We used to call this fast time, back in the day. My mother and I still do; my younger son had to ask me what it meant. Of course, that may be because for a long time Indiana stayed on standard time all year, which was great considering how incredibly west we are in the Eastern Time Zone. Here we are in Indiana, getting up and going to bed with New York, Boston, and all the folks in Maine who can’t get there from here.

Then a few years back, Mitch Daniels got himself elected governor and, gadzooks, we found ourselves on daylight savings time. Mother calls it GDT – for Governor Daniels or, more likely, God Damn Time.

I have yet to move my watch forward; my mother doesn’t. I sent the governor an email back then but only got an intern’s form reply. Aha, apparently Mitch does not understand he has lost Mother’s vote – she calls him “That boy.” And while she does not have a “Ditch Mitch” bumper sticker on her car, she just might be getting there.

Earlier today I wrote about the “Before You Go” CD/DVD that thanks the soldiers for what they have done. Then later, I was upstairs, brushing my teeth of all things, and it occurred to me that we certainly weren’t saying a very good thank you by making crappy cars and losing out to the Japanese and having a bunch of people who are happy to stay on welfare. Let’s get personal: I whine about not losing weight. Well, for Heaven’s Sake, surely I can take off ten pounds. Surely I can keep my lawn in better shape; surely I don’t need to use obscene language; there are lots and lots of “surely’s”.

Rats, AmeliaJake, let’s shape up.

Is it the camera business – and software that brings editing and enhancing to the amateur, not to mention printing – that is behind some blogs today. Well, yes, I would say so. Now, I don’t know what was the chicken and what was the egg with the Pioneer Woman but along with her stories of her life, there is a pictorial place that few of us experience – the Old West, the New West, the prairie, nature and so forth. So, yes, Nikon and Hewitt-Packard would take notice of the potential for marketing. And Adobe Photoshop – hey, is there much difference between being talked through a recipe and talked through photo editing? Probably not. And she is starting a whole new blog devoted to it, along with the Pioneer Woman Cooks blog.

Now, on the upper right sidebar of Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, Beside the Stream is featured – a blog with lots of pictures about the mountains and Colorado. This lady, I think her name is Alice, starts right off telling you she hadn’t really taken pictures until a “professional” camera arrived at her house. And now she has a tutor. I don’t know what brand of camera she has and it probably doesn’t matter. I think the idea is to get people wanting to take more photos and do more things with them and that leads to overall growth in camera sales, software and accessories.

This is okay with me. Perhaps soon I will be looking each day at photos of living in a bayou, in a bunch of cities, in the desert, in the High Plains, in the Sierras, in resorts, and so forth. Well, it should be educational.

Say, anyone want to give me a fancy camera to capture a small Indiana town in photos. I’m from Lagrange County; I can do farms and Amish and Shipshewana. I’m from the pioneer stock of the area – I’ve got old photos that can be resurrected.

Nikon, Canon, Olympus . . . if you’re interested, remember I’m ameliajake@theleaningcow.com

I am in the lucky generation; I am the daughter of those who were young during the Depression and in early adulthood in WWII. My grandmother made my mother a winter coat out of an older one, sprucing it up so it looked nice. When Roosevelt spoke the day after Pearl Harbor, she listened to it over the public address system in the school auditorium. My father went in the service in 1942 and came back to Indiana in late 1945 and was discharged at Fort Benjamin Harrison.

He was in the signal corps and said he never was a “real soldier”. He’s gone now. His hair was white and he had become frail.

I look at these pictures of old men and the pictures of young men in combat and realize they are the same. I feel for them; I feel for me. Something so important, something that reaches so deeply into your soul and it passes in a lifetime. Maybe that is the real reason they made stone and sculptors – because at least there is something to touch, something as strong as they were.

(Well, okay, bronze is good as well.)

A musical and pictorial tribute and thank you in in album form on the Internet now. My husband sent it to me and I send it on to you.

I have always wanted to feel that which is the  ‘whatever’ – zest, passion, determination, courage – of an adventurer, an explorer, a “what if we did this?” person. Today I saw another link to the Apple commercial that so many people like because it salutes those who take a different path. Yes, I like it also; but I think the writers stole it from Walter Lippmann. I know when I heard the partial narration of this on a made for TV movie, I sought it out and committed parts to memory. It is here at the bottom of this link and here is a bit of it (well, around half of it):

The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia Earhart’s adventure. They are the things that are undertaken not for some definite, measurable result, but because someone, not counting the costs or calculating the consequences, is moved by curiosity, the love of excellence, a point of honor, the compulsion to invent or to make or to understand. In such persons mankind overcomes the inertia which would keep it earthbound forever in its habitual ways. They have in them the free and useless energy with which alone men surpass themselves.

Such energy cannot be planned and managed and made purposeful, or weighed by the standards of utility or judged by its social consequences. It is wild and it is free. But all the heroes, the saints and the seers, the explorers and the creators partake of it. They do not know what they discover. They do not know where their impulse is taking them. They can give no account in advance of where they are going or explain completely where they have been. They have been possessed for a time with an extraordinary passion which is unintelligible in ordinary terms.

No preconceived theory fits them. No material purpose actuates them. They do the useless, brave, noble, the divinely foolish and the very wisest things that are done by man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that man is no mere creature of his habits, no mere automaton in his routine, no mere cog in the collective machine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky.

I’ve had the respiratory flu (I think) with a touch of gastric symptoms for about two weeks now. I don’t feel so bad anymore, but when I sit down and happen to be tilting one way or the other, I wind up in nap phase. I don’t know that I can say I am tired or sleepy, but just that  – poof – there I am dozing away. It was 10 this morning when my cell phone jolted me awake. I call my mother every morning around nine every morning and evening. This morning, I had my usual 8:30 am conversation with my neighbor (She’s 90 and lives alone) across the street and thought, “Oh, I’ll just wait a few minutes to call Mother.” That didn’t work.

I’ve been lucky and haven’t had flu bouts in recent years, and darn it, the year I do have it they won’t allow human subjects in high school science experiments. My grandson could have used me, instead of those beans.  We could have done coughing videos relating to the timed dosage of cough syrup (some of which was pretty cool by the way) and a series of “hair-do” pictures.

I just thought of something; we have the boy watch old movies to further his cultural education and the last one was “Arsenic and Old Lace”. Okay, going for a caffeine fix.

My father died eight years ago; I suppose he felt tired for some time before he fessed up to being pretty ill, but he did not allow he might have the flu until January 8th. We took him to the hospital on January 15th, supposedly for rehydration. I remember watching his feet go down the back steps of the deck – me on one side of him, my daughter-in-law, a nurse, on the other. I thought maybe he wouldn’t be coming home. He didn’t. He died on February 10th and we buried him on the 14th. My youngest son had come back when he was ill because we thought he would have many good days and some months or so. One semester of college didn’t seem that important at that time.

I don’t know how we got started doing it but he and I would really form a bond with these bears we would see in GoodWill; it just seemed we had to bring them home. I don’t know about Quentin, but I didn’t want them to be just material and stuffing. I guess I wanted them for a little while to be real. I needed them to be real because if they could be real in my mind, other things could. Actually, I never really thought that, and didn’t much think it now. it just seemed okay coming out on the keyboard. Looking back, I think Quentin knew I needed something soft and comforting and innocent. Maybe we both did.

As we – but mostly it was me – started getting a pile of these bears, we noticed some of them were exactly alike except for color and label. We referred to them as “the fam” , adopting the phrase from the movie “What About Bob.” At least that’s where I think we first latched onto it – Bill Murrary and “the fam”.

We gave them names and so we wouldn’t forget we stuck their names on their butts with masking tape.

This bear is Demonesque. We pretty much went with the first impression thing, so I don’ t know that he is. I will say that in the last years, he has nothing mischievous.

Maybe it is time to pull the masking tape off and send him back to GoodWill.

I don’t like housekeeping and I wind up being  behind the eight ball most of the time.  It is my reputation and fine, okay. Or not fine, but I live with it and so do others because I have some redeeming features. There may not be many, but there are some. Anyway, I have decided to be as painless as possible about getting things in order while giving myself little gold stars I can look back on.

It did not occur to me to take a picture of a cluttered room and then one of it cleaned.  Overwhelming. I am going to try pictures of small areas, and I guess in the after picture, you will just have to take my word for it I have not moved the stuff four or five feet to other side.

Here is my first picture:  

Will I even be able to fulfill the first attempt of this plan? Do not hold your breath.