When the Discovery Channel was new, along with The Learning Channel, I sometimes would walk into the room, turn on the TV and find myself watching hour after hour. Modern Marvels was an incredibly compelling show and at the end of each segment, I would tell myself that this would be the last. Then a promo for the next show would come on and it would be something along the lines of the Grand Canyon or the Golden Gate Bridge and I would sigh and settle in.

Then, somewhere along the line, it seemed that these educational stations went more to reality shows and following the lives of atypical families or, belief it or not, choosing wedding dresses.

My son had told me about The Smithsonian Channel, but with the long lineup of cable channels, I kept missing it. Then, yesterday, there it was and it was highlighting aerial views of different countries and areas of the United States. The One Hour More Syndrome hit and I spent most of the afternoon watching National Geographic type pictures and hearing factoids of areas about which I had been unaware.

I do hope the channel does not morph into choosing kilts or saris or kimonos.

Holy Moses!! I quickly added three newspaper clippings to my last post and did not then go and look at it. BAD MISTAKE. It sprawled across the entire page. I went into site administration and did what any 69-year-old unaccomplished post poster would do – I spent a lot of time figuring out how to fix it.

I am no longer thinking about that now, however, for when I typed BAD MISTAKE, I started to wonder if that was actually correct. A mistake is something done wrong and this was an instance of something definitely wrong, so how could it be a bad mistake. I would think as mistakes go, it was a good one – or at least an adequate one.

I suppose it is intended to refer to the severity of the effects of the mistake – maybe like giving someone aspirin instead of Percocet and them complaining, as opposed to reversing the dose and totally knocking out someone with a minor headache.

I am considering now that if you make a mistake and the effect is minor, then maybe you have done this mistaking business badly. If you make a mistake and your stove catches fire, well, I guess you have mistaked really well.

It’s possible that I need to stop thinking.

My younger son’s middle name is his great-grandmother’s maiden name – Akers. I found three quick references to her from about 100 years ago:

I read a blog entry about Trump tweeting and on the spur of the moment commented that I thought sooner or later a pundit would start referring to him as Tweety Bird. Now I can’t get it out of my mind. This could make for a long day.

That is a misleading post title; I should have typed my shark vacuum and my memory, but what is done is done. Oh, I know there is a delete key and it would me so easy, but today is : Return to Your Past Day and so I doing it like we did waaaay back then.

For those who did not live in those Stone Ages, I will explain:

You did not have a delete key; you typed it, there it stayed. You could use really thin onion skin paper and with an eraser make the paper even thinner; or, if you couldn’t get away with that, you could use White-Out, which was so very obvious.

To deal with these frequent situations, you had to write your way out of your predicament, finding someway to get to the period of the sentence  in a grammatically acceptable process. Often this was not easy. And it definitely was a pain in the neck.

By the way, I made up the today is Return to Your Past Day, although I suspect you knew that.

Getting back to what I started to relate in the first place, I have a Shark vacuum, which is bagless and lets you see the dirt you are sucking up. This can be upsetting, for you may realize that  you are a very dirty person. On the other hand, you feel like you are accomplishing something. On top of it all, the vacuum comes apart in several washable pieces, including the hose and that comes in handy when you inadvertently suck up something noxious.

Yesterday, I vacuumed some areas and then decided I’d wash the filter and let it dry overnight so I could really do a whiz-bang job today. However, and I have no idea how this could have happened, since I have a not-bad memory, I forgot to wash it out. I got up this morning and thought: Oh, no, I really can’t start out the day by vacuuming . . . Gosh Darn! I could have been psychically crushed, but I am resilient and opted to sit down, eat a foldover (peanut butter sandwich) and look at the Internet news.

I just posted not ten minutes ago, but I am here again because I must confess to a totally AmeliaJake type of mistake. I glanced at a sub-headline on the Internet news that announced a Miss Turkey had lost her crown due to a tweet. And I thought – please brace yourself – that it had something to do with a Thanksgiving event . . . and maybe with an actual turkey that had been judged “perfect”. Well, no, it wasn’t; you can see for yourself what the real story is HERE.

This started out as one of the major no-no’s for trial lawyers: Do not ask a question you do not already know the answer to or are an answer you are not prepared to hear. I suppose it derived, as so many prudent things do, from the old adage that curiosity killed the cat.

Firemen feel the door before they open it, for instance. I’m not going to give another example; I am going straight to crux of what prompted me to sigh and sit down and whimper onto my laptop. I suspected it, I know, and that is probably why I put off going upstairs and into a certain room. However, because an attachment to my vacuum has been missing for a number of days, I decided to go see if I had left it “in a certain room.”

Up the stairs I went and I turned left and I did not find the attachment; I viewed a room that harbored nothing filthy, but a number of plates and empty cups and glasses – everywhere. I assume it was everywhere because I made a U-Turn and descended the stairs.

A little while later, I heard the door open to the back vestibule and went out to the kitchen to speak with the dinnerware collector. He tilted his head and said, “Well, it’s a work in progress.” That is one thing he has inherited from me – the ability to disguise something distasteful with a euphemism. Why, when I wanted to wash a stuffed animal and make it sound less horrible than saying, “I’m going to put it in the washing machine,” I simply said it was going to a spa. Never mind that the last time I did that in a HE washer, the spin cycle totally flattened the thing against the side and in the end, an eye fell out.

Actually, no one asked me to relay that story and I shouldn’t have, which only goes to show, even if you know the answer to a question – especially one you are not asked – sometimes you just should keep your mouth closed.

I have upped my consumption of regular old water, although I will allow that most of what I drink is bottled water from Ice Mountain. The main reason I stick with Ice Mountain is because I like the sound of the name and the flash of pleasant mood I feel when I glance at the label. Forest beneath the iced capped mountain – yes, yes, yes, it stirs something inside me. Another reason, which formed in my own mind, has to to do with the Artesians of Olympia Beer. They were the little elf-like guys that manufactured the beer. Please, no one tell me this is a myth or advertising ploy; I simply won’t belief it.

Yes, Virginia, Artesians do exist.

Having taken a byroad here, I’ll return to the point I am supposed to me making. It seems that with a marked increased consumption of water, I have found more energy, even to the point of going outside in 85+ weather with a pruning saw. I look forward to drinking water, something I used to experience only after having done something that has perspiration flowing down my face or during a fever.

Then, again, there is the exercise from toting in a 28 or 32 pack of bottles, but that’s internal usage, although the effort does encourage it. What if the water has me work myself to death? No, that’s certainly not a possibility,

Drat, I made an inappropriate pun in the title above, and, really, it was totally unintentional; it had to be subconscious. I caught it almost immediately and could easily have changed it, but maybe it is appropriate because it testifies to the intensity of the emotion that wells within me when a certain topic comes up.

The title of the book was enough to sent up a red flag: Thunder Dog. The short synopsis was confirmation of the assault on my heart:

This #1 New York Times bestseller tells the inspirational true story of Roselle, a loyal guide dog who led her blind owner from the World Trade Center to safety during the harrowing moments of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. With nearly 2,000 five-star ratings on Goodreads.

Shane. It will always be Shane; Shane, whom I did not name, remarking that I would always be reminded of Alan Ladd; Shane, who came to live with me when Quentin had to find him a new home. “Will you take Shane,” he asked. There wasn’t time for a breath between his question and my answer, “Yes, of course.”

There was the trip to Memphis with Cameron to meet up with Quentin who brought Shane from Houston, a trip that had us stopping at Historic Sites and staying at a motel and detouring to show where his grandfather and I had lived at the former AF base at Blytheville, Arkansas. It was a trip that was a marathon drive back from Memphis, with no motel and frequent calls from home for the last four hours as anticipating people queried, “Where are you now?”

And there were the years with Shane. Shane who was an Australian Shepherd clown, who loved Wubbas and hugs and trips to the fairgrounds. Shane who was ordered around by Sydney, our elderly Australian Shepherd who had been the last one to whom my father addressed his last coherent words and the one who was by my mother almost a decade later when she died.

And Shane was Quentin’s dog. Shane had followed in the line of the dogs we have had and said goodbye to, and in quite a few years I knew I would have to say goodbye to him. But it didn’t work out that way. Shane had an asymptomatic genetic condition that led to cancer in the heart that struck its lethal blow in a 48 hour period. He was lying on the floor and I was trying not to stimulate him because I knew he would try so hard to please me. And, so, he died alone and untouched. It was shocking, leaving even the vet to wonder and it was the necropsy that gave us the answer. Answers don’t bring dogs back. In fact, someone said to me, “Shane’s gone and he’s not coming back.” Maybe that was the push that got me thinking that everything Shane represented, everything to which he was linked was gone . . . and not coming back. And it was so much to lose forever.

Shane’s memory was the master key to so many boxes of sadness that were stacked in my mind like safety deposit boxes in a bank’s vault. And so when I watched Marley and Me with Owen Wilson, I sobbed and was near tears for days. Homeward Bound? Oh, heaven’s no.

There are so many deserving stories of loyal and wonderful dogs, but I can’t bring myself to read them. I have lived that story

I met a part of Harvey’s extended family this morning at the gas station. I winced at the price per gallon and turned my back to the pump and when that pump shut off automatically, I turned slowly and groaned.

And it occurred to me: With all the notifications about voluntary help for Hurricane Harvey’s victims, am I making an obligatory donation to oh, say, some gas companies?