What Would Jimmy Do?

Well, here we are in November, the last full month of autumn with the days growing shorter and the beginning of colder temperatures. 

The month kicked off with All Saints Day, a Christian festival held on November 1 that celebrates the lives of all saints — known and unknown. All Soul’s Day, a time for families to remember and honor loved ones who have passed away was November 2, and this year, November 3 was a presidential election. On the 11th, we celebrate Veterans Day and of course Thanksgiving comes along near the end of the month. Black Friday started this year sometime in August, I think — not like traditionally the day after Thanksgiving. 

Lots of pretty significant things have happened during the month of November:
The Erie Canal was formally opened in New York (Nov. 4, 1925)
The Suez Canal opened (Nov. 17, 1869)
Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address (Nov. 19, 1863)
The Holland Tunnel Opened to traffic (Nov. 13, 1927)
The board game Monopoly hit the market (Nov. 5, 1935)
John F. Kennedy was assassinated (Nov. 22, 1963)
Over 900 of Jim Jones’ followers committed mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana (Nov.19, 1978)

This year, November may turn out to be best known for the most COVID cases per day in history. Hopefully, that won’t be the case…. but whatever it brings, hope everyone has a good November.
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Today is our favorite grandson’s birthday.
Happy Sixth Birthday Locke!!!
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We both went to the eye doctor this past week. The doctor has been predicting that I’d need cataract surgery very soon for the past several years. Once again this year he seemed a little disappointed — while I do have cataracts, they haven’t gotten bad enough yet to require surgery. 

He seemed surprised that I could read almost all the letters on the eye chart… I told him that it was easy, I had memorized them from last year. I’m not sure he believed me, but he switched to a chart with numbers and had me read those.

I got to thinking about the first time, a long time ago, that I thought I might need reading glasses. We lived in Vienna, and I had never gone to an eye doctor in that area — in fact, I hadn’t been to any eye doctor in years. Anyhow, when Kelly was a baby, she had what looked like a freckle on the white part of one of her eye, and the baby doctor sent her to an eye specialist to check it out. (The freckle turned out to be nothing.)

So when I began to have trouble reading small print, since we weren’t familiar with any other eye doctors, Claire called the doctor we had taken Kelly to, and asked if they did eye exams. They said they did, so I made an appointment. In case I didn’t mention it, this doctor specialized in rare eye diseases and complex surgeries, like transplanting eyes and things like that. 

After examining my eyes, the doctor said, “well, frankly, I don’t know what your problem is.” (Obviously when he found out I didn’t need an eye transplant, he wasn’t interested.) I said that I seemed to have problems reading small print. The doctor’s response was, “well, s**t, that happens to everyone when they get old.” I acknowledged that that was probably true and said, “I thought maybe I might need reading glasses or something.” The doctor said, “yea, that’s probably a good idea.” By this time I was getting a little frustrated and said, “do you know where I could get some?” His reply: “ Well, I can write you a prescription… but I’d just go to Ben Franklin.”  I said that I thought Ben Franklin was a five and dime store. He said that it was and I should go there and they have a big rack full of reading glasses and that I should get a number 29 — he even wrote a big “#29” on a prescription form and handed it to me. 

When I got home, Claire asked me how the appointment went — needless to say, I wasn’t happy and said something like, “I paid this guy $80 to tell me to go buy a pair of glasses at Ben Franklin.”

Well, it turns out that there weren’t very many Ben Franklin stores in the area, but we did have something called People’s Drug Stores — a few days later I was in People’s  and they had a rack of reading glasses. They had various numbers and I found a pair that had a tag with #29 on them. I put them on and took a credit card out of my wallet and the small print on the back of the card literally “jumped out” — I could read it very easily. Obviously I bought the glasses — I think they were $9.95. I went home very excited and started reading all the small print I could find. I suppose Claire was pleased, but I don’t think she shared my enthusiasm. 

Today, number 29s don’t do the trick anymore — I just give up on some small print and convince myself it probably isn’t very important anyway. 
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Today is election day — many think it may be the most important election in their lifetimes. That may or may not be, but all elections are important. I’ve lived enough places in the world to have seen elections  that are in no way fair and I’ve been places where are no elections. Believe me when I say that your right to vote is a privilege that you should never take for granted and it’s a civic duty that you should be proud to fulfill.

Everyone has a right vote no matter their skin color, gender, relationship status or age. I read a quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt a couple of days ago: “This nation has placed its destiny in the hands, the heads, and the hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God.”

If you haven’t already done it — VOTE!
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Today is a special day.
It’s the wedding anniversary of my favorite twins’ and grandson’s parents.
Happy Seventh Wedding Anniversary, Dave and Chassie!!!
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We always keep a bottle of champagne in the fridge for special occasions.
Sometimes, the special occasion is that we’ve got a bottle of champagne in the fridge.
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Today is Halloween — a Halloween like most, or all, of us have never seen before. Obviously, Covid-19 changes things dramatically, but there is a full moon on Halloween and of course today is Saturday, so you working readers can sleep in tomorrow — and — it’s also daylight saving time so we get more Halloween — or maybe less — I forget, it’s just all so confusing. 

Anyhow, even though Halloween is different this year, we only think that because it evolved to what we consider “normal” over the years. If we looked back at some of the early Halloweens, we’d think they were pretty strange, too….

The first occurrence of Halloween festivities that resemble what we consider traditional today was in ancient Ireland. It was called Samhain, and it was a pagan religious ritual practiced by the Celts. In ancient Gaelic, the term Samhain translates to “end of summer” that signifies the beginning of the darker half of the year. 

According to ancient Celtic lore, the festival of Samhain was a special day that the dead could walk on Earth. This was the beginning of the “spooky” and “undead” tradition of Halloween that we think of today. 

The practice of trick-or treating has its roots in the United Kingdom and Ireland — as a religious rite. Neighbors would visit each other to ask for “soul cakes.” Then they would pray together.

The Jack-o’-lantern is one of the better known symbols of Halloween across the world. It began with the Celts in Scotland and Ireland who used large root vegetables as lanterns. Jack-o’-lanterns get their name from a man (probably named Jack) who died and was sent to Purgatory. Once there, he walked among the living for eternity with only a single lantern to guide his way. 

The Halloween we know today comes from the original Halloween practices brought by the Irish and Scottish immigrants that became infused with the mysticism and voodoo spiritualism brought by Haitian and African Americans. 

Interestingly, in Ireland, Halloween was traditionally an evening for finding your soulmate. Bachelors and bachelorettes would gather and play matchmaking games. These games were said to be the key to finding true love. Girls in Scotland once believed that they would see their future husbands if they laid their bedsheets in front of the fire on Halloween night. 

Some animal shelters refuse to allow adoption of black cats around Halloween because they fear that they will be sacrificed, abused, or forced into a ritual of some sort. 

The colors black and orange are associated with Halloween because orange is the color of the autumn harvest, and black is the color of death, darkness or the afterlife — together, they symbolize Halloween. 

In a normal year, seven out of every ten adult Americans hand out candy to trick-or-treaters.

So how much of the trick-or-treating, attending parties, or visiting haunted houses will occur this year, no one knows. But it’s still Halloween — maybe the situation will inspire new traditions and we’ll look back on “todays Halloween” and wonder why we ever did that. Happy Halloween!
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Well, it’s going to be a busy weekend around here — it’s halloween, OTBN, there’s a full moon and Daylight Saving Time begins, or actually, I guess it ends. Anyhow, along with everything else, we have to deal with changing the clocks again.

I know we’ve talked about this before, but the credit, or blame, for DST is often credited to Benjamin Franklin. He was at least one of the first ones to propose the concept in his 1784 essay, “An Economical Project.” However, no one really took it seriously until more than a century later.

The current format for DST was proposed in New Zealand by an entomologist, George Hudson. In 1895 he recommended a two-hour time change because he wanted more daylight after work to hunt bugs in the summer.

DST was first adopted by Germany during World War I, when Germany was looking for ways to save energy. A number of countries, including the United States followed suit for the duration of the war. DST was used again during World War II as a way to save energy for war production. After World War II, the U.S. continued to observe daylight saving time, but there was no standard law about how to implement it — it didn’t become a national standard in the U.S. until 1966.

DST is considered dangerous by many people. According to supposedly reliable research, cluster headaches are more likely within two weeks of the time change, people are more prone to car crashes, the incidence of heart attacks may be higher as a result of the time change and more people seek help for depression in the weeks after the transition from the extended summer daylight hours.

The original intent of DST was to save electricity, but a lot of people wake up before the sun rises and need to turn on the lights or the heat, or both, during those cold dark mornings, probably offsetting any energy that might be saved in the evenings. And — farmers actually hate DST. It is/was popular to believe that farmers pushed for the change to more daylight hours, but they hate it because it disrupts their schedule too much. They already make the most of the daylight and wake up very early. 

Being a big fan of trains, it’s always been interesting to me the way Amtrak treats DST. Trains aren’t allowed to leave a station before their scheduled time (in order to keep to their published timetables.) So when the clocks are set back one hour in the fall, all Amtrak trains in the U.S. that are running on time (not sure how many that would be) stop at 2:00 am and wait one hour before continuing. In the spring, at the DST change, trains are immediately an hour behind schedule at 2:00 am, but they just keep going and do their best to make up the time. 

There’s been a lot of controversy lately about DST and a lot, maybe the majority, of people think it should be done away with. But for now, whether you think it’s good or bad or are for or against it — it is what it is. Like most things, if it’s left up to Washington to resolve, it’ll probably be around for a long time. Anyhow, it may not be so bad — as I heard someone say…. it lets poor people experience jet lag.
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It’s raining here today — I’m not complaining, it’s rained all around us this year but we have hardly gotten any. So I’m good with a dreary day as long as we get some rain.

That’s a  word that I heard a lot when I was growing up — dreary — pretty much always used to describe the weather. I remember my parents and grandparents using it a lot — if it was a cloudy day, or especially if it was a cloudy and cold day, it was referred to as dreary.
I don’t remember hearing it much in recent years, but Claire used the term the other day and the day was, in fact, overcast.

I did a bit of checking, and I’d say that if you describe something as dreary, you mean that it’s dull and depressing — I suppose that could even be applied to people, although I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it used that way.

If you’re into word origins, I think the term comes from the Old English dreorig, meaning sad or sorrowful. It originally meant cruel, bloody, blood-stained — from droer, meaning gore or blood.

So generally speaking, dreary isn’t a particularly happy word… maybe that’s why it seems to crop up more often these days. But at least it has lost its original sense and the notion of “dripping blood.” So I guess maybe we’re at least moving in the right direction….
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A few days ago Pope Francis endorsed same-sex civil unions. If I remember correctly, when Francis was archbishop of Buenos Aires, he endorsed civil unions for gay couples as an alternative to same-sex marriages. 

I suppose this is a controversial subject for a lot of people, but I’ve never gotten terribly excited about it. The thing that always appeared unfair to me was that if two people are sharing a life together, and they can’t have power of Attorney, in case its needed, for the other person — that just seems wrong. It seems to me that should be their legal right.

Pope Francis said, “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God. You can’t kick someone out of a family, nor make their life miserable for this. What we have to have is a civil union law; that way they are legally covered.”

I’m pretty sure that goes right along with my thinking. I think legal rights are important. As far as “marriage,” that’s something else altogether — it probably becomes more emotional, maybe religious and sometimes just a matter of semantics. If the “union” is legally covered, that’s what’s important — marriage is something to be resolved by the various religions or other such groups. Again, remember what I’ve said here many times — things that I ramble on about are simply my opinions. Agree or disagree, read or don’t read, the choice is yours.

Pope Francis appears to be concerned about of a lot of the right things, like the environment, income inequality, immigration and people the most affected by discrimination. That seems like a good thing to me…..
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