Yesterday, Elaine and I had a great Thanksgiving meal at the beautiful home of my son and his lovely wife, Kathleen. Most of my grandchildren were there, as well as my great grandchild. It does my heart good to see how they are all now taller than me. One grandson was worried that he was going to be a short guy, but he has sprouted up in a short period of time. He's still a little worried, because people have told him he looks like I did when I was his age. Sorry. He'll get over it. (But, of course, he is a very handsome boy!) (This is where I am supposed to put an emoticon with a smiling face.)
Talking to a couple of my grandkids, I learned how to download 350 pictures from my cell phone and found out about some apps that will be useful. Smart kids! And handsome and beautiful too!
I like to remember back when I was kid at Thanksgiving day. My grandmother spent a long time cooking a turkey, making cranberry sauce, mashing potatoes, creating the stuffing, cooking the vegetables and baking lots of pies. I don't think she got any help from my grandfather or uncles. Some of my aunts helped out, but I doubt my mother did, even though she was a great cook. She cooked meals every day for the folks she worked for so she needed a day off from that job.
Some folks did not show up for the Thanksgiving dinner and we didn't know why, because we were too poor to have a telephone. What a difference yesterday. Via SKYPE, we all were able to see and talk to my sister, her boy friend, and cousin in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Amazing! This was something that I thought about for years and wondered if we would ever have.
Kurzweill predicts that in 2040 we will be able to upload our brain contents to whatever the "cloud" is then. This will give us eternal life... well, at least until the sun lashes out and burns us up.
Meanwhile, I keep finding how dumb I am, for instance:
Readers Digest has a monthly test of "Word Power" and during a recent test, I bombed out on 4 words that I thought I knew:
plangent: very loud (I thought it was flexible) This comes from the Latin verb: plangere, to strike or beat one's chest in grief, or to lament.
chthonic: of the underworld (I thought it was having sharp claws) This is from the Greek word for "earth." Hades lives under the earth, where he rules, and he is called a chthonic diety.
gormless: stupid (I thought it was lacking firm shape) This began in Britain and is still used there much more than in the U.S. It started as: gaum (attention) and less.
pixilated: mentally unbalanced (I thought it was elfin.) This is just a corruption of "pixie." Is a leprechaun pixilated?
Shame on me for missing these words. I have seldom, if ever felt the need to use these words in my correspondence. However, I will attempt to rectify that situation by slipping them into my blog entries from time to time.
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