The Caregiver’s Tales: A Blog

It’s raining and everything is oddly green given that it’s December. But we’ve yet to have a freeze. So, rain and cool weather have the grass excited and growing. A reverse version of spring. And no cold is on the horizon either. So, I’ll probably need to mow at some point, although that’s just for cosmetic reasons and I have no HOA or neighbors tut-tutting over my unkempt grass. So, I might let it go for a while longer.

AI wins again. I had a batch of Word Files. I wanted a field inserted into the header of each document. I knew it could be done because five years ago I paid someone to write me a VBA macro to do a similar task. This time I simply asked ChatGPT for help. Quick as a wink I had a program. We gave it a few tweaks and just like that 300 files had a field inserted into a header on each document. It saved me time and money.

Once upon a time I considered myself a well-read man, a reader of the great books. But that feeling has long since dissipated. I’m unable to quote passages from favorite poems or phrases from favorite books. I can’t site references from memory. The words I’ve read from the books and poems I’ve read are scattered in my memory like so many leaves from winter trees. The titles are there, the authors are there, and even some of the characters are there as well. But nothing feels coherent.

There’s a character in Star Trek that’s irresistible, The Borg. Resistance, as they’ll tell you, is futile. The Star Trek heroes obviously resist but lots of cultures don’t. I think the internet is our Borg, and judging by how many people use it, I’d say resistance is futile. Although, perhaps in retrospect its technology in general that captured us. But that’s for another day. Right now, for me, it’s the internet, because someone in China is still perusing my site every day.

It’s a cool windy day with a promise of rain. A good staying inside day. A cold front’s coming. Lows in the 30s, highs in the 40s. A Texas winter. We’re the place where blue northers come to die, victims of the second law of thermodynamics. Don’t bring your arctic air around here. You’ll be balmy in no time. It’s one reason why so many refugees from northern climes live here. The cold air might chase them, but it will surrender in the end.

It is nothing for me to wake at night and instantly recall some moment in my life that needs re-litigating. Sometimes, they’re events close at hand, other times they’re decades in the past. The other night I found myself in the early 80s, at my second job out of college. I have no idea why I decided to relive those days, but there I was, wide awake, going over all the things I did or didn’t do and regretting some of them.

This is the month of revelations. The other day I looked back and realized how far I’d come since my college days, a long, long way. Then yesterday, I realized this is only the second time in my life I’ve lived alone. The first was a brief stint right out of high school when I took a job at the Houston Chronicle as a copyboy and had a room at the downtown YMCA. Between then and now I moved back home, joined the Navy, had a roommate, and then a wife and kids. That’s sixty years of always being in the company of someone. No wonder things feel strange these days.

I surrendered yesterday. Went back to Word. I tried to be 21^st century with a cloud-based solution, but it felt kludgy and inelegant. Also, I officially started work on my next book, and most of the essays I’ll use were in Word. So, I bit the bullet and bought a personal license, and I officially miss the days when you bought the software outright, and it was yours to use. I understand the license paradigm, but that doesn’t make it easier to tolerate.