I surrendered to my impulses yesterday. I bought the presents whose purchase I second guessed. I may be late in life but at some point, I figured I needed to start trusting my instincts. Because buying Christmas presents isn’t a mind reading exercise, it’s a small celebration of the act of thinking of someone. Of course, it helps to know if they’re allergic to peanuts or don’t like perfume. But after that it seems to me the world ought to be your oyster.

As I stood on the porch this morning after feeding the cats, I counted six planes in the air. Blinking lights against the dark sky moving with purpose against the backdrop of stars and planets. There’s likely a waypoint somewhere close. All the planes seemed to be streaming up from the south then making turns just to my east to find their final destinations.

I went to the recital of a friend’s granddaughter last night. It wasn’t planned, and part of a longer story, but that’s alright. The family has played a key role in my life since the death of my wife and the grandchildren know me as Mister John. We get along well. And getting to see one of them play at a recital reminded me of how much I missed my little grand-kids in Virginia and their recitals. So, it was a fun thing to do.

A lesson in commerce. My daughter and I spent several months discussing, designing, and creating a series of mugs for me to sell in our online store at Gatewood Press. The goal was to create something with the potential to sell not only to the fans I have for this blog, but to a broader base. To that end we even advertised on social media. I used the approach in 2021 when I published my last book, with good results. The results this time? We sold two mugs.

It is rather comforting for this old man to be back in the universe of Microsoft. Writing in word and calculating in Excel. The addition of the company’s AI tool has rounded out the package. I was late to the company’s initial offerings, but like the virus in Pluribus, eventually they assimilated the competing word processing and spreadsheet offerings in the early days of computing and became universal in the business world of my youth. I learned to love and use its tools. We were peaceful and happy.

Spent my evening yesterday with people making music. An open mic, welcome to all comers, and they came. The evening is hosted by a friend which is what gave me my initial boost of courage several months back. I’m not real sure why I needed it. Sixty years ago, when I first picked up the guitar, I had a trio and we’d play for anyone at the drop of a hat. I guess as the years wore on, I learned how much I didn’t know, and that began to give me pause. These days, in the twilight of my life, my nerves twitch when I play for strangers.

Two years ago, in November, I hiked to the top of Gudalupe Peak, the tallest mountain in Texas. I got up the next day and did a seven-mile hike. Five months later, I had an abdominal aortic aneurysm repaired. I shut down. I haven’t been on a monumental hike since. Lots of short ones, but nothing like that one year of the South Rim and the Peak. Mostly, I’ve chalked it up to letting my body heal and age, but I hardly ever think of those seven stents anymore. So, that excuse is long gone. I think it’s time to strap on the boots and backpack and get moving.

I’ve worn the letters c, d, l, and k off my computer keyboard. You would think e would have been the first to go since it’s the most used letter in the English language. But I’m betting the demise of d, l, and k has something to do with the fact that my fingers rest on them as I type. J and F are protected by little protrusions that identify them as index finger keys, anchor points for the hands of a typist. C is most likely the victim of ctrl-c. The copy shortcut.

Television, once central to my life, is no longer. I go days sometimes without turning on the television. I think it started when I cut the cable cord. Streaming is slightly more complicated. You have to remember what service has what show. And you can binge them, so with one good evening you can consume an entire season. And if you miss a show’s weekly appearance, you can catch up, which means the tune-in imperative is gone.

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.

Time. It certainly does fly. Whether you’re having fun or not, apparently. It stunned me, really, to realize on my recent trip to my college campus that fifty years had passed since I was a student there. Then I realized 20 years had slipped by since my father’s passing. And it’s been sixteen years since I moved to my current home. And a depressing number of folks have died along the way, which is par for the course, I believe.

Drove to Houston yesterday with an old friend to watch our college team play football. They lost. They could have won, and probably should have, but as seasons go wins are outnumbering losses by a good number and this has to count as a positive. Unfortunately, we seem to be in an age that demands perfection and we expect money to buy us happiness and victories. So, if we finish 8-4 or 9-3 next week, both good, there still will be a fair number of folks who will count the season a near failure.

There was a chance of rain around noon yesterday. The chance passed. So did the rain. There was a chance of rain at midnight. The chance passed. So did the rain. There are more chances today, but chances pass, unfulfilled, so I’m just going to wait and see what happens. I managed to hook up the drain pipe to the big rainwater tank, so I’m ready. But I’ll keep my hopes at a manageable level and not raise them again. I was more than ready at noon, but the rain had its own agenda.