Ramble

It is late November, the last day of the month. The clock ticks on, and in a little less than an hour and 15 minutes it will be December. Outside, the Gambel Oak trees are naked, devoid of all of their leaves and acorns, and they rest in the calm winter night. I sit here at my computer in my own room, surrounded by the accoutrements of my life: my computer, my high-speed scanner, my high-speed printer --- a duplex Dell color laser printer. There's my TV, VCR, and DVD player. A telephone. No, two telephones: the landline services the house and my cell phone. Why do I need two telephones? Too much to catalog, just in this one room.

At one time this was Brent's room, but after he had left it and ended up downstairs, I claimed it for my own. Over time, I made bookshelves wherever I could to hold more and more books than I should ever have bought. In the more recent history of the room, I have begun scanning those books so that I can search them and utilize them electronically to read and manipulate. I have a perfect binding machine, purchased, but never used. I have a guillotine paper cutter that I use all the time to cut the spines off of my books.

It is amazing, the blessing of things that I enjoy. It is odd to contemplate them and to think about cataloging them. I don't have the energy for that, at least I don't think I do. More probably, I don't want to. Not now anyway.

It is warm and comfortable even as I sit here too late for the furnace to still keep things at the normal daytime temperature. That is because the computer gives off heat, as do the lights

I think about visiting Grandma Eddy. She lived on Lincoln Avenue, I think between 20th and 21st Street, in Ogden. She had a wood oven in her kitchen. I remember that, when we visited, we passed through a porch at the back of the house on into the kitchen where the wood stove was located and then into the dining room.

The dining room was the functional living area of the home. It is there that we always sat when we visited Grandma and the other relatives that assembled there, around a massive table. The dining room area was heated by that wood stove in the kitchen, and now that I think about it, we were always invited to sit closest to the door to the kitchen, I assume, because it was warmer there on cold days.

It is not cold here. We have forced the central heating and cooling (central cooling for the first time this year; before that, we had cooling from a swamp cooler centrally located).

Here in my room I have a comfortable chair I bought. It has wheels and is adjustable in various modes, made to make you comfortable and for convenience in moving around. Yet, often times I find myself complaining to myself about it. What do I have to complain about? I do plenty of it --- at least, to myself. I have nothing to complain about. Well, not in the total perspective of my life and what is happening in the world today.