The New Year Cometh

Today is the last day of the old year, 2014. It had its bright moments and flashes of sorrow. In many ways it was like so many other years that preceded it.

And then tomorrow, like always, the New Year will come and bring with it fresh experiences, joys, laughter; maybe good health, maybe not. The world around us will spin for better or worse and be a reminder of how insignificant we - you and I as individuals - truly are. I read recently there are more stars than grains of sand in the world. That is some hard math and not for the mathematically challenged who have trouble balancing a checkbook.

Hopefully, we will stay in touch with family and our old friends and make a new one or two. (I anticipate being a Great Grandfather in January, and this fills my heart with joy.) We will visit some new places, look at new movies, listen to new songs, read good books, taste new food and drinks. In short, live the good life we have been blessed with. We will have to be prepared for some bad news and deal with it as best we can, whether it affects us as individuals, family or nation.

Being old in years does not bother me. I am 83 now and thankful for the life lived and anticipated.  I am a bit slower than at the beginning of 2014. I know it and so do some of my family. For years I visited a son in Washington area and always stayed with he and his wife at their four story townhouse. After a trip this year, they recognized the difficulty I was having with the stairs and he put me up in a nearby hotel on my next visit. No talk about getting old, just silent recognition of what long life brings.

My wife Joyce joins me in wishing all who see this message a Happy New Year. We will walk through it together, the good and the tough, and hope you all will do the same.  

Christmas message

Christmas is the time of the year when families and friends gather to celebrate the Birth of Christ,

 give thanks for all the blessings of this life and remember those who have been of service to us this past year. 

It is also a time to ask God's blessing on the men and women who serve our country around the world and especially those who will be separated from love ones at this special time.

And to all who see this blog, "Merry Christmas" and may good things happen to you in 2015.

Part of a festival of lights at Hilton Head.

A child exults with joy.

Have a Merry Christmas!

Cables, splitters and football

Exterior cable box with 3 splitters and multiple cables.

It was a 'no football' Thanksgiving due to cable failure, but the Hargray repair man showed up as promised on Black Friday. While elsewhere shoppers were pushing and shoving - and a few throwing punches - things turned out better at our house. (Women fought over a Barbie doll and it took police to break it up. In England, two men fought over a TV in a Tesco grocery store and the TV was dropped  - a third man picked it up and walked off with it.

On the home front, the TV cable failure was attributed to a bad splitter and, perhaps, too many unused cables and connections. Three of the latter were in play. Since we have two TVs hooked up to cable at present the other cables were tied off and voila the tubes were back to working as usual. 

Today it will be Carolina and Clemson and later Notre Dame and Southern California.

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No football

Yesterday, Thanksgiving 2014, for only the second time in 54 years, I did not see any NFL football.  The first time I was in Taian, China, where the NFL runs a slow second to the NBA. The Chinese are very big on American basketball and follow certain players and their careers like a high school freshman chasing his first puppy love. Yesterday, my cable service went kaput and 24 hours later I am waiting for the Hargray repair man to show up at my house "between 1 and 5 pm."

Back in 1960, it was the Packers and Lions who were the game of the day. This custom of many years ended when Vince Lombardi notified the league the Packers did not want to do this any longer. It was hard on any team which usually played the previous Sunday and had to suit up again on Thursday. This cut the recovery time for injuries incurred on the previous Sunday, and Lombardi felt doing this every year was unfair to his players and fans. So the league began shuffling other teams into the turkey day festivities.
Football on Thanksgiving has been a regular occurrence since the league's inception in 1920. Currently, three NFL games are played every Thanksgiving. The first two are hosted by the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys, with one team from each conference playing either team on a rotating basis; a third game, with no fixed opponents, has been played annually since 2006. With six teams now playing each Thanksgiving many more players have less time to recover from injuries suffered the previous Sunday. (The league also started a regular Thursday night game in 2006. So much for the league's professed "concerns" about player safety.)
Notwithstanding the lack of NFL action in my life yesterday, today I am the same cheerful, friendly, clear thinking, pure in body and soul heterosexual male I have always been.

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Quotes worth remembering

Down through our nation's history men have uttered memorable phrases which remain with us throughout our lives, e.g. "Give me liberty or give me death,"  "Walk softly but carry a big stick," "We have nothing to fear but fear itself," "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," "I am not a crook," "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," "It's the economy stupid," "Yes we can." Most of these came from politicians, but others have made memorable contributions as well. Consider this "Notable Quote " from Steve  Martin, actor and comedian, found in The Island Packet, Bluffton, SC, on November 24, 2014: "I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff. Got me a $300 pair of socks. Got a fur sink. An electric dog polisher. A gasoline-powered turtleneck sweater. And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff too."

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Tearing down the Berlin Wall

Part of the wall saved as a memorial.

I was in Berlin twenty-five years ago when the Berlin Wall, erected in 1961 to separate East Berlin from the West, began to crumble (and would eventually come down.) In November 1989, following months of civil unrest in East Germany, the Communist government said people could travel between East and West.

My wife, Mary (died December 29, 2010), and I took advantage of a great price on an American Airlines flight to Germany to enjoy our first overseas trip together. We traveled in both East (Communist controlled) and West Germany, and spent a night in Salzburg, Austria.

We landed in Frankfurt and went on to Munich. While there we visited Dachau, the first concentration camp established by the Nazis. We were deeply sorrowed and affected by the horrific place in history the camp represents. We traveled to Oberammergau and visited some castles. Our next stop was Berchtesgaden but it was late when we arrived and we stayed the night across the border in Salzburg.

We drove the Autobahn toward Berlin through East Germany (getting in and out was an exercise in paperwork and paying fees) and later spent more two hours stuck on the road because of an accident ahead of us. We eventually arrived in West Berlin, the most exciting part of the journey. I visited Kennedy Platz where President Kennedy gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech and talked with a German who had been there on the occasion so many years earlier. I was at Checkpoint Charlie and considered crossing over in the night to sight see but an American military officer recommended waiting for daylight. We took an organized bus tour of East Berlin the next day and found it much subdued in contrast to the lively and vigorous West Berlin.

We went to the Wall, separating Berlin into the Communist zone and the Democratic West, which was being attacked with small hammers and light hand tools by enthusiastic and almost delirious Berliners. (Starting officially in 1990, the government used heavy duty demolition equipment and by 1992 the nine miles of concrete, barbed wire, alarms, lights and buffer zones (killing fields) were gone.) Mary and I joined the throng of Berliners – West and East - and knocked some stones and bricks loose. I gathered a large handful of small pieces of rock and stone. Later, when we were back home, I divided these into five small plastic snack bags, labeled them and gave one to each of our children at Christmas as a memento of an historic moment in their lifetime.

On our final day we went on to Magdeburg, at the time one of the most depressing towns in East Germany, and then to Bonn and Frankfurt for the flight home.

Complete blog here.

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Madrac Farms - A pleasant Saturday Trip

There is always something new to do in life. Over the weekend I made a trip to a pumpkin farm on Ralph Rahn Road in Rincon, Georgia. My wife, Joyce, and her step-daughter, Perry McGuiness,visiting from Minnesota, also made the trip.

I bought tickets for the farm in late September through one of those Groupon e-mails offering dollars off the admission. I originally planned to use them in early October when a couple of my sons were visiting. Time was against us on that occasion.

When I saw the site one thought that occurred was how the owner(s) of the farm were maximizing their investment. In addition to raising crops of corn, sunflowers, and pumpkins for sale, they were using them as backdrops to a fun time and pleasurably experience for adults and children. Especially children. The corn and sunflower crops had already been harvested. Loads of pumpkins were already gone to market but the patch had enough left to remain as the main attraction. The rest of the story can be told best by pictures:

Joyce and Perry

Joyce and the Blogger

Into the maze of the maize.

The Sunflower Patch

Perry in the hay wagon; a converted peanut wagon.

The little ones experienced the ride.

Posing for a picture for the family album. 

Kids enjoy having their face painted.

This is me coming down the slide as Perry cheers me on.

Visitors were invited to pick their own pumpkin.

A sight to enjoy and remember: Madrac's Pumpkin Farm.

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Network signal ---- re-visited

I thought I had my Internet router strength/distance problem worked out. (Ref. This blog, "Five bars of strength, Thursday, October 16.)  Apparently not as well as I believed. We have a new all-in-one computer in a room at the other end of the house and could not sustain adequate strength to our network access point. I found some loose change in the cushions of the sofa and bought a Linksys Wi-Fi range extender N300. The setup was simple, took only a few minutes and voila everything fell into place. The signal for the network on the new computer is five by five.

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Five bars of strength

Often it is the easiest solution which is the best and the simplest. Today's case in point: For several evenings while trying to watch a Netflix streaming (instant download) film I experienced a stop and go action. This was a recent new phenomenon and frustrating. While watching the film I would only see a portion of the scene and hear the dialogue before the film would have to reload. I incorrectly assumed it was a poor Internet connection, or my Apple internet router was too far away from the living room smart TV. The router is in one room about 50-60 from the TV in the living room. When I checked the strength I had only two of five bars showing signal power. Instinct said to get a

A router signal extender (an example)

router signal extender. I spent about an hour researching an extender for my Apple router. A Google search turned up several people with a similar problem and those who reported solving the issue did so with extenders. Rather than rush off and spend $70  $80, I decided to try using a Chromecast system (a thumb-sized media streaming device that plugs into the HDMI port on your TV) given to me last Christmas by one of my sons. This has an extender built in. While the installation was in progress, I re-read the small manual which came with my Apple router. The manual addressed interference and what could cause it. One of these was metal objects near the router. Between my router and my television set I had a couple of laptop computers and some other small metal objects very close to the router. When I removed these, the five bars of signal strength on my TV Internet connection instantly improved from two bars to five. I worked this for about half an hour and determined I had continuous reception from Netflix without stop and go aggravation. One of the films I had tried to watch last evening came through - as they say - loud and clear.

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D-Day Through French Eyes

There is hardly an American alive today who has not seen “The Longest Day,” Darrell Zanuck’s 1962 epic film of the invasion of France in June 1944. This star-studded, dramatic film and other movies about World War II center on the actions and activities, usually heroic, of Allied forces on the long march to Berlin to end the Nazi reign in Europe. Recall the moment in Patton when the General, standing in his jeep as it sped down the road, replied to a common soldier’s “Where are you going General? “I’m going to Berlin. I'm going to personally shoot that paper-hanging son of a bitch.” 

Lost in all of these tales of derring-do and allied competence is an intimate picture of what D-Day was like for the ordinary French men and women living, some for decades, on the Normandy peninsula. 

Those who lived in the Normandy countryside where the landings and fighting took place were average every day people. They were farmers and villagers. They had cows to milk, bread to bake, crops to harvest, children to educate, babies to be born, old and sick people to be nursed and buried.

 

Ms. Roberts

Mary Louise Roberts', professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, second book,  D-Day through French Eyes - Memoirs of Normandy 1944, brings to life the personal stories of some of the French men and women who were the first Europeans to be touched for good or bad by the greatest sea and air armada in history on the night of June 5- 6, 1944. The Allied plan was to conquer the Normandy peninsula in three weeks. It took three months.

The tales of joy, merriment, love, respect, admiration, sorrow, loss and anger are from diaries kept at the time and recollection put down on paper years later. To make an omelet you have to crack eggs, was certainly on the mind of the Normans. From the moments the paras (Allied paratroopers) began dropping from the sky to the early morning shelling from the ships off-shore that destroyed homes, churches, schools, businesses, and killed people and animals, death and destruction were all around.

Roberts says in her introduction to this easily read book, “I have chosen temoignages (testimony)  that revolve around the rich sensory details of D-Day --- the sound of artillery, the first glimpse of an American, the stench of death, and the taste of chocolate. The result is a vision of both hell at the hands of the occupiers and joy at being liberated.” In most instances testimony is prefaced with an explanation and perspective by Roberts to help the reader become enmeshed as if living in the day.

Perhaps for the first time, D-Day through French Eyes offers readers the opportunity to balance the stirring events of those dramatic, impacting days as portrayed by Hollywood, and what it was like to live in the path of D-Day.

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