My mother breaks that rule constantly.

She is like me that she LOVES technology, except she has absolutely no clue on how to use it.

A few years ago, she decided to “upgrade” from her desktop computer to a laptop.  (I put the word upgrade in quotes because there was no reason to get a new computer.  The desktop worked perfectly and had no problems – that weren’t created by her.)  The main reason that she bought a laptop and not another desktop was because I had one.  Yes, my 60-year old mother sounds like my 7-year old son!

So when she bought it I told her that it’s great cause she can get a wireless router and take the laptop anywhere in the house to use it and not have to sit in the office area where the modem is set up.  She was excited about this.  Thought it would be great to sit in the living room with it on her lap while watching the Home Shopping Network.

So, she bought a router.  Called tech support and had them help her set it up so she could go wireless.

But our adventure doesn’t stop there.

She wanted to make sure that the laptop wouldn’t over heat so she purchased a stand to put it on so it would raise if several inches off the desk and keep it cool.  Also, with that purchase she bought a keyboard and a mouse because she didn’t like using the laptop keyboard and wasn’t liking using the mousepad either.

So, when I showed up to her house several weeks later to check to see how she was doing with her new computer I was surprised that she took nearly none of my advice.

The place on her desk where she had her desktop was replaced by a laptop, keyboard, mouse, stand and a router which was hard wired directly into the computer.  $1000+ later and nothing changed……except the additional wires and the phone calls.

With a new computer means a new operating system.  So things changed slightly, which in terms of parents, are massive overhauls to the display.  So, whenever I see her name show up on the caller ID and it’s not the weekend I get nervous.

One the other hand – she can’t spell!

One of my strengths is spelling, and it’s my pet peeves too.  It drives me wild when I see simple words totally misspelled, especially knowing  spell checkers are embedded into nearly every piece of technology out there.

So, getting emails from my mother is like trying to decrypt hieroglyphics from the city of Atlantis.  Getting a 5 sentence email from her can sometimes take me several minutes to read (and re-read) before I can understand it!

So anyway………

Sometime back in the 70′s my mother made a Christmas tree skirt to cover the green metal base of our non-authentic looking artificial tree that we used for more than two decades.  Because of this skirt, I think that every Christmas tree should have one to make the bottom more presentable, and the skirt shouldn’t be one of those flimsy Dollar Store versions either.

The skirt my mother made was very elaborate.  Fluffy white background with pieces of holly all on it, and in the center in big red letters the words “Merry Chrismas”

No, that’s not a typo by me, but one by my mother.

Every year after Thanksgiving we would put up our tree and I would sit there and look at our misspelled skirt and cringe.

As other families where celebrating Christ, we were putting ‘Chris’ back into Christmas.  I don’t know who this Chris was that we were celebrating.  At one point I thought that maybe it was Chris Dodd who is a politician from Connecticut (where I grew up) or Christopher Lloyd when he was on “Taxi”.

Either way, that skirt came out every year until 1992 when I joined the Air Force and the Christmas tree got smaller and smaller until it became a 1 foot tall tree on the countertop.  I haven’t seen that skirt in years, but I know that my mom has it packed up in a box somewhere in her shed.  I know that one day when she passes I’m going to go through her things and find that skirt tucked away somewhere and I’m going to take it and put it under my Christmas tree.  Even though I will still cringe from the spelling I will know that it will still be on display every holiday in my house because it’s something my mother made and still has sentimental meaning to me.

And why is this?

Because I am a father.
And my son sees all of this in me.

Is this something that older people do when they use the computer?  In the computer world, using CAPS is the same as yelling.  So why are they yelling at me?  They must be losing their hearing or something.

Whatever the reason – it drives me crazy!  I don’t know if they know what “Caps Lock” means on the computer.  I think I need to go to their computers and pull of that stupid key, maybe that would help.

Or, you know what I can do, I could alway type back to them in the smallest font size available.  That’ll teach them!

A lot of parents are getting offended by seeing the commercial on TV.

Can anyone explain to me why they’re getting offended?

According to what I’ve read, they’re afraid that their kids might ask them what a porno is.  Granted the word “porno” doesn’t appear often on TV, so they might be curious.  That’s understandable.

But, have you watched what’s on TV lately?

Firstly, wasn’t there a movie called “Sex and the City” released earlier this year?  How come no one really made a stink about the word “sex”?  And then there’s beer commercials.  They’re are a lot of them out there showing people drinking and having a good time.  No one questions those commercials either.

The last time I looked at my calendar it was 2008, more “risque” things are being exposed to our children everyday.

Parents shouldn’t be afraid to have to explain things to their children.  “A porno is a type of film.  Like comedy, horror, or sci-fi.”  Explain things in terms that they understand.  You can’t shelter your children from life.  That’s not how the real world is.  Not everyone is nice.  Not everyone is honest.  Babies don’t really come from the stork.

If children are forced to live inside a “bubble” when they get some freedom from their parents they are going to do things much worse than you could imagine.  Be honest with your kids.  If you are open with them, maybe one day, they’ll be open to you about things going on with them.

Being a beautiful Sunday, I planned on taking my son, CJ out to pick pumpkins in a pumkin patch.  He has never actually picked pumpkins, except for the ones you can ‘pick’ in the grocery store.  This was also my first experience.  There is a nice place not to far from the house that seemed to be the perfect place.  Of course, being only three weeks away from Halloween the place was packed.  The place was amazing they offered everything from ‘pre-picked’ pumpkins, apple picking, a petting zoo to a hayride.  We paid the $1 per person for the hayride to take us to the pumpkin patch.  The place was interesting.  I’ve never been in a pumpkin patch before, but CJ was excited about it. 

Every pumpkin he saw in there he wanted to pick – even the green ones!  Of course, I explained to him that you need to look for one that’s orange and predominately round with no big cuts or gouges in it.  After about 15 minutes he found one that seemed to weigh about the same as he does.  He was happy. 

I didn’t want to be lugging that heavy orb around the place so I decided to go and pay for it.  Of course, since the parking lot was full that also meant that the lines were also long.  It took me 20 minutes just to get to the register to pay for this beast.  That’s longer than it took CJ to pick it out!  The place we went to charges for pumpkins by the pound and I don’t know how much that was, but the grand total for this one pumpkin was $12.84!  I can’t believe that they charge that much for a pumpkin!  This is a place that has them in the field.  I went out to the patch (which I paid a $1 to get there), I picked the pumpkin (they didn’t), and I walked it to the register, stood in line for a third of an hour and they charge me that much!

The moral of this story is:  If you want the experience of picking your pumpkins go to a pumpkin patch, look around, and take all the pictures you want.  But, in the end, you’ll end up at Wal-Mart paying a lot less for the exact same thing!

(Final note: My son doesn’t know why I want to “cut up” the pumpkin.  He knows what a jack-o-latern is.)