Londonbeat

The song of the day is I've Been Thinking About You by British dance-pop band Londonbeat. The song hit Number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the Hot Dance Music/Club Play charts in 1991.

Snow Update

We had a nor'easter during the night. I got up this morning and found that it had snowed about 24 feet. I dug my way out of the front door and up to the top of the snow. I came out of the snow just as my neighbor was coming out of a tunnel he had dug. Between our two houses there is a power pole next to the street, and I took out my cellphone and snapped a photo. Notice you don't see any houses in the photo because they're all under the snow.

Whew! I can't wait for spring to arrive.

Some readers may think I took a photo off the Internet and now I'm just playing with you, pretending this is a photo of my street. I admit that is a possibility.

Nor'easter

As I type these words, a nor'easter is crawling its way up the east coast of the USA. Boston is forecast to get 24 inches of snow with hurricane-force winds. That would put a chill in your britches! Down in central Virginia where I call home, it's snowing now, but we're not forecast to get hit with a lot of snow. Weather.gov says my small city has a 90% chance of getting 1 to 3 inches of snow tonight with a 50% chance of snow in the morning, then the weather will turn sunny and breezy. The high temp tomorrow is predicted to be 33°F (that's half a degree above freezing for those who speak Celcius).

As long as the electricity stays on I'll be okay. If the power goes off, the only person I know with a working fireplace plus all-important firewood is my pal Butch who lives about six houses from me. He's recovering from Covid so I'd prefer to not be around him for a few more days, but sh*t happens and you have to go with the flow. He caught Covid from his daughter, who caught it from her husband. I have a friend in Roanoke who also has Covid, and she caught it from her daughter, who also gave it to her son (her daughter's son). I'm vaccinated and boosted so if I get the virus, I hope it won't be too hard on me.

Of course, I have a working wood stove insert that is adjoined with the fireplace in my house. But to heat the house you need lots of wood and you also need electricity to circulate air through the insert. So if the electricity goes off, I'll either walk to Butch's house and roll the dice with Covid or I'll look for a hotel room in some area that has electric power that is still coming over the wires.

I'm sleepy and I'm going to call it a day. Or a night. Or something. Wherever you are, dear reader, I hope your electric power stays on and you stay warm. Assuming it's cold where you live. For all I know you live in Straya and you're sweating because it's mid-summer there. If so, just turn on the aircon and make an avo on toast to go with your fizzy drink, and raise your glass. "Cheers!"

21 Things

Some years ago, I came across these 21 pearls of pop-wisdom, and for some reason I decided to save them. (This is why my computer's hard drive is filled with junk.) I don't remember where I found them, nor do I know who wrote them, but they were probably written by a number of individuals (that number being 21) and collected by someone we will call "Number 22."  However, many of them are good advice and if they all were written by one person, I'm just a little impressed.

---

1  Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.

2  Marry a man/woman you love to talk to. As you get older, their conversational skills will be as important as any other.

3  Don't believe all you hear, spend all you have or sleep all you want.

4  When you say "I love you," mean it.

5  When you say "I'm sorry," look the person in the eye.

6  Be engaged at least six months before you get married.

7  Believe in love at first sight.

8  Never laugh at anyone's dreams. People who don't have dreams don't have much.

9  Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt but it's the only way to live life completely.

10  In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling.

11  Don't judge people by their relatives.

12  Talk slowly but think quickly.

13  When someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, smile and ask, "Why do you want to know?"

14  Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

15  Say bless you when you hear someone sneeze.

16  When you lose, don't lose the lesson.

17  Remember the three R's: Respect for self; Respect for others; and Responsibility for all your actions.

18  Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

19  When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

20  Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your voice.

21  Spend some time alone.

3 Poems

Prologue

In the book that is my memory, on the first page of that chapter that is the day I met you, appear the words "Here begins a new life."
— Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova

Poems From Another Lifetime

I

When it’s 2AM and the night is quiet,
I seem to not fit the world.

Said the wrong things today,
spoke when I should have listened,
was silent when I should have spoken.

At 2AM it comes to haunt me,
to live in my head and make me feel that
something in me doesn’t fit the world.

I get through the noisy day,
until it’s 2AM
and the night is quiet, and then

I seem to not fit the world.

II

My connection to you
is more than who you are
and what you do.

My connection to you
is lifetimes of love.

Perhaps you were my daughter
many lifetimes now.

Perhaps I was your son
not that long ago.

Maybe we were brothers
or sisters
or lovers.

Man and wife
or children together.

I look into your eyes
and see someone that I know
well beyond our time together.

I loved you long before we met.
I had forgotten how much.

Now,
I remember.

III

Warm rains have come and gone,
Melting the winter snow,
Cleansing the earth's gentle heart.

Sun shines brightly on my face,
Gently cheering me,
Softly warming me.

Morning beckons me, night is gone.
Memories linger bittersweet,
Longings now hidden.

Questions haunt me,
Ghosts of the night,
Chased by the sun.

I would live that night again,
Dream the dream,
Feel the wonder.

Though my heart is wounded,
The sun shines now,
I live, still.
— VirtualWayne

Epilogue

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.
— Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Leonard Cohen

The song of the day is Everybody Knows by Leonard Cohen with Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen. This video is from a 1988 performance on "Austin City Limits."

Everybody Knows

I've noticed that many people today are not open to changing their minds. They decide something is true or false, often based on what their equally unknowing friends think, and that's that. If new information comes along, they stick with the old decision and dismiss the new information with terms like "fake news" and "lies" and "propaganda." 

I've been a scientific person all my life. I follow the science. To do that, you must keep an open mind, because science is all about what we know today, but tomorrow, next week, or next year, science may make a new discovery that changes what we know today. We have to be able to change our minds quickly if we want to stay on top of what is real.

Jason Fried said of Jeff Bezos:

"He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today."

And...

"He’s observed that the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking."

And...

"What trait signified someone who was wrong a lot of the time? Someone obsessed with details that only support one point of view. If someone can’t climb out of the details, and see the bigger picture from multiple angles, they’re often wrong most of the time."

Tim Cook said of Steve Jobs:

"He would flip on something so fast that you would forget that he was the one taking the 180 degree polar opposite position the day before. I saw it daily. This is a gift, because things do change, and it takes courage to change. It takes courage to say, ‘I was wrong.’ I think he had that."

We can all learn something from very successful people. Yet, it appears that very few of us are willing to do that. We stick with what we know, because that's the comfortable position, and we never have to admit we were wrong. But revolutions aren't made by sticking with what "everybody" knows.

ZARINA

The song of the day is Veniki Munda (Pule Mae) by ZARINA featuring Munda Jam. Lyric version here. Published by Pacific Music, 2018. Note: some or all of this information may be incorrect. Feel free to correct me in the comments. Do not confuse ZARINA with the well-known Indian artist Zarina Hashmi.

Waiting for Nuria

Snow fell in the dark hours between Friday nightfall and Saturday dawn. This Saturday morning, the temperature was 21°F and snow covered the ground and the streets. My lady friend Nuria had already packed her bags for her trip back to Costa Rica, and I loaded them into my Jeep and we drove off to Richmond airport. The Interstate had been salted and was in good condition and we made good time. Nuria had to be at RIC three hours before her flight. The airport was relatively crowded but it didn't take long to get checked in.

Her flight was scheduled to depart at 1:22PM. I talked to her at 5:20PM, and she was in the JFK airport terminal in New York City. She said the airport was cold and she was cold. A bottle of water was five dollars. For comparison, a bottle of water from Walmart is 11 cents and a bottle from Sam's Club is 8 cents. You can expect to be gouged if you buy something at an airport. 

I texted with her on WhatsApp at 5:20PM but a few minutes later I lost contact—WhatsApp said my texts were not getting through to her. Perhaps she had already boarded her plane. While I was texting with her, she told me she had left something for me under my pillow. I checked and indeed, she had left something special. That was a nice surprise.

It will be late when she gets into Juan Santamaría International Airport. I told her to call me when she gets home, but she said it will be too late to call. She doesn't want to wake me up. But I won't be sleeping. 

I put the flight tracker on my computer and the NFC Divisional Playoff game between San Francisco and Green Bay on my TV and I watched the game and I checked the flight status from time to time. The game was incredible; San Francisco won with less than 4 seconds on the clock. (I also watched San Francisco beat Dallas last Sunday, 23 - 17. And that was a good game.)

Now the after-game commentary is playing on Fox, and Nuria's flight is three minutes ahead of schedule. Her flight should be landing in 45 minutes.

It's 18°F (-8°C) now, though no doubt it will be a few degrees colder before morning arrives.

Forty five minutes passes and Nuria's plane has landed at SJO. It's Sunday morning, barely. 

An hour passes.

It is 1:04AM. I receive a text from Nuria. She is home. I can go to sleep now.

Beggars

For most of my life I've been willing to help a stranger who told me he or she needed help. If a stranger walked up to me with a "sob" story and told me he or she needed money, I would open my wallet. If a man told me he needed ten dollars, I gave him ten dollars. If a man told me he needed five dollars, I gave him ten dollars, too.

I recall one time when I was just 18, a girl stopped me on the street and told me a story about how she needed money, so I gave her a small amount of money. I watched her run away, cross the street, and run into a park. She ran up to a young man standing in the park and handed him the money I had just given her. Obviously, he was using the girl to beg from strangers, probably assuming they were more likely to give money to a young woman than to a man.

But I continued being generous because I felt that it was the right thing to do. Then I found out that the police say citizens should not give money to beggars. Many of them spend the money on illegal drugs.

But I found it difficult to say "No" to people. My nature is to help someone who needs help. But the police are right. I don't know what that person is going to do with that money. 

A few days ago, my lady friend, Nuria, and I were leaving a restaurant and walking down a long paved path to the parking lot when a woman approached us with a sob story. It began with her explaining that she had two young children and no job and she needed money.

"That's what the government is for," I said, and Nuria and I continued to my Jeep. The woman gave us a mean look and walked toward the restaurant's door, then turned and looked back at us, as if she could not believe she had been turned down.

"That's incredible," Nuria said. In her country, Costa Rica, there are many beggars. She encounters them whenever she leaves her home and goes downtown. But encountering a beggar in America, even a well-dressed beggar, seemed incongruous to her.

When I told the beggar "That's what the government is for," I was referring to the many government programs designed to help people in need. There is subsidized housing and public housing, there is Medicaid (health care for low income people) and CHIP (Child's Health Insurance Program), there is SNAP (food stamps), there is SSI (Supplemental Security Income), there is TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), and there are others. But for this woman who needs money for her two babies, before I open my wallet for her I want to know where is her children's father? The baby daddy is the man who should be taking care of them before she approaches random people on the street.

My days of opening my wallet and giving money to strangers just because they ask me for it are over.  It seems mean, or at least stingy, to deny my money to someone who claims to need help, and I'll probably never be able to do it without feeling at least some amount of guilt, but maybe "No" is exactly what they need to hear.

What do you do when a stranger asks for money? And, does it make a difference if the beggar looks like a hobo or is well-dressed?

The Gullible American

A few years ago I received an email from a friend. He sent it to about 45 or 50 of his friends, and he didn't "blind copy" the recipients, meaning I could see every email address it was sent to. One of his friends replied, but that person didn't reply only to the sender, he "replied all," meaning I received a copy of his email.

In his email, my friend was passing along some information he had received by email. He said that the best way to treat a burn was to plunge the burned body part (finger, hand) into a bucket of sand. The person who replied stated in his email that he intended to try that method the next time he burned himself.

I sent that person an email, and I said "Don't do that ... stick with tried and true. Pour cold water over the injury."

He replied and asked, "How do you know water works best? Maybe sand is the best way to treat a burn."

And I replied, "Consider the source of this information. It's contained in an email being passed along from person to person. We don't know the real source of the information. It could be a doctor or it could be a bored 14-year-old sitting in his bedroom sending out bogus information just to make mischief." And that's where the conversation ended.

But my point applies to a lot of things happening today. The QAnon person is an excellent example. So many people take his/her word as truth without knowing anything about the person called QAnon. Is QAnon a person in government? Is QAnon a bored 14 year old? How would you know? And if you do know, how do you know? What evidence do you have? What proof do you have?

Now some of Q's followers are going to prison. So far, some sentences have been for more than five years, and I wouldn't bet against even longer sentences down the road.

People are too gullible today. They fall for online "catfishing" scams and lose a lot of money. The Internet is filled with criminals and fraudsters because so many Americans throw out their common sense and think, "If it's on the Internet it must be true."

"Believe none of what you hear and believe half of what you see," is an old quote. It has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. Use common sense. Check out things you hear, consider the sources, be careful about taking one person's word about something important. Even things you see with your own eyes can deceive you. That is how magicians make a living: they present you with an illusion. What you see isn't really what is happening.

Remember the Wizard of Oz: the wizard never was the "great and powerful" ... he was merely an old man standing behind a curtain. Many people you know may present themselves as the Wizard. Don't be gullible. Don't be a wide-eyed sucker. Don't be a mark. 

Believe none of what you hear; believe half of what you see.

Shannon

It's Sunday morning. It was dark when I sat at my PC an hour ago, but the sky is brightening now. The temperature is 21°F (feels like 11°F) and a winter storm is knocking on our doors, just hours away.

This is Nuria's last week with me. She is flying home to Costa Rica next Saturday. I'll miss her, and she'll miss me, but that's how it has to be for now. We're trying to change that, but the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service works in mysterious ways. Or rather, it works like any large bureaucracy. 

Here's a Song of the Day for you. This song is from 1983, and it's a good song. I don't know why the singer didn't have more hits.

The song of the day is 1983's Let The Music Play from the album Let The Music Play by singer-songwriter Shannon (Brenda Shannon Greene).

The Paper Clip Procedure

In a previous post I mentioned that I had been an engineer at a company that designed missile guidance systems. It was my first job after college, so I was a very young engineer when I began the job, although I had studied electronics for much of my young life. I had begun studying electronics and reading the ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) manual when I was about age 8; I had been an amateur radio operator ("ham") when I was 14, which included building my own rig. A "rig" is an amateur radio transmitter. I erected an antenna in the backyard. It was a quarter wave dipole with ground-plane wires buried under the backyard soil.

At age 16, I attended radio-repair night school in Richmond. I was too young to enroll in the class (the minimum age was 18 for that) but the instructor allowed me to audit the class. He even graded my test papers, which was nice of him considering he wasn't making money from my attendance. I got good grades.

By the time I got to Virginia Tech I already knew more about electronics than the average graduate. A student-friend and I built an AM/FM "pirate" radio station that we operated from a dorm room. There are a number of stories connected to that project, but I'll have to tell them another day.

The day came when I graduated university and I moved to Burlington, North Carolina to begin a new job. I was working for the Defense Activities Division of a large corporation. The shop that built the guidance systems was in Burlington. The design engineers were in Burlington. But the guidance systems were used at our company launch facility at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

One day my boss told me that our Florida facility had received a shipment of used test equipment from another facility, and he wanted me to fly down to Kennedy Space Center and cable together these various pieces of equipment and make sure they worked. "Okay," I told him. "I'll get an airline ticket and a hotel reservation."

Let me assure my readers that I had no idea of what I was about to do. I had never seen or used these items of test equipment and I knew absolutely nothing about them. It was an assignment destined for failure. I assume the boss didn't want to send one of his experienced engineers to a job they were bound to fail. "Send the new guy—he doesn't have a reputation that could get damaged by failure," is what I imagined him thinking. Nevertheless, I flew to Florida and rented a car and drove to the Kennedy Space Center. One of our Florida employees met me and gave me a tour of the Space Center. I walked beside the giant "crawler" that carried the Saturn moon rockets out to the launch pad. The size of the crawler was very impressive. I saw other things: missiles of various sizes, including a Saturn V booster.

We ended our tour back at the company's facility, where I was shown a collection of equipment and a collection of cables. There were also some manuals, but it would have taken me days to read them. I thumbed through a few manuals to get a general idea of how to connect all these electronic boxes (at which I was successful) and then how to power them on and run through a test of the boxes. All went well except for one problem. One of the boxes contained a relay—a type of electro-mechanical switch—that was failing to operate. A spring inside the relay was old and well-used and was no longer strong enough to operate the relay. 

In a flash of inspiration, I got a paper clip and I pulled the two loops of the paper clip apart enough to make a kind of spring, and I inserted the paper clip into the relay. The extra help from the paper clip was enough to make the relay function. How long it would function, I had no idea. But it was working now. So, "Bye, guys, thanks for the tour. I have a plane to catch. Good luck!"

I drove to the airport and flew home. I don't know what happened to the test sets that I got working, but I never heard another word about them. Maybe they worked, and maybe they were never used. Either way, I called it a success.

Bananas

This is a simple story.

I went to Wally World to buy a few groceries. I wanted to buy a few bananas but the table was bare—almost. There were six bananas left, and they looked very overripe. They were splotched black and yellow and looked like something I would throw out. I picked out four of the bananas and put them in my cart.

I checked out and went home, and I put the 4 ugly bananas in a bowl on the dining table. The bananas sat in the bowl for a few days. They didn't look inviting at all. They looked overripe to the point of just tossing them out.

After a few days, I picked up one of the splotchy bananas and peeled it. Inside the peel, the banana was perfect. It was just ripe enough but not too ripe, and it tasted delicious. In fact, it was a perfect banana. I ate the others over the next few days and they were the same. They were perfect bananas in appearance and taste. 

The bananas had looked fit only for the garbage can, and I would not have bought them if I had a better choice. But surprise! Inside the peel they were as perfect as you would ever hope to find. I don't know why I mentioned this story. It just seemed to have a moral in it somewhere.

The Rocket Fuel Incident

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I had a job as a robotics engineer. I worked in a relatively small building on the side of a mountain south of Roanoke, Virginia. There was another business on the side of that mountain, and it was an aerospace testing firm. In my previous job, before the robotics job, I had been a design engineer for missile guidance systems, and sometimes we would take a guidance system to this aerospace testing company for environmental testing. "Environmental testing" consists of shaking the guidance system, dropping it from a specific height, subjecting it to certain acceleration forces, and subjecting it to extremes of temperature. In short, we did everything possible to mimic the forces that the guidance system would experience during an actual flight. If the system was going to fail, we wanted it to fail on the ground, on a shaker table, not while it was in flight.

But all of that is background. On this particular day, I no longer worked as a guidance system designer; I worked for a different company as a mobile robot designer, meaning I designed the electronics for mobile robots. You're about to see how being familiar with missiles ties into this story.

One day after lunch, our company illustrator, an affable fellow named Ken, and I decided to go for a walk. It was a sunny day and the temperature was nice. The gravel road in front of our building looped—after going past our building, the road continued around a curve and went past another building, which was the aerospace testing company that in an earlier year tested missile guidance systems for my previous employer.

Inside the road's loop was a small forest. My co-worker and I decided to take a shortcut back to our company by walking through this small forest. We soon came upon a scattering of steel drums. They were scattered here and there in the woods. They looked like 30 gallon stainless steel drums. They were smaller than the standard 55 gallon drums we're all familiar with, and they were shiny, unpainted. And stenciled in large, black letters on each drum was the following declaration:

I knew instantly what I was looking at. My co-worker Ken knew, too. Hydrazine has multiple uses but it is best known for being "rocket fuel." It often fuels the small "thrusters" that provide fine guidance to position a rocket or its payload.

Hydrazine is quite poisonous, especially if inhaled, and very explosive if it contacts air. The part of the forest that Ken and I were walking through was peaceful enough on a workday, but there were deer and wild turkey living there and, of course, there were sometimes hunters. A stray bullet could put a hole in one of those drums. There looked to be enough hydrazine scattered among the trees to blow away a good portion of the side of the mountain.

When we got back to our workplace, Ken called the county fire department and told them what we had found. When I drove home a few hours later, I passed a fire truck that was stopped by the side of the road near the drums. I never went back into those woods to see if the hydrazine had been removed. I assumed it had been removed and, if it was still there, I'd rather not know about it.

A Way of Knowledge

An unknown TV scriptwriter wrote, “Nietzsche believed that most culture exists purely to distract us from the truth.” I don’t know a lot about what Nietzsche believed, but it sounds exactly like something Yaqui Indian brujo don Juan Matus would have said. Not about Nietzshe, but about the reason culture exists.

In anthropologist Carlos Castaneda’s book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, don Juan says:

“For me there is only the traveling on the paths that have a HEART.. And the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And, there I travel, looking, looking, breathlessly.”

Scholars have debated whether don Juan is a real person and whether the tales of the Yaqui brujo are fictional. A realist would insist that the books are fictional because many events in the books defy reality as we understand it. A believer in the Yaqui way of knowledge would say, of course these events defy our reality, because reality is far greater than what our culture comprehends—that is the whole point of the books.

Our culture becomes a fortress to protect us from forces and energies that we do not understand and cannot control. This makes sense, for even in the “real world” we have different cultures that can barely comprehend each other’s reality.

It seems to me that is what is occurring in our modern-day America. Republicans and Democrats, Red states and Blue states, Conservatives and Liberals, call them what you will, are firmly wedded to their own worldviews, to the extent that they can’t understand any other worldview. Disagreement is one thing; inability to grasp, tolerate, or accept, is very much another problem.

People should keep in mind that it’s possible that they are wrong. But for most people, that is “a bridge too far.” They can’t be wrong. Their entire worldview is built around a set of “facts” that they are certain are correct.

But then, maybe I’m wrong.

VirtualWayne

What if I had been born to the same woman but with a different father? Would I still be me? Half of my DNA would be different, so I would have some different physical and mental attributes, but would I still be me? Would I have the same sense of I-ness that I have now?

What if I had been born to the same father I had in this life, but with a different mother? Would I still be me?

What if both my parents had been different people? What if my parents had been African, living in dire poverty, struggling to survive. Would I still be me?

What I'm asking is, "Was I me before I was conceived? As I've mentioned before on this blog, when I was very young—about six years old—I had a powerful sense that I existed somewhere before I was born. I felt that I could almost remember that place where I had existed before I came to Earth, but in the end I could not remember it. 

So I'm asking, am I a soul who incarnated into physical existence at a certain time and place? I ask because that's the way I feel I came to be. And those people dying of disease and starvation and ignorance in places like Africa: they must be souls, too. If I'm a soul, then they are souls. We all are souls.

In which case, our bodies are like virtual reality headsets, except they're whole body headsets.

Imagine you work in a lab developing virtual reality "suits." You're at your lab bench, and you plug in your suit and turn it on. Instantly, you see that you're in a vast field of green grass and yellow flowers. If you look up you can see the blue sky with puffy white clouds. If you look down you can see the ground with green grass and yellow flowers and honey bees buzzing around the flowers, and if you squat close to the ground you are able to see details of the grass and smell the flowers and see the bees harvesting nectar from the flowers. 

This virtual reality (VR) suit you are wearing is very advanced compared to the crude VR of today. It  gives you not only vision and hearing but also smell and touch and taste. You are now living in a virtual world, and perhaps you will meet other virtual persons. They are real people, of course, and they lived (and still live) somewhere before they came to visit this virtual world. They will live a virtual life in this virtual world, but your (and their) virtual bodies will one day grow old and die. This is part of the program running the VR suit. One day you will die, and then you will "wake up" back in the lab where you started, and all your memories of your real life will return. You'll remember that your real life is here in the real world, and the virtual life was only a kind of game, a kind of school—a virtual world to learn and experience things that you cannot experience safely—or at all—in your real world.

Scientists say our bodies are controlled by our physical brains, not by souls. They say they know this because if a certain part of the brain is damaged, it always affects the same part of the body in every person with that same injury. But now, suppose you're in your virtual reality suit and someone cuts a wire in the suit. Immediately, your left eye sees the world as blurry.  Did the wire affect your left eye? No, the wire only affected data going to the left eye "viewscreen" in your suit. Your real left eye still works perfectly well, except now it is looking at a left eye "viewscreen" that is displaying a blurred image. Any person wearing the same VR suit would have the same faulty vision if someone were to cut the same wire in their VR suit that was cut in your VR suit.

Perhaps we have a true home and an earthly home. As spirits in our "true home" we have certain powers, certain abilities, and certain kinds of knowledge. But there is also a kind of knowledge and a kind of learning that we don't have access to in our true home. In order to acquire that different kind of knowledge, we have to be born in a human body and grow up and experience the world with the limitations of that human body. The human body is a kind of VR suit—a biological VR suit—with a soul as its true conscious inhabitant.

Why would our souls need or want a human body VR suit? One answer: if you're unkind to another person, you don't know what that feels like to them until your life puts you in the same situation and allows someone to give you the same experience of unkindness. We get what we give, because that is why we're here: to be educated. We die, and we're reborn in a very different life where all the lessons are new. Maybe not all the lessons are new; I suspect some souls are stubborn and have to repeat certain lessons before they understand.

What looks to us like unfairness and injustice may be part of a soul's journey of learning. For that reason, we cannot be too quick to judge. Everything in our lives, everything we now experience, may have been prearranged before our births for our individual journeys of education. VirtualWayne isn't real, he's merely spending a temporary life on this Earth getting some education about real human life. It's the kind of education you can't get when you spend all your time in Paradise.

Snow Day

Today is Monday, January 3rd. I intended to post a blog for January 1, but it was New Year's Day. Who works on New Year's Day?

Then I was going to write a blog for January 2nd, but that was Sunday. Certain religions believe that we'll be in trouble with the Big Guy if we work on Sunday. I didn't want to take that chance, therefore, I couldn't write a blog on that day.

So today rolled around: Tuesday. It rained all night, and cold air moved in, and by morning the rain had turned to snow. Then around noon, or maybe a little before, the electricity went off. It's one of those things that happens during winter in my little city. Snow and (it's added weight) brings down limbs and power lines. The last time the power went off, it was off for about 24 hours. My house depends on electricity for heat. The electricity turns a motor that pumps fuel and air into a combustion chamber where it burns and heats water, which another electric motor pumps through radiators throughout the house. When the power goes off, those electric motors stop spinning and the house begins cooling.

Fortunately, the outage lasted only a few hours. I heard the electricity come back on—I heard the boiler in the basement begin roaring. I had to set the time on a couple of clocks but that was a very minor inconvenience. I watch the news and I know that people in some parts of the country are having a very rough time with the cold weather. 

Snow made the yards (gardens) in my city white, but in the afternoon the snow ended and the sun came out and shone bright in a blue sky. 

According to the National Weather Service, tonight's low for my small city is supposed to be 13°F  (-10°C). Tomorrow will warm up to 36°F. That sounds cold but at least it's above freezing. I've seen many a winter day where the high temperature for the day never got above 25°F (-4°C) and the overnight low got down to -8°F (-22°C). I feel sorry for the critters who live outside, but I guess they have ways to survive. They make dens or burrows or they fly south. Some of them hibernate and sleep away the cold.

I hope all my readers are in comfortable houses to sleep this night away. ¡Buenas noches!