One of my younger brothers is in the hospital recovering from surgery from colon cancer.  He seems to be doing well and the family has been supportive.  My nieces went to the trouble of having Thanksgiving dinner a week early so that he could enjoy it.  My sister and my nieces have worked hard to keep the family intact.  I'm grateful.

My grandfather Clarence Bott had colon cancer and died of it in 1937, he was only forty-two.  He was adopted by Jaob Bott and it's possible that his father died of colon cancer and that is the reason for the adoption.  My father was only thirteen when his father died.  In 1970 my uncle Bob died from the disease, again at age forty-two.  In 1992 Bob's son, also named Bob, died at age thirty-five.  My older brother Brad got colon cancer and had surgery but died of a heart attack while recovering.  He was only forty-eight.

There have been other kinds of cancer in the family and other problems.  I read a report saying this defective gene also expresses itself in ovarian cancer.  One of my sisters and other relatives have contracted that.

My father died in a car accident when he was forty-two years old.  He had the defective gene and there is a good chance he would have come down with colon cancer had he lived.

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Not long ago a representative from Human Resources came to our center telling us that the company would be offering us health care if we retired.  The rule thus far had been that we couldn't get health care until we turned fifty-five.  We could collect our pension anytime after thirty years of service but no health care.  This change was incredible and meant I could retire in the coming year.

We didn't receive our promised information packets in the mail and eventually we were told that the health care was being offered but not to our center.  The announcement had been a mistake.

The letdown was substantial.

Now I have to wait until I'm fifty-five.  That will give me thirty-seven years with the company. I am not complaining.  I know innumerable people who would love to be able to retire at fifty-five.  Working another sixteen months will be more of an annoyance than a hardship.

As I've written, my genetic history give me a sense of urgency.

I read once. At fifty you still have time, but no time to waste.  Truer words were never spoken.

I love my Ipod Touch.

I have hundreds of photos, thousands of songs, full length movies, tv shows and applications on it. One thing that has frustrated me is that unlike the Iphone the Touch has no camera or microphone.  I carry a camera (plus there is one in my phone) so that didn't bother me but the missing microphone annoyed me.  Many applications demand one.

I did a search of the internet and found a great microphone called ThumbTacks Micro-Microphone .   I read the reviews, ordered it and it was shipped the next day.  Three days later it arrived.  It is tiny and looks like a thumbtack.

I plugged it in and was disappointed with the sound quality with the app that came with the Itouch so I downloaded an app from Griffin called Italk Lite.  The improvement in sound quality is amazing.  You can choose good, better or best quality.  Plus you can pause and restart the recording.  You can append recordings too.  You can name and save the recording.  I downloaded an application that allows you to wirelessly transmit the recordings to your computer.

I'm impressed by the quality of the recording plus I can now use some great apps.  I downloaded an app that turns the Itouch into an electronic guitar (or banjo) tuner.

If you own an Ipod Touch I can't imagine a better way to spend $12.99

I've given up on Twitter.  I found the concept interesting but the spammers got involved and would get ten new followers a day that were just porn sites.  I stopped posting there but still use it to keep track of interesting people like Derron Brown .

Facebook on the other hand is a great deal of fun.  I've only been on a couple months but have found friends from childhood, high school and work.   I was surprised when the school photographer Kim Tonry posted pictures of me from high school.  The first one was when I was in a play called The Physicists.

My senior year was tumultuous but also incredibly exciting.  The Physicists was a great play even though I had a small part. I know, there are no small parts only small actors. Believe me, I was a small actor.

Thanks to Kim here is a another picture, me playing chess.

 These pictures are thirty-five years and seventy-five pounds apart from me now.

 I like Facebook and plan to continue using it.  I still don't understand Farm Town, Mafia Wars, sending pokes and all  the quizzes but it will come to me.

I am back and this blog will once again become active.  A lot has been going on.

At work I've transferred back to Elyria after being in Middleburg Heights for twenty years.  I've lost a couple friends this year and I can feel change all around me.  I have the ability to retire anytime after January 1st, 2010 and that is giving me a great deal to think about.

Life seems to be accelerating.

Anyone who knows me or knows this blog knows I love succulents.  But my true love is the Lithop.  I've written about them before so rather that repeat myself go HERE.

I pulled out all of my Lithops for the first time today after a long winter.   The become dormant and die off and a new plant emerges out of the center.  The hard part is not watering them.  I haven't watered them since October!!!  I was a little worried as many of them are very small., just babies.

I brought them out and there they were fresh and ready to go.  I couldn't be happier.  Check out the pics

As I prepare to transition into retirement (in a couple of years) I've been looking at my financial situation.  The economy is bad but my job pays well and I'm secure now that I'm in my thirty-fifth year. 

I've been using Quicken for years and have a pretty good idea where I'm at but decided to download an app for my Apple Ipod Touch that would keep track of purchases at stores.  It cost $0.99 so it was in my price range.  I entered my shopping list and when I shopped entered the prices.  When I got to checkout it was off by a couple bucks.  I figured I must have made a mistake so I didn't think much about it.

The next day I did some grocery shopping and the same thing.  This time when I got home I went over the list.  That is when I found the mistakes.  I bought some blood oranges but was charged for the higher priced oranges.  Then another product was different from the price on the shelf.  Hmmm.

Then I went to the other receipt and found another error, this on worth a couple bucks.

I've always assumed that with scanners things were spot on but not any more.  I plan to watch carefully and correct errors.  I wonder how much these kind of errors have costed me over the years? 

I have been working some horrible hours lately.  It is worse than the Christmas Peak.  That is part of the reason that I've been neglecting this blog.  I've signed up with Twitter to mini-blog.

I'm going to try doing Twitte for a while and see how that goes until work normalizes.  I'm Leastbest there too.

I don't really get the concept yet but it will be an interesting experiment.

I play a lot of poker.  When I play with friends we often need a real poker application like Tim's Tourney Timer .  The timer keeps track of blinds and breaks.  It does everything I need.  Once again this is freeware.  If you play poker this app is for you.

When I first got the Ipod Touch I put photographs and music on it.  I wanted to do more but couldn't find an easy way to do some of it.  Movies were a bit frustrating as you had to convert and transfer them from the dvd.  Then I found Videora Ipod Converter .  It takes all of the muss and fuss out of putting movies onto the Touch.

I love having movies on the Touch.  If I'm stuck someplace I can watch a movie with amazing clarity.  By the way, Videora Ipod Converter is freeware but if you use it as much as I do, send them a buck or two.

I've been using PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) for a long time.  I have a lot of interests and they help me keep things straight.  I started with the Sony Clie and it was okay for its' time but rather limited.  Then I progressed to the Palm Tungsten T2.  This was more like it.  It had a beautiful color screen and unlimited memory due to it's memory slot.  I was frustrated with it as it had a tendency to freeze and sometimes hard to sync.

I now have an Ipod Touch second generation.  It is an incredible machine.  Essentially it is an Iphone without the phone or the camera. I use it for everything.

With WiFi I can access my email and websites from almost anywhere.  This saves me from carrying my laptop. 

  I have over 1000 photographs, a few thousand songs and many full length movies on it.  I also have some incredible applications.

I plan to have some posts devoted to the Touch, specifically applications that I find useful  It's a truly remarkable machine.