I have been very happy to have this blog. I am very happy to still have it. I live in a severely restricted mode now - my social energy has depleted entirely. I enjoy writing about random things, and in the process I make sense of the many random things in my long life. It's one of the few things I can do, in my dotage, from the elephant (a great, gray, 'zero gravity', reclining chair.)
Thanks to Google that I still have this blog. I don't want it to end before I do. I thought I had ruined everything by hitting [send] to renew my Google account before I had changed the payment method from my old, abandoned, credit card account to my new one. The next day I hurriedly joined Google with the new account. I still thought everything was lost. Apparently, the accounts people at Google were paying attention because here I am posting to the account.
As a life-long blurter, one of the better things that has happened to me since the tracheostomy, is that now I do all my talking in writing on a dry-erase board. This forces me to think, at least a little bit, before I utter. I now must learn to think before I [send].
The blog is named after my mother's cousin Pauline Stiles' first book. Pauline was a fixture in my childhood. She was an elegant, tall, slim, woman. She lived in San Bernardino, California, in the house where she was born and grew up; her house had Spanish architecture and a red tile roof. We lived in Redlands, eight miles to the south. When we ate at her house, she summoned the maid to the table with a little bell. Our mother, before she married our Father, had lived with Pauline's family when her own mother was put in hospital.
Pauline had been engaged to marry a beautiful young man. When he discovered that the young man had Tuberculosis, her father forbade Pauline to marry him. Pauline was sent off on a grand tour of Europe as a consolation.
On her tour, to keep it all in memory, Pauline took careful notes. On her return her mother suggested she edit them into a book. Pauline did. A publisher published this first book, New Footprints in Old Places. Pauline wrote a number of sucessful novels after New Footprints. She felt that Dr. Will, her last novel, based on her father's life as a doctor in wild California, was her best. It probably was.
Thanks to Google that I still have this blog. I don't want it to end before I do. I thought I had ruined everything by hitting [send] to renew my Google account before I had changed the payment method from my old, abandoned, credit card account to my new one. The next day I hurriedly joined Google with the new account. I still thought everything was lost. Apparently, the accounts people at Google were paying attention because here I am posting to the account.
As a life-long blurter, one of the better things that has happened to me since the tracheostomy, is that now I do all my talking in writing on a dry-erase board. This forces me to think, at least a little bit, before I utter. I now must learn to think before I [send].
The blog is named after my mother's cousin Pauline Stiles' first book. Pauline was a fixture in my childhood. She was an elegant, tall, slim, woman. She lived in San Bernardino, California, in the house where she was born and grew up; her house had Spanish architecture and a red tile roof. We lived in Redlands, eight miles to the south. When we ate at her house, she summoned the maid to the table with a little bell. Our mother, before she married our Father, had lived with Pauline's family when her own mother was put in hospital.
Pauline had been engaged to marry a beautiful young man. When he discovered that the young man had Tuberculosis, her father forbade Pauline to marry him. Pauline was sent off on a grand tour of Europe as a consolation.
On her tour, to keep it all in memory, Pauline took careful notes. On her return her mother suggested she edit them into a book. Pauline did. A publisher published this first book, New Footprints in Old Places. Pauline wrote a number of sucessful novels after New Footprints. She felt that Dr. Will, her last novel, based on her father's life as a doctor in wild California, was her best. It probably was.