The Invasion of the Allied forces on the Normandy coast is 64 years old, today. It was an amazing achievement. I don't think anyone in this generation or in my own has half of courage, fortitude and shear guts of even the humblest private of  the 1944  American Army.

Thank you to the brave generation - most of them either dead or near dying that fought for America, Asia and Europe, Thank you, men of courage, you did well. Your courage are as ribbons of gold on your soul.

I know, if faced with the same choices the young men and women of this time would, for the most part,  march in peace parades and leave the fighting to men and women they despised - and, in this era, we would lose Europe, England and most of north Africa and all of Asia to the Axis powers. We are raising a generation that loves itself too much to make sacrifices. Challenged to day we will cave in to those who are both meaner and braver than we are.

My husband is watching "The Longest Day" and I am going back to it, now - the invasion has just begun and I missing the best part. Don't forget the brave men and women of my parent's generation who fought for what you hold on to, so very lightly --- your freedom and your right to exist.

Try to be grateful, people - the world would have been far different without their sacrifice.
 

Just plain neat... the Swiss guards - walking in two eras knowing the weapons of both.

1.3 million years ago - bones of the first visitors to Europe.. its really difficult to keep up with all the news on this front. I am trying to put this into my mental map of man's evolution but can't quite grasp it, yet!

What if Lincoln had persuaded the south to part with their slaves for money? Could thousands of lives have been saved north & south? Would it have worked or would the crisis of states rights caused the civil war to continue?

We may never know when our species broke off from our hominid roots; the scientists will be debating this until the sun glows red but when did paleontology become anthropology, exactly - when ape became man.

A real, honest-to-goodness, paper letter. My hand ached, but some of the pain faded during the 2 hours or so it took to write it. My muscles just didn't feel right at the beginning, but I have a friend who still believes in paper mail (otherwise called snail mail.) and she just about begs for a letter every so often, and having only a few friends, I figured I'd better communicate in the traditional manner for the sake of our 30 year-old friendship, if for no other reason,  anyway, guilt was finally overcoming my prodigious ability to procrastinate. I have been my usual lazy, somewhat quiet self since the early 90's - letters used to be second nature, now they are a rarity. Email is all anyone ever gets if they let me get away with what comes naturally... and My friends either fail to hear from me for years or they get letters the size of small books... there is little middle ground, so she is going to read my 9-page letter in about 5 days.

 It made me realize how dependent and linked (attached, connected, related to..) to the computer I really am at this stage of my life. I grew up in a far different world, which seems somehow more primitive to me, as I look back on my youth. We had paper and pen. We learned to write, to compose and studied penmanship with endless repeated lessons to teach our hands the natural forming of letters. The work was repetitious but somehow enjoyable for me... AAAA BBB CCC aaa bbb ccc ---- and, I still do these lessons, sometimes just to keep myself limber and practiced, but, sadly, I am noticing that I am losing my skills to form the letters properly as I grow older. The letters looked malformed and somehow poorly designed last night, it saddened me to see how poor my penmanship really had become over the last few years. Its lets obvious when I am writing a check or a list.  I felt like tearing the letter up but did not, and I realized how often I had started letters only to tear them up. I need to find an envelope and send it, today. It is a strange that something so natural has now become something extra-ordinary. (note :It was actually yesterday, love modern technology. Saved this as a draft, last night, when I ran out of time !)
This trend is even becoming more pronounced in the young and there are many articles about the trend.
E-Mail is, of course a wonderful addition to the world's inter-connectivity & ability to communicate quickly as is Blogging and Podcasts. This is doubly true in commercial settings and I recently had a good experience solving a problem with a malfunctioning Sansa MP3 player via email (try doing that with snail mail, it would have taken months! ). Our ability to communicate with one another over immense spaces, quickly and easily is bound to effect our world in ways we hardly imagine at this time and I sometimes think this will mean a new birth of freedom (of expression), other times, I wonder if it just means more words, poorly expressed with less content in what we write - there is little struggle to compose and there is always the delete key. But the fact that you are reading this post and that you live in (lets say) Europe or Boston, or even the Far East, means something about the world has changed that has never been true, before, you are reading the words of someone who lives many miles away the same day she wrote it - that wasn't possible until now. (She may have actually composed its beginning one day, finished it the next and proof read it and changed it further hours after she originally finished it ..that means something to the future of communications that I suspect will be significant.

The only time I worry about this new medium is when I read some of the bitter feuding I see on the net-- I think that some people may be releasing a lot of hostility that should not exist over matters that should and could be resolved rationally. My husband, always wise when it comes to human nature suggests this is because it is safe to say things on the net that would get you killed if you were standing in front of the person... lets face it, what are we going to do, come through the screen and strangle each other? Zap each other with lasers from afar? It is too easy to be rude on the Internet.

 Remember, please, that this ability to speak to the world, even though I am a humble housewife, is very, very NEW  -----very new. Blogging, particularly, seems to me to be a letter to the world - I don't really know who reads my blog - or if anyone reads it - (at least, when I write a letter to a friend, I know they may try get through the thing!) but whether anyone reads what I write or doesn't, does not matter as much as the discipline of composition and the effort I make to communicate to others. As I said earlier - I have worked on this composition several times today.

That this is an amazing, very new medium does not mean it should destroy the traditional means of communications that have survived the centuries - writing a real letter takes patience and an effort at rational composition, the ability to plan a sentence quickly and the ability to pick out the things in your life that are most worth sharing. It is a challenge to do it well. It is an art that many of our best writers savored and cherished.  It is often a note to the future.  (whether it is a historian or a just a descendant.) It is an art form as well as a challenge to your mind - and in my case, my hand.
Just to prove my point here is a short list of letters well worth the reading :
1.One of my favorites : the Adams letters covering the early revolution and John's experiences at Congress and Abigail's experiences as an isolated woman managing a farm.

2.Jane Austen was a wonderful, clever writer &  a personal favorite. She wrote fine letters, here is just one site that quotes some of them.

3.While reading a biography of George Washington, lately, I was impressed with his skill at letter writing. He is a hard man to get to know, but his letters reveal the real man.

4.The importance of letters to the understanding of the common man/woman living every day under unique and extraordinary times gives us a history that isn't found in our text books. Here is a website about the love letters written by soldiers during the civil war.

5. Another short letter written about an extraordinary event by a common woman - the sinking of the Titanic by Mary Sloan.

6. Another letter from the Titanic, it was chilly on board.

A final thought :
My husband, dear man he always is, has impressed on me from day one of my computing experience, to always back-up, save and re-save, save to disk etc. ... because, as he said, from the very beginning, anything you type on the computer is literally written in sand, silicon, to be exact... it is magnetic and can be lost either by accident or deletion or simple aging. It is like writing your novel or fine letter at the edge of vast sea which can flood any moment and all your hard work can be lost if your hard-disk crashes. While making copies is profoundly easy - too easy, sometimes, all those copies can be lost. All that it would take is some mischief, either purposely performed or accidentally performed, to cause the Internet to crash around us. A computer is just a big plastic paperweight if we don't have electricity flowing through it. (I always go through something like computer withdrawal when we have a power outage.)  Historians had  finally come to the conclusion, recently, that history isn't  just about the kings and rulers and how many wars they fight... its about the common people, also - people like you and I who live our lives and observe our times, sometimes only through the news,  but now, we, the common people are giving up on the art of writing letters and it isn't good for the future of history; what we think is on on our computers and in our email box but that box can be corrupted beyond salvation or just plain lost at any moment - I know, because it has happened several times to me. Our prose could last generations - easily searched for over the net when we are long in our graves - or it could be lost, tomorrow, forever. Which ever is true, when our words are lost, our History will be lost, forever.

Health News : Some personal good news, my doctor's visit went well. All my blood work numbers showed improvement and I have not slipped into Diabetes. I forget the number and even the meaning of the number... 6? I have a difficult time keeping numbers in my memory for longer than a few minutes, which may explain why I never excelled in mathematics.

My official weight is 180 as of Wednesday. My weight here at home is 172. If anyone comes up with a good theory about the scales at doctor's offices I would certainly appreciate hearing from them. Leon says that the scales at the doctor's office are/is better technology, I suggested it was certainly older technology - our home scales is based on a simple spring and can be effected by many things, even the weather. My weight at the beginning of my diet, mid- September was a whopping 216 so I have lost 36 pounds. The doctor wants me down to 140. I may try for even lower, just on the simple theory that I don't like authority figures telling me what to do but also, I want to LOOK thin. At 140 I will still look plump.

Very few understand there is a permanent knot somewhere in my soul when it comes to authority. I hid in youth but in middle age, heck no.  The poor deluded doc things I am eating 1500 - 1200 calories. I did not LIE> I just didn't tell the truth.  I said nothing and smiled like the simple housewife I am. 'Oh, yes, 1200 calories, how few calories that is... !'  I am trying my best to eat about 500 - 600 calories a day, though, I admit many days it crawls towards 700. When I ate 1500 I gained weight and when I ate 1200 I didn't much lose weight so I finally took the great dive into the three digit ranges and that is when I saw actual weight loss.
 I actually gained no weight during Christmas and lost 2 pounds since so life is good. Sometimes I amaze even myself !!!!!!!!!
The Revolutionary War :
I am listening to the book 'The Glorious Cause' by Jeff Shaara. It is the second of two books about the events that lead up to the founding of the United States. The first, 'Rise to Rebellion' is up to and including the signing of the declaration of independence. This novel is the actual war.

  I am a true lover of America, what it stands for, what it has done, not only for me but for my family and what it did for the world since its founding. I do not understand those who blame America for the ills of the world... it is a kind of madness, I suppose, an inability to see the good, a self-hatred that flows deep in people's souls, an ignorance born of spoon- fed education by prejudiced professors, a denial of the actual facts of the history - most of all, it seems to me, a refusal to see what human nature is really like, many blame America for things that all cultures, races & countries do - What is natural for our species as a whole to do when given the chance - forgetting, in a way,  that America is an institution established by human beings and for human beings and can be no better and no worse than what we make her. Human nature throughout history and even beyond into the shadows of prehistory is not pretty or pure-hearted. People are not nice. Americans have done nothing that other human beings have not done - and, most of the time, we have hesitated to do the worse that our species is capable of ... that is something few people ever mention. I suggest you just accept that and get on with your life.

 Without America, Europe would be in even a worse mess than it is and the last 200 years would have been even more horrid than they were. Asia, too would be no better and may very well be worse without us... think of Japanese imperialism without America to stand in her way.

Those who do not know this history (the founding of the USA)  can not appreciate how narrow an escape we had from the confines of monarchy - or even why it was time to escape monarchy and elitism. I really suggest you look at this novel as a dramatization of the history and use it as I plan to - a stepping stone into other, purely factual reading and research into those events. I have used fiction as a stepping stone into deeper historical study most of my life. I am mostly self-educated, as I have mentioned many times. Study alone demands attention to your own course of study that is usually done by the professor in college so it is best to get a good overview of the entire subject, first. Without the professor guiding and protecting you, you must choose what books to read and what areas of the story most interest you and therefore, are worthy of further study, oh, by the way - history is story ... don't ever forget that.

 I don't specialize in any one thing : I don't need to, I study for the shear enjoyment of study. It doesn't really matter - I did not walk the path of the scholar this lifetime. I like being a housewife. It is a noble life, a giving, service oriented life... but my mind hungers for knowledge and I feed it a steady diet of books, both those I read and those I listen to on tape/CD. Listening to a book while washing dishes makes the chore bearable !

Well stay happy. I hate January, I have decided. Some solar worship would be very inflaming about now, don't you think? a book under a tree... a tall glass of ice tea... hummmmmm ... So much for global warming... we keep hovering between raining and cold and raining and colder.