Day 291
Can you imagine living a couple of hundred years ago and while visiting a friend they offer you a drink and then lead you over to a box that STAYS COLD ON ITS OWN no matter what the temperature outside? I suppose you would either be completely stoked and start making plans for your friend to turn lead to gold or you would hightail it down to the local authorities and get a lynching mob together.
Dude…that stuff’s MAGIC
Have you ever noticed how the most amazing things become mundane in pretty short order? And it extends past things like written language, electric lights, and the BeDazzler. It is easy to not always fully appreciate the amazing things around us. I have a view of Pike’s Peak from my back yard and it is SPECTACULAR. When we moved here ten months ago, it was such a change from West Texas, I could barely take my eyes off the purple mountain’s majesty. But now, some days I go from dawn to dusk without even a glance in its direction.
This is me, giving myself an internal lecture about not recognizing all those WOW opportunities. I should say WOW more often.
While on the topic, the other miracle of our modern age I have been taking for granted is The Library. The Simple Year has caused us to change our behavior in many ways and one of them has been our use of that amazing institution.
Yeah that’s right, I said it—AMAZING INSTITUTION.
All that knowledge, all those resources are available for all of us to borrow. The concept of the library has been around for several hundred years, but the contents were limited typically to the very rich. It wasn’t until around the turn of the 20th century that the hoi polloi were given access to libraries, thank you Andrew Carnegie.
Today, most libraries keep up with the times, in addition to the traditional offerings, many now offer eReaders, music and movie downloads, video games, software and online courses for check out. The main branch in our city even has a movie vending machine (much like a RedBox, only free) in its lobby.
Also, where else can you go and have a staff of true experts, with master’s degrees in How to Find Stuff, there perfectly willing, even eager, to help you. They are like the ninja masters in deciphering stupid questions. I stopped at our local library once and realized I had forgotten the name of the book I needed, so I stood there loitering in the front probably looking vacant and confused until some librarian took pity on me and asked if I needed help. I actually said to her, “Well, I’m looking for my book club book, but forgot the name. I can only remember the book was blue with white writing and the authors name started with S…I think.” The woman actually consulted a list of popular book club book titles (who knew such a list existed?) and then was able to correctly produce a copy of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.
Dude…that stuff’s MAGIC
We are readers in this house and in the past if a favorite author had a new book coming out or there was a movie we really wanted to see, I’ll admit, we would just buy it. Because we were all about instant gratification. This year we put ourselves on the waiting list for new titles and the wait really never seems that long. We have had the opportunity to watch movies we might never had thought about if we had been only watching the newest flicks, wonderful family movies like Mary Poppins, The Apple Dumpling Gang, ET, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Annie.
Nobody feels like they are missing anything by not owning our favorite books or not having immediate access to the latest movies, in fact I would even say that it has probably slowed down the pace at our house on the weekends, which is a good thing.