One of the problems of growing old is maintenance. Just getting going in the morning takes a while. Have to do my 15 minutes of back exercises each day just to keep from having a sore back on a regular basis. (It works--one visit to the doctor has averted lots of pain, but doing the routine is a pain...) "Maintenance" also includes the obsolescence of one's knowledge.
Back in the day when we first got our telephone it was a party line, and you had a crank to turn to ring the bell. One long ring got you the operator, and a combination of longs and shorts was the code for each of the four or five other households on the line. Now I was never physically coordinated, so when I first had occasion to use the phone my ringing was atrocious. I'd stutter on the long ring, making it sound like two shorts, etc. so you'd have to apologize to the person who answered because it was the wrong number.
Anyhow, after time and practice, I finally got good with the phone. Then of course we got it replaced with the old dial handset, which required a new set of skills...etc. etc.
What triggered this nostalgia? Almost anything these days gets me going but the announcement that Google was killing its Google software this summer is the trigger. I've used it for years to follow a bunch of blogs and some other websites. And now I'm faced with finding a new RSS reader, and learning it. That's maintenance, and that's a problem.
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