When one is young, one is frequently described as naive, of foolishly believing all things. What a great blessing this can be. Before we become obstinate and set in our ways, we are sometimes even teachable. This happened to me. When I was a boy, I had terrible attacks of Poison Ivy; summer, winter, didn’t matter. Eyes & lips puffed up, itching & oozing all over my body. Whenever it started showing up, I had to run home, get special shots & remain in isolation until it went away. Once, when visiting my grandparents far from home, a Poison Ivy attack came on. My grandparents, rather than sending me home, encouraged me to exercise faith, read scripture, and taught me the power of the mind. Within 3 days, my Poison Ivy went away and it has never returned in over 55 years. What a wonderful lesson my grandparents taught me. The power of the mind, the power of faith, is real.
The Power of Faith
Posted in Uncategorized
Power Outage 22 hours
Wednesday Jan 26th 9:30PM: The boom of a power transformer outside somewhere, followed by darkness. Hmmm…..power failure. OK, break out the battery powered lights, grab a flashlight and look around outside to see if it’s the whole neighborhood or just us. Lights off all around our subdivision, but could see some lights on in a different subdivision a few streets away. Of course, TV and Internet down, so decided to make it a little party, just the two of us, sitting in the reduced light, snacking and telling stories; kinda fun. After a couple of hours, went to bed and decided to wait til morning, fully expecting the power to come on sometime during the night.
Next morning, oh-oh, power still out. No heat, cold outside. Called into work and begged the day off to take care of the house. Jury-rigged a small 1kw generator out in the utility shed (after getting the &#%*@%** thing started) and ran extension cords into the house; connected the blower for the living room gas fireplace, so we’d have heat; ran another line to the gas hot water heater in the garage, same thing, just needed power for the blower, so we had hot water. Used matches to light the gas range in the kitchen as needed, so we were doing fine.
After several hours, ran a line to the fridge for an hour, then to each freezer (have 3 of them) for an hour each; kept that up. Verizon FIOS battery started beeping that it was discharging.
At 2:30pm Thursday, power came back on, flickered a few times over the next few minutes, then stabilized. Have found out since that we were pretty lucky, compared to many others in the region. Counted Our Blessings.
Also got some good ideas on how to make the generator experience a little better next time.
Posted in This Old House
Lost in the Information Cosmos
Once upon a time, on a planet not quite as corrupted, during a period before Twitter, Blogs, retweets, when there was just Facebook for the young-uns and Google as the daily find-it tool, I was introduced along with a few others to the MKMMA world, and whilst attempting to swim upstream to safety with a firm grasp on my DMP, became used to clicking on links on one of the MarkJ web sites whenever I wanted to access group information or keep up with the assignments.
Then it happened …. Amidst the flurry of “new things” to comprehend and implement, with Blue Rectangles, Red Circles, Green Triangles, we were tasked with creating Twitter accounts and MK Blogs and following hundreds of each on a semi-daily basis while holding down a full time job, building another full-time business, and dealing with Life Events ranging from hospitalizations to family relocations to racoons in the attic and mice in the silverware drawer, the MarkJ website I used to depend on to reach my own blog and Twitter pages was no longer to be found! Adrift in the swirl of URLs & Twits & RSS feeds & blogrolls etc.
Hours later and after O/D-ing on destressers, finally rediscovered my twitter account and my blog; still can’t find how to set up blogrolls, but dinasaurs move forward only one step at a time. If anyone has any suggestions for setting up a blogroll here and cares to share, I would appreciate it.
Now on to the next crisis….
Posted in Uncategorized
New Blueprint
This Master Key training is great; finding that changing my blueprint is working, and I’m recognizing when the old BP puts up its typical objections in order to stay in familiar territory, and I then fill out a “service card” with a task using a new good habit. Still a long way to go, and older folks have habits which are firmly entrenched and quite difficult to replace with new good habits, but its working.
Posted in Uncategorized
iPhone vs. Android
Used my iPhone for over a year and liked it; used Note feature a lot, for memos and for emails, really handy, also used MS Office apps. Got an htc Hero Android phone and it works great for phone calls, bluetooth in my car, email etc. but couldn’t find a Note feature like I had on the iPhone; finally went to Market and bought an awesome Notes program for 2 bucks, really nice and touch of class. Also does MS Office apps nicely. So I hereby declare the Android is better than the iPhone, based on overall features, availability of apps, ease of use, reliability, etc. Also better pix & videos, and with a 32G microcard, lots of storage.
Posted in Uncategorized
Happy New Year TCAworld
And so here we are, March 14th, 2010, but it’s the birth of TCAworld in the blog world. TCAworld started out years ago during the realm of bulletin board systems, and for a while was the world’s smallest “AOL”, having 10 phone lines online. We ran several diferent BBS systems, including Searchlight and others.
With the advent of the World Wide Web, it became apparent that websites were the way to go, so the BBS was shut down and we converted over to www.tcaworld.com and its sister web sites (www.winners-retire-early.com) and others.
It’ll be fun to see where this takes us. Saddle up and hold on tight!
Posted in Uncategorized
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!
Posted in Uncategorized