Technological Dinosaurs

    We still use a VCR. 

     I know, I know. No one uses them anymore. They use tivo or whatever.  We don't. 

    Well, our one vcr died. We had two, one in the living room and one in a spare room. The one in the living room had to be given last rights.

    No prob.  We would just get a new one.  Apparently, we had not paid attention of the death of the dinosaurs.  Oh, you could still get one.  It just didn't do what the old ones did: let you change channels through them and timer record. Man.  Now, what?

   Well, maybe we could find a gently used one.  Right.  We found one at an auction. A vcr/dvr combination.  Yea!  We bought it. Brought it home. Hooked it up.  We put the other one back in its usual place and hooked it up.

   The "new" one wouldn't work.  We had our technologically gifted kids work with it.  It didn't work.

   So, we moved the other one back out front and hooked it up.

   Oh, it came on.  It worked.  The only problem was, it now spoke only Spanish. It recorded in English, but you had to know what the words meant to time record.

  Okay. So, I checked into Spanish dictionary, classes, teachers.

  Then I tried one more time to go through the menu and hit the last phrase on the list and, you guessed it :  ENGLISH. Yea! We are now back to recording and watching. Please pray that it continues.

   

Losing

     We ended the last year with the loss of my husband's younger sister. He is from a family of eight and there are now three of them left.

     We lost his parents and three siblings several years ago and a brother in the Korean War. So, we are now down to three. Two sisters and him.

    Losing someone to death is never easy. No matter how much better off you think they may be. It is a hole that is hard to fill. There goes some of your past, as well as some of the family past. I have learned that each of us sees things differently, even the exact same thing. So to lose that perspective is a real loss.

    I can't say that we are as devastated losing her now, as we would have been twenty years ago, because primarily of the age of us all. Still, she takes with her some memories of us that no one else has.  And we have memories of her no one else shares. Sometimes, we should share these memories while we still can. We have a cousin whose wife of 8 years has Alzheimer's and her memories are gone.

    Share life, love and memories with your loved ones while you can.  Have a happy, memorable, shared 2012.