Virginia Is For Families

So here we are in Richmond after driving back from NC on Monday. Yesterday I was playing Lord of the Rings Online when suddenly everything stopped working. The only thing that would come up on the browser was a photo of a Comcast technician. His profusely smiling profile confused me for awhile and then it dawned that Comcast had cut off our internet service.

This situation jolted me out of Middle Earth and back into the real world (yes I can still tell the difference). Not a happy circumstance. So I called Comcast and discovered that they thought they had not received our last payment.

“You don’t pay YOU gotta stay HERE. Forget about the orcs YOU gotta deal with us.” But we had paid them and so they turned the service back on. And nothing happened. My Norton 360 virus and bacteria protection was preventing Comcast from returning me to my home. It now saw Comcast as the enemy. Perhaps it’s a better protection program than previously thought.

What to do? I decided to get the hedge clippers and trim the bushes in the front yard. Hopefully Beth would come home while I was doing this and see the sweat all over my LL Bean t-shirt.

Note: sometimes you have to make lemonade out of your old lemons. And this part of the day actually went very well. It was calm and pleasant out in the yard and the exercise did my chair bound body some good. I managed not to fall off the step ladder and Beth did actually return home while I was in the process of wrestling with a crusty old limb.

Now I only have seventeen projects left to do this month. But they will have to wait because there’s an interesting book sitting next to the sabotaged computer. It’s a biography of Albert Einstein by Walter Isaacson and Zachary gave it to me last Christmas. I think it was his a joke on his part and I must admit it’s was pretty clever move by the young politico.
Albert had a lot of trouble finding a job early in life most probably because he was outspoken and not overly awed by authority. (I wonder if Zachary read certain parts of this book before turning it over to Dad because he and Albert have a few things in common.) But Al was an outgoing guy and did make a few really good friends. One of them helped him get the job in a Swiss patent office where he was able to think and write about physics most of the day (government jobs are the same all around the world). After a short while he produced several papers that shook up the same world quite a bit.

Don’t ask me what he did. I’m not really up on theoretical physics. It had something to do with light being made up of particles or waves. Einstein spent his whole life trying to decide whether light was made up of waves or particles called photons. I guess. Maybe he didn’t spend that much time thinking about it. Maybe he was more interested in baseball. I don’t know. But I hope to finish the book and find out someday.

What do you think? Do you think light is made up of waves or particles? I think light is like one of the bushes I trimmed in our front yard. It was full of little green berries that flew all over the place when I started whacking the bush. But they were also part of the bush before they were disturbed. So the answer is both! When we “see” something we disturb the particles and they fly off into space. Otherwise they are just peacefully sitting there like waves or berries hanging from the vine.

I guess Zachary was not joking around when he put this book in a grocery bag and slid it under the Christmas tree for dear old Dad!

Now where’s my Nobel Prize? Well, to be fair, Einstein offered mathematical data to back up his ideas and I offer the vacuum of space or as it is known around here. . . nothing. But we will let the scientists work out the details. I’m just here to enjoy the benefits that physics have brought us in the 21st century. And that includes the ability to go somewhere where Einstein and physics are unknown.

I guess that I have been having a little vacation here. How the weeks fly by! But I did add some photos to one of my other blogs My Foto Buzz and they look pretty nice with the new dark theme. It’s all about photos gang. Blogging would be a waste of time for yours truly if it wasn’t for the photos.

They are magic! Or at least they are a magical power that pulls me back into the world. Because I can become lost somewhere else.

Did you know that you can become addicted to a computer game? I have become addicted to Lord of the Rings Online. So now there will be a struggle to become unaddicted. Is “unaddicted” not a word? I hate Wordpress spell check.

But now that I have added the photos of flowers and butterflies to My Foto Buzz I feel better. And Yes I know foto is not a word but the spell check should just relax and let me finish this post. There are no spell checks in Middle Earth!

Wait. That was a wrong thought. I don’t need to go back to Hobbit Land because there is no spell check there. And I can continue to blog even if spell check harrasses me and my domains don’t do the things they are supposed to do. A man’s blog is his domain after all and he better take care of it!

I was thinking yesterday about dissolving all my blogs and just having a Blogger blog that requires no effort and is maintained by the wonderful people who run Google and the world. I could write posts and publish them in about four minutes and then get back to Gandalf and the gang.

But My Foto Buzz looks much nicer than any Blogger blog I can find. And it costs more too! So there’s another advantage.

Oh wait. Spending money is not a good thing. Unless, of course, you want to help the economy so that it does not tank forever! Wouldn’t it be cool if everyone decided to go out and buy something this weekend to help the economy? Even if they only have two nickels to rub together! You can still buy stuff for ten cents right?

Like what? I’m not sure. Surely not anything that I see in the grocery store check out line (Spell check I haven’t seen you for awhile. . . “where’d” you go? Oh there you are!!) Candy bars cost two bucks! That’s crazy. A candy bar costs almost as much as a gallon of gas! And if the economy tanks again they will probably cost as much as a tank of gas! I used tank as both a verb and a noun in that sentence you may notice in an attempt to frustrate spell check and cause him to go take a nap somewhere.

Well we all need naps. You need them and I hope you find them on a regular basis. I’m thinking that a good nap is hard to find however. I doubt too many folks actually take them on a regular basis. And then there’s the problem that if you take a nap you may not be able to go to sleep at the appointed hour. Insomnia creeps in. So are naps really a good thing?

I don’t know. I’m just asking. I’m a little concerned that maybe there’s nothing out here that’s really good for you all the time. Can anyone think of something that is one hundred percent good for you all the time? Please let me know.

I can be reached in my little bungalow above the Hobbit village near the waterfall that supplies crystal waters to the residents who enjoy their little Hobbit meals most anytime of the day. But watch out for roving orcs! (Welcome back spell check! You never heard of an orc? Shame on you!)

And a Hobbit economy that allows all to live comfortably on their limited incomes because. . . . wait. . . . what is this?

A silver dagger is 465 pieces of silver in the auction house! That’s highway robbery. That’s not fair. That’s. . . well . . . that’s the way it is.

From time to time I enjoy reading the newspaper and learning about what is going on in the world. It’s not something to do every day because too much news is not a good thing. In fact, too much news can drive you crazy. I used to follow the news closely until one day I found myself downtown trying to find the office of our number one elected official so I could discuss something with him.

Suddenly it occurred to me that I had gone around the bend and ought to find something else to do. So I stopped watching or caring about the news and became a blogger. Now a giant wave could pass outside my window here in Richmond, Virginia and I would simply note it in a blog post, take a few photos and resume playing Lord of the Rings Online.

It’s so nice to be sane once again. I’m really proud to have made such progress in so short a period of time.

I enjoy reading about things that are happening in the world. But it’s like eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. You really have to limit your intake or you will die way before your time.

Speaking of death I was sad to see in the news yesterday that two motorcycle drivers had a head-on collision here in town over the weekend and passed away. Condolences to their family and friends but how do you have a head-on collision with another motorcycle driver? Don’t people drive motorcycles so they can go around things? I see them all the time in traffic going around cars that are stuck in one place. Perhaps these two were related in another lifetime. Maybe they were brothers who went off in different directions and missed each other terribly.

Now they are together again in heaven. Angels are tenderly trying to separate them so that they can begin their heavenly training.

I also enjoy reading about what happened on this day in history. On July 1, 1867 Canada became a self-governing dominion of Great Britain. This news also is causing me some confusion however. Doesn’t the word dominion have something to do with the word dominate? And isn’t the concept of self-government different from the notion of domination? It’s a little like what happened to Prince Charles on this day in 1969. Because he was formally invested as the Prince of Wales by his mother. He was given a position of great authority and prestige on this day.

And here we are forty years later and he’s still got the same position and precious little authority! Henry V!!! who has been so vividly portrayed lately on Showtime had his wife’s head removed based on some trumped up rumors about her infidelity. But Prince Charles had to watch while his wife went tooling around Paris with her boyfriend in a luxury automobile for the whole world to see!

Boy things sure have changed in the last four hundred years.

Maybe.

Canada did manage to get a national anthem on this day in 1980. It only took 113 years to come up with some music to mark the occasion.

In 1946 on this day the United States exploded a 20-kiloton atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. But on this day in 1968 the US, Britain, the Soviet Union and sixty other countries signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Between these two dates
in the 1950’s above ground testing was conducted out west in the US near Las Vegas! People were encouraged to go out in their yards and watch. In fact they were given radiation badges that were collected and analyzed.

Some of these folks later discovered that they glowed in the dark except on one little area where the radiation badge had been located!!

Oh, I just made that last part up!

Maybe

Marlon Brandon left us on this date five years ago. Maybe he can welcome our two motorcycle brothers into the fraternity up there and do a quick replay with them to figure out how they went wrong.

And, finally, a bevy of beautiful babes are enjoying birthdays today. Olivia de Havilland, Karen Black, Deborah Harry, Genevieve Bujold, Lisa Blount, Pamela Anderson, Liv Tyler and Jamie Farr are all having special days.

And I have completed my adventure into a world full of news and history and insanity. Clearly its time to relax and do some deep breathing. My wife always hides the car keys for awhile when I do this so no one will be tempted to go downtown. Not that I would actually try and go anywhere to see someone about the current state of our terrestrial paradise.

Who would I talk to anyway? It seems like no one is in charge in any meaningful sense. We are all just drifting along through time waiting for the last day when history is able to amaze us.

And we become it.

So enjoy!

Lord of the Rings Online/ Mines of Moria is a wonderful fantasy-filled game full of mirth and adventure.  And now they have added a blogging area for their fans to express themselves.

It is a Wordpress blogging area.  Isn’t that convenient?

It is for this blogger who has four Wordpress blogs and doesn’t need to spend time learning another way of doing things.

This is so cool.  You can have fun in Middle Earth and then blog about it.  I spent about thirty minutes this morning coming up with this. ..

http://my.lotro.com/davidlind/

and   had a bump in traffic because of it.  I really enjoy this game and recommend it to those of you who love Tolkien and the little hobbit fellows.

It really is hysterical watching hobbits try to run in this  game.  Their tiny legs go back and forth is frenzied  fashion as they dash across the tundra.  But I shouldn’t make fun of them.  Some of my best friends are hobbits.

Please make a friend request if you visit my lotro blog and play this game.  I will put you front and center.

I cannot predict where my blogging adventure will take me.  It’s just a matter of following the fun and trying to share it with anyone who is interested.