I love the internet

Sometimes I forget how spoiled we are to have the technology available to us today.

Remember when you used shoot a roll of 24 or 36 exposures, take the roll of film to the local drugstore, wait a week and then get maybe one or two pictures from the whole roll that didn't suck?

Did your dinner get cold while you were looking at and ordering your photos online? 
Stick it in the microwave for a minute or two. Hot dinner again. About the time you're finished with your dinner, your email will let you know your prints are ready at the local store.

Telephones. Let's talk about telephones.
When I worked at a little ceramic company in California in 1984, one of the ladies I worked with had a hubby who was some kind of high priced corporate guy. I don't know what he did for a living. He made a lot of money and he wasn't a very nice guy. Maybe he was a crooked lawyer. Ha.

Anyway, one lunchtime, I sat in the car with Wanda. And there was a TELEPHONE in the car!! In the center console was a regular black telephone. With a boingity cord connecting the handset to the phone.

There were also two large antennas on the roof of the car. I was soooo impressed with that telephone. I couldn't believe a person could be driving down the road and talking on the phone. She said that it was expensive, but yes, a person could make important calls. That it wasn't there so she could call and tell him to bring home a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk.

Now you can pull a phone out of your pocket and argue with people on the internet all day long... or of course ask your wife to bring home some milk. Or beer.
  Computers make it easy to find out almost anything. In the past month or so, I have learned many new things. I encourage the kids at work to come in and tell me what they've learned every day. Sometimes, they come in and tell me things they've found on the internet, sometimes from books or from parents or their teachers. I'm trying to get them to ponder the many ways a person can learn, and to figure out that learning isn't confined to a building between the hours of 8 and 3, Monday through Friday.

Hm. In no particular order, here are some of the things I've googled (funny how that's now a universally recognized verb, but my spell check, on a computer that's full of google, doesn't like the word) and/or looked at in the last month.

A few movie plots. I don't really love watching movies, although I will sit with Eric and watch whatever offering we have from Netflix for the weekend. I bring my computer and my zentangly stuff and we sit in the same room. Sometimes the movie's a little slow and I want to find out what's going to happen.

I looked up different plants. Flower photos. Tangle patterns. The cost of wedding flowers made commercially. It's like 40 bucks for a corsage with just a couple roses and a sprig of baby's breath!! I didn't figure out how much money we saved by my work on making the wedding flowers, but I spent about a hundred bucks for everything. Ribbons and flowers and wires and floral tape and the bouquet holder. 

I looked up some legal information, too. I was reading something interesting and looked up libel. 

Did you know that when you're a public figure (politician, lawyer, actor, university professor) the rules are a little different than for your average Joe. Or Jill. To prove libel, the ostensibly injured party would have to show both intent and substantial damage to his or her reputation and/or livelihood. It's a threat often bandied about to make people stop talking, but it's usually a bunch of wind.
Most of the time, people who want to safeguard their reputations don't go around doing questionable things and hurting other people.
Most of the time. :)

I looked up the rewards program for our credit card. We've never used any of our points, so there were a bunch of them accumulating. I chose a fifty dollar Amazon card and a fifty dollar card for a meal at Red Lobster. It's certainly not free money, but getting those gift cards required the internet.

Checked into, "What happens when you get a rock chip in the windshield of the car you rented?" Found out that yes, my own car insurance would cover it, but who knows what would happen to our deductible? I was advised to take a photo of the rock chip next to a dime or quarter to show the size of the damaged spot, as on occasion a rental car company will come back and try to bill your credit card for a full windshield replacement.  I took the photo without realizing there was no card in my good camera. So we have no photographic evidence anyway.

But they didn't bill us for a full windshield. It cost us an extra seventeen bucks on top of the one week rental, but that wasn't too bad. We saved something like 150 bucks by renting the car for a week. Eric, Lyssa and Bob drove up to Kennewick and saw Eric's sister over Labor Day weekend.

Eric hadn't seen her in the more than 35 years since we met, Bob in at least 25. Long story, and not mine to tell. But they were able to talk and spend some time together. I needed a car to get around while they were gone, and they needed something a little larger than the car we ordinarily drive, so we rented a Camry.

I perused the news websites. They're often fun to look at. KATU has the worst written website of the ones I read. Full of grammatical and factual errors. I swear they get a monkey with a typewriter to do their headlines. Case in point:

Family of Rainier Police Chief killed frustrated suspect trial date not set yet
One of the people who commented on that story wanted to know if punctuation had gone up in price.

I read a lot of blogs.

I am on Facebook, but I don't put a lot of information out there.
There are a lot of FB links in my history, too.
Amazon.
Netflix.
Gmail.
Verizon and other places who provide services for me are paid online.
Medical stuff and a few local bills are paid by my credit union with computer-generated checks. I go online and send money.

Recipes.

Work email. I often order my snacks and supplies while I'm sitting here at home. No, I don't get paid for the time I spend doing it. That's my choice. I'd rather spend the time at home and order while I'm doing other things (eating dinner, chatting online with friends, drawing tangly stuff) instead of taking time away from the kids while I'm trying to work. I don't want to stay late, either. When the last kid leaves for the evening, I am out the door as soon as I can be. I love being there, but I love being home more. :)

And then there's blogging, too. Lots of links to me answering comments on my blog and commenting on others. I've been writing here since 2005. It's been a journal more than anything else. I still like doing it, or I'd stop. I wonder if the next generation in the nursing homes will be writing blogs and playing video games and/or D&D.

I also write a work blog (no, you wouldn't be interested in the link) for the people I work with. It's a way for us to exchange ideas and solutions, although it's more of a monologue and I've mostly stopped writing there. It was a volunteer thing and just hasn't caught on.

I am up at 1 AM with some interesting heartburn. We ate kinda late. But I've been up long enough to finish writing this, hit post and go back to sleep. Busy day planned.
Hope you're having a good day.
Zzzz you later.