This is what I think about on Memorial Day.  For most Americans Memorial Day, or rather the Memorial Day weekend, marks the beginning of the summer “play” season; time to prep the cottage or the get the RV out of storage, get out the summer “toys”, attend summer camps (or summer school), and take vacations.  It has a much more serious and official meaning, of course, which is to remember those who served and died in the defense of our country while on active duty.  It is not necessarily a day to honor “all” veterans, although it seems to have turned into that.  We have another holiday for that purpose; it’s called Veteran’s Day.

Regardless, there is no doubt that each citizen owes the existence of our nation, and the freedoms we enjoy within it, to those who served to build it and defend it, and especially those who paid the ultimate price.  It a shame that some of those lives were wasted in the name of foolish nationalism, but the shame is not the soldier’s, it is the government’s.  And the government is merely a political manifestation of the will of the majority.  In our system the majority rules (or is supposed to) but that does not always make its actions right.  Those who served did so with a sense of duty without which we could not have a functioning military.  My father survived the invasion of Normandy on D-Day.  He was one of the troops who took Omaha Beach.  His unit suffered 90% casualties.  He was barely 19 years old at the time.  He was wounded on the drive inland through France and received the Purple Heart and almost 50 years later a unit commendation for the service his unit rendered that day and in the days that followed.

My cough subsided enough that both Linda and I finally got a little sleep last night.  She made her yummy vegan pancakes for breakfast and my sense of taste had returned to the point that I enjoyed them.  I still wasn’t feeling up to much physical activity, but managed to pull up all of the stakes for the pole barn and mark the location of each one with green marker paint.  I was feeling well enough to work at my desk and spent a good portion of the rest of the day downloading and installing apps on my new ASUS laptop.

I was working at my computer this afternoon when I had one of those associative moments where I suddenly remembered something I was trying to recall a week ago.  As a young pre-teenager in the early 1960’s there were three things that I had set as “life goals” but I could only remember two of them, although I was clear that I had accomplished all three.  I was looking at the support thread for the Participant’s Database WordPress plug-in, where there was a lot of detail on “coding,” when I recalled that the missing goal was to “learn to program a computer.”  Duh!

These “life goals” were not career goals; they were just ideas that sounded interesting and “out there” at the time.  I actually ended up “programming computers” for a living for a while and did some very fancy FORTRAN programming for my electrical engineering Masters Degree project and again to create the Monte-Carlo simulations that were the foundation of my doctoral research and dissertation.  My other two goals where to “understand nuclear energy” and “learn to fly an airplane” both of which I also accomplished, at least to my satisfaction.  I never made a living in aviation, although my dad spent almost his entire adult working life in the aerospace industry, both defense and space.  I did end up studying physics as an engineering student, and teaching it at the high school level, so in a sense understanding nuclear energy also touched on earning a living at one point in my life.  As an Air Force ROTC cadet from 1973 – 1976 I was a pilot candidate.  If not for the sudden end of the Vietnam Conflict, I would have made my living in aviation, at least for a while.

Perhaps these seem like strange life goals for a pre-teen, but they were very forward-looking and exotic notions in the early 1960’s.  The fact that I accomplished them does not mean my life is complete or that I have accomplished everything else I attempted in the last half century.  Nor does it mean that I ran out of things to do or the motivation to do them.  I simply find it interesting that I accomplished them and find a certain satisfaction in that.  To this day whenever I see an airplane fly by I wonder how many people see that same plane and wonder what it must be like to fly it or are mystified by how it is able to stay in the air?  I also wonder how people manage to make sense of a world connected together by technologies about which they have no real understanding, or how they understand a universe ruled at its most fundamental level by randomness and chaos.  Downloading and installing software leaves me a certain amount of time to think, and I downloaded and installed a lot of software today.

Linda made a wonderful vegan potato salad this afternoon and we had it for dinner with jumbo vegan hot dogs, with mustard, onion, and relish, of course.  And grapes; but no adult beverages as they are contraindicated for my medications, and frankly are not the least bit satisfying when ill.  I know I’m getting better when my appetite starts to return.  I will know I am fully recovered when I once again look forward to a glass of wine with dinner.

Technomadia did a one hour live video chat at 8 PM with RVillage founder/CEO Curtis Coleman.  It was a good, relaxed chat with enough questions from the audience to keep it moving.  I think they had 45 people online at one time.  They use UStream for these live video events and were interrupted three or four times by commercials.  The first one I got was in Spanish, but someone else got one in French.  The problem was that the hosts do not get a heads up that UStream is going to cut them off, so they keep talking until someone messages them that they are not on the air.  But it’s a “free” service, and of course almost everything in life that’s free has a hidden cost, especially if it involves the Internet.  Somewhat ironically the RVillage website went offline during the broadcast.  The head of development was monitoring the chat and got right on it as soon as it was reported; something about “backend server overload.”  RVillage passed the 7,500 member level just before the video chat went live.  Whatever the issue was they had it straightened out quickly.  RVillage lives on very robust servers run by Amazon.