit them? and what if, 2 years from now, an even more advanced gadgets come up? how can one keep up?

on second thoughts, should one keep up?

the year’s end approaches and tasks are piling up! my list of things to do is as rattling as a las vegas strip map. aside from christmas shopping and parties, there’s jan’s school transition program, and… our year end family newsletter! i was hoping to insert it in christmas cards, but it seems like the cards would need to be mailed out sans the newsletter or it will be 2007 redux, i.e., not a single card mailed out.

but then again, theres just a week left before christmas. a week! will they reach their destinations in time? does it make sense to still mail them out?

bollocks, where did the time go? i though i had it all under control, but as before, christmas crept up on me without me realizing it. i’m still not finished with christmas shopping, which is frankly becoming more of a chore. hubby and i were even telling ourselves not to give each other gifts anymore and just save it for something bigger after the holiday brouhaha are over. i mean, there’s gotta be joy in giving, and if it starts to feel like something that needs to be done instead of something you want and are eager to do, then there’s something wrong, eh? but we’ll see. a week is a week, and i just might spot something that’s a joy to give/receive.

on the newsletter front: i’ve been looking for simple and free christmas newsletter templates, but unfortunately, the selection out there is dismal. aside from those i’ve used in our past newsletters, there doesn’t seem to be many more to choose from. so i’m trying out a web-based template now, instead of a word attachment. we’ll see how that works out.

how are you keeping up with the holiday rush?

last year, were were awed by the christmas light up along orchard road. this year? i thought of taking photos, but they were so uninspiring, they weren’t worth the space in my storage card. ok, i’m not going to mince words; i found them downright ugly.

they’ve transformed the shopping street to a candy wonderland, so instead of the traditional christmas ornaments of poinsettia, stars, baubles, and such, they had giant candies, cupcake houses, lollipops and doughnuts adorning the trees and sidewalks. and red heart-shaped balloons (?) from hitachi.

it’s christmas, for christ’s sake (pun intended), not a carnival! they wanted the theme to be “sweet christmas in the tropics”. a theme?!? what theme? christmas theme is not good enough a theme? christmas is a tradition that’s more than two thousand years old. you can’t just come up with a theme and use adornments that has no relevance whatsoever to christmas!

or is it really all just about marketing and drawing sales? how utterly disappointing.

if you’ve been trying to visit this blog the last couple of days, you’d have noticed a digital signage saying that it was unavailable. sorry, no fault of mine this time. server crashed. even a techno-bobo like me can’t manage something like that.

why is it that when it was offline, i was itching to blog and pen my thoughts, and now that it’s up, i don’t know where to begin? arrgh!