Livin’ La Vida Loca

Lisa and I both love to cook.   We season our cooking with incredibly fresh herbs and spices which we buy in one pound packages from San Francisco Herb Company and keep in the freezer until we need them.   Every morning we make one pot of Folgers Hazlenut flavored coffee and as the day progresses we make one, sometimes two, pots of hot tea in the same Dollar-store-special 12 cup, drip coffee maker.   We also buy our tea from San Francisco Herb Co. and we’re not tea snobs so we like the Apricot, Passion Peach, Jasmine and Mango flavored tea every bit as much as we do the Ceylon, Darjeeling or China Black.   We also buy Yerba Mate and dried Spearmint which, in combination, make a tasty hot beverage (a little China Black tea and Spearmint isn’t bad either).

I’m a voracious Fantasy and Science Fiction reader who’s never been affluent enough to afford what my reading habit would cost if I bought new books.   I once haunted used bookstores, flea markets, library thrift stores and garage sales for reading matter but that’s all changed now.   These days I just log onto PaperBackSwap.com and use my accumulated credit (from books I’ve sent to other members) to order myself a fresh new stack of books.   Oh, I still haunt all the old familiar places but if I can’t find books I want to read, I can still find books to swap and that’s a wonderful thing.   Sometimes it’s also a money saving thing, for example, I recently used three swap credits, which cost me under $5, to acquire three nice Linux reference books with cover prices totalling well over $50 (as if I could have found them anywhere around here).   I picked up the first two books in Philip Jose Farmer’s six-book series The Dungeon at a flea market not long ago and really liked them so I went looking for the other four books.   I found books three, four and six at PaperBackSwap.com.   Meanwhile, Lisa had developed an interest Isaac Asimov’s Robot and Foundation series.   I’d been able to find some, but not all, of the books she wanted through PaperBackSwap.com.   So I need one to complete the series I was reading and she needed four in the series she was reading.   I found all five books, used, for less than $20 at Amazon.com.

Through Google video and YouTube we’ve discovered Eric Mongrain, Andy McGee (along w/Craig D’Andrea), the utterly astounding Li Jie (You like? You want more? You’ll find thirteen more pieces of her work hiding among the midi files on this page) and the inimitable Peter Oakley.   Of course on any given evening one can spend a few minutes playing around on YouTube and find one thing or another to watch and, though we’ve given up television altogether, a few minutes is about all we can spare.   After all, we’ve a new world to explore albeit virtually.

When we worked nights and Lisa couldn’t sleep with the morning sun in her eyes I found a place online that sells old fashioned night-masks and bought her one.   When I wanted to hear the music of Carlos Montoya again, after far too many years of abstinence, I found a place online where I was able to download an entire album in mp3 files.   I bought a used Quantaray QSX7001 tripod, in excellent condition, at a flea market for under ten dollars; it was missing the quick disconnect (the part that attaches to the camera) but I was able to purchase a new one online for a few dollars thus presenting my wife with a very nice tripod which cost me considerably less than it’s normal retail price.   When I find myself without a book to read I got to the Baen Free Library and download a (free) book that I can read on my computer.   When I want a weather forecast I go to the Weather Underground site and plug in my zip code.   When I want to know how a word is spelled, or if I’m using it correctly, I go to Merriam Websters online and type it in.   The first thing I do every morning is turn on our computers and I check my email before I make coffee; the last thing I do every night, before I go to sleep, is check my email and turn off our computers.

None of this seems unusual to me any more but every once in a while, for a brief moment, I remember when several of the houses on our block had bomb shelters in the back yard and we had bomb drills, along with fire drills, at school.   Telephones didn’t have dials, you picked up the handset and a woman’s voice asked you "Number please?".   A truck drove through our neighborhood once or twice every year towing a little trailer that broadcast a cloud of DDT and we kids ran along behind the truck, playing in the cloud because it was cool ( I liked the smell of it).   The street in front of our house wasn’t asphalt, it was concrete and every summer another truck, with another little trailer, came and put new tar in the cracks between slabs of concrete in the road. That was another cool time for us kids because we could pull off a little chunk of fresh tar, while it was still warm and chew it. It was just like gum only it tasted different, was free, and it lasted for hours.   I remember an article in my Weekly Reader that was about something called the Univac.

When I have one of those moments all I can say is "Wow!"

No, really, wow!

Don Crowder