t 'n t luoma

The day didn’t start off very well. The battery charger that we bought yesterday did not charge the battery for the Olympus C-50.

Fortunately Vivek was up for return trip to Circuit City, so off we went. The quandry, of course, was whether I should try to get another charger for the battery that we already have, or get a battery for the new charger that we bought.... (Ah... the casual ease with which a $50 mistake becomes a $100 one...)

Upon arrival I went to the camera department and started explaining the situation... “I have a camera with a dead battery, left the charger in Ohio, bought a new charger yesterday, didn’t charge the battery... so I either need a new charger that will charge this battery, or...” At this point he grabbed another guy who worked there. Apparently this was a bit to complicated for just one man to handle.

“How old is the camera?” asked Second Level Circuit City Man. (“About a year.”) “Does it get a lot of use?” I chuckled. (“Should I tell him about the Daily Dose of Ethan?” Nah...) I just said, “Yes.”

“Battery’s probably dead,” he declared. Could be. Nothing lasts forever.

Anyway, we arrived back at the house just in time to greet Mimi and Dick who brought Phoebe and Meg Gooddog, both regular contributors to the DDOE. Meg Azevedo and Lilly and Wayne Fiori and Jeni with Halsey, Jackson, and Roey.

Mimi wrote “It was delightful to meet more old friends” which summed it up perfectly. I’ve “known” many of these folks since 1997 when we first adopted Jerry. They have been with us through seminary, ordination exams, first church ups and downs, Gabriel, and now Ethan. The mere fact that we have only now met in person is something along the lines of interesting trivia, not a defining characteristic.

It is a common observation that most Americans do not know their (physical) neighbors. I would assume this is more or less true in many other, but not all, places around the globe. There are many different reasons given for this, many different factors given for the increasing isolation of society. One that is often cited (recently) is the Internet, with groups of people huddled over individual computer screens rather than sitting down face to face. College campuses report dramatically decreased participation in on-campus events after high-speed Internet access is added to the dorms.

I have come to think of the Internet as something like a telephone or an airplane or television... it can bring people together more easily and cause them to be more separated. It’s all in how you use it, or how you let yourself be used by it.

There will hopefully be a lot more pictures to come, but that’s all for me for today. Tomorrow we head out to Golden Gate Park.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention: Wayne, I don’t often get a chance to hang around and talk with people about ssh, wget, and the like. I enjoyed it, even if most of the rest of the folks in the room thought we were speaking a foreign language.