A reminder of the "Circle of Life"

As the first taste of Winter from a blast of cold air and wind blows through Texas this morning, I'm reminded of how one's life begins with just needing the bare necessities and slowly leaves with just having simple needs.

I have succumbed to yet another sign of old age......It's funny how just the simplest of things, like a change in the season reminds one of how our bodies are changing.

We start off as little infants with booties and as we move into the Autumn and Winter of our lives and suddenly we find we are completing that Circle of Life and we need booties again. Yep, I'm just getting older.

Oh, I've done most of it now. Cataract surgery, gray hair, liver spots, loose skin and wrinkles under my eyes.....but now, now the dreaded sign of really getting old......COLD FEET!

I haven't worn slippers since I was a little Skeeter kid growing up in Dayton, Ohio. The winters up there sometimes would call for several feet of snow and sheets of ice. As a child, I loved it. I don't ever remember being cold when playing outside, maybe because I was reminded every time I went out, "Tommy put your hat and gloves and boots and scarf on" or maybe as a kid, we had so much body heat from playing in the snow we never noticed it.

I do remember the cold though at night or on the weekends after coming in from a day of playing in the snow or sledding, or maybe waking up on a Saturday morning and going downstairs to watch cartoons on the tiny Emerson TV in the living room,

The only things to keep my feet warm were these Indian-looking kind of mucklucks with leather soles. They were warm, but oh, how they itched. I guess they were made from wool and I would scratch and scratch until my ankles would bleed. I decided then and there, I would just tough it out and not wear anything on my feet unless of course Mom came into the room and spotted my bare toes.

But now, as I come full circle, I've decided to do something I haven't done in over 60 years. I'm gonna get some slippers. Some warm slippers that will be somewhat fashionable, possibly even sexy but most important, they will be warm. And NOT made out of wool.

So, Mother Nature, "bring it on". I'll have warm feet and just sit in front of the fire and remember how as a child I didn't have a care in the world, well except for itchy ankles.

New and even more exciting challenges await me...

I'm embarking on yet another adventure. This one is travelling to the world of electronics. It's a land that isn't totally foreign to me for I have had a keen interest in it even going back to my young Skeeter days.

I guess my first exposure was when my oldest brother, Dave, an Electrical Engineer himself, had all sorts of equipment that lit up his bedroom.  He had everything from oscilloscopes to ham radios including something my friend, "The Jer" and I referred as his "shock machine".

I may have written about it previously but it was simply a device that had two orange juice cans that we would hold in each hand that were wired to a transformer and Dave would entice us to hold on for as long as we could as he slowly increased the voltage. "The Jer" always could hold on the longest, either because he was braver, or had a higher pain threshold. Regardless, I always had an interest in all of the electronic gadgets.

Fast forward to some 60 years later and here I am refreshing my brain with all of the different Laws of Electronics including Ohm's Law, Coulomb's Law, DC Circuit Laws and many more. And why, you might ask?. Well, because I just love to learn things and as the world is on a fast-paced race to automating everything we do and particularly doing it with a Smart Phone, I want to be on the forefront.

I've joked before that if people could wipe their butt with a Smart Phone, they'd probably do it. And, quite frankly I love the ideas that shoot in and out of my head-brain as I think of new ways to automate everything around me.

I mean, how cool is it as you get to work, or on vacation or anywhere and you ask yourself, "Did I shut the garage door?" Well, now all I have to do is turn on my WiFi camera from my phone and if I see the garage door is still open, a simple app closes it.

But I'm taking it even further. I'm not buying these finished products. I'm building them from scratch. Well, that is along with Dave's help.

In my pool business more and more customers are wanting to automate their equipment, having things like their spas turned on and heated by the time they get home or having their waterfalls dance to lights and music. Sure, that equipment has been out there for a few years. But it was all a propitiatory mystery. Now, I can build it myself for just a mere fraction of the shelf cost.

But why, why do I want to go to the trouble of building it rather than buying it. It's because I want to use my brain. I don't want to sit and simply get old. I have writing that stimulates me but now I have a new world of electronics that stimulate me, sorta like that shock machine that I used to hold onto when I was a kid.

If anyone has a suggestion or an idea of something they need, let me know.I can make it for you.

My first project has been simply making a blinking light and turning it on and off from anywhere in the world. Simple?  Yes. But if you can make a light blink, you can do anything.

Another of the world's greatest myths unveiled...

I have lived most of my 69 years on this earth trying to do the right thing. Sure, I don't necessarily follow the rules per se, but I have always been a law abiding person who for the most part tried to live my life on the positive side of the good/bad line.

Growing up and even as an adult, I accepted the rules and regulations as truth. If I was told the earth was round, well then, I believed it was round without ever venturing to the end of the horizon to see if I would drop off into space. 

I always believed, as I was told, that the sun rose in the East and set in the West. Although, it wasn't until later that I found out the sun didn't actually rise and fall but the Earth rotated and it made it seem like the sun was rising and setting.

And yes, there were times, that even if I did know the truth, well maybe I didn't want to believe it at the time, but deep down I knew I was just fooling myself. Things like drinking cheap wine and thinking I really wouldn't get a hangover headache. Or thinking that maybe Mom wouldn't smell cigarette smoke and beer on my breath when I came in late at night on a high school weekend. They were truths and they stood the test of time.

But today, I found that one of the truths that I believed in all of my life has now been unveiled to me as an untruth. A simple myth.

I have spoken of or written of my oldest brother, Dave, many times on this blog. His
brilliance is somewhere in the stratosphere, yet he often comes to me with questions on how to solve certain problems of the universe. Sometimes Academia needs to walk hand-hand with Practicality.

Dave and I have been working on several projects together and today it involved DC Current. I won't go any further that that, BUT, he told me something , which I in turn, I had to do and find out for myself.

Did you know, the in the old-timey type flashlights, that you could put the batteries in backwards, assuming they all went the same direction, and the flashlight would still work. Yep, it's true. If you don't believe me, try it for yourself.

Now, keep in mind, that's for the old-time electronic things, today most of our devices are POLAR sensitive, what that means is "Do it the way the instructions say".

But to think all of my life, I put batteries into a flashlight or into a simple device by following the directions and I could have followed MY rules and had done it my way and it still would have worked. This all may sound mundane and simple to many of you, but these were truths that I believed. I held these Truths to be Self-evident.

So today, even though I'm a lot older, a lot more mature (well, sorta), maybe, just maybe I'll once again be a little more adventurous. Maybe I'll go back to taking the road less traveled.

I'm not disappointed. Actually, I feel some exhilaration in knowing that even in the Autumn of my life I am still learning new things. Yes, some aren't as important as others but some things are pretty cool, and Dave and I are on to some new and exciting inventions.

And, did you know that about 20 years ago I was developing a GPS bracelet even before people could even spell GPS, well I mean they could spell GPS of course, but they didn't know what it was. I had the idea for a GPS bracelet that could be used to find lost seniors or kids or even doggies. I never followed up. But, there are plenty of others things out there. And now that I feel a sense of challenge knowing that maybe I just have to believe in myself and not take everything for Gospel truth.

OK, so, in conclusion, be careful on some of the new electronic devices, you might want to double check on putting those batteries in backwards, you could cause the device to run backwards and who knows what might happen. But for those old-timey things like flashlights. You'll be ok. Try it!