All hands on deck: but not me!

  

 

         If you are inviting people to sail on your boat, leave me out. I don’t get seasick—just claustrophobic.

 

Despite the photo, I’m not talking about cruise ships. I love those cruise ships! I’m talking about your skiff, rowboat, sailboat, even your yacht.

 

         People speak some sort of a foreign language on those things.

What is a spinnaker? A jib? What are fore and aft? What is starboard? What’s the matter with left and right, like you would say on land?

 

         You can’t go anywhere. You are confined to a small space and have to listen to your host rail on about their sea adventures. Well, I have some sea adventures too:

 

         My sister and I rented a rowboat when I was a teenager at Lake Tahoe. I wasn’t much of a rower, and my little sister cried as the wind picked up and blew us toward the middle of the huge, deep lake. Fortunately, I was able to maneuver the boat to the edge of the small bay and we got out on the rocks. I don’t think we ever told our parents about it.

 

         And the time a friend took me on his sailboat in the unpredictable San Francisco Bay. The voyage from San Francisco to Oakland went just fine, but again the winds came up, and I thought we would never make it back without crashing into the Bay Bridge.

 

         Most humiliating was a voyage in Chesapeake Bay with my uncle and aunt when I was about 30. My 17-year-old cousin and her boyfriend got out a sunfish—a teensy boat—and they let me hold the rudder for awhile. Soon we saw a Coast Guard boat making a B-line toward us. Did they think we were smuggling drugs or something?

 

         When they got close, an officer looked at me and wanted to know why we had no life preservers. I drew a blank and looked at my friends. “What’s the matter? Can’t he talk?” the officer asked the two of them. Because I was holding the rudder, apparently that made me the captain of the ship. What, I was Captain Ahab? Captain Hook? Captain Queeg? Captain Bligh?

 

         We got off with a warning. I don’t remember if I gave them my name. Perhaps I was banned from the seas for life. Good!

Confessions of a tech writer

 Confessions of a tech writer

 

“You may be a writer, but you don’t know jack about technology,” said the owner of the satellite TV magazine where I was editor. Maybe he was right—I never even learned to operate a satellite dish.

 

Moving on,  I found a job at the Kiplinger Letter, where I was considered a technical guru. If I worked for a satellite magazine, I must be, right?

 

So I wrote about the latest in computers, mobile phones and social media from 1992 until I retired in 2009, a heady time in the tech industry. I didn’t necessarily understand how these things worked, but I interviewed people who did. If some expert called me to complain “you got that all wrong,” I would listen carefully and ask the person to be a contact. They were my best sources! 

 

I went to tech conferences and heard the likes of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs describe their latest breakthroughs. We were all amused at one meeting when Gates’ power point display went dark and his staff couldn’t fix it. No one is immune! At one convention, I saw young  women at a Japanese company’s booth taking pictures with their cell phones. What? Who would want to do that? But I wrote about it anyway. 

 

My proudest moment came after I wrote a two-page special section on the future of the Internet in 1995 (ancient days in that field.)  Years later, it was a featured article posted in the company’s  first-floor museum in an exhibit called: “From Gutenberg to the Internet.”

 

I admit I didn’t get everything right. I was confronted in the late 1990s by the Y2K issue: the prospect of computers failing when the new century began, with machines misinterpreting “00” as the year 1900. A doomsayer bought our mailing list and put out his own newsletter forecasting disaster on Jan. 1. I got dozens of calls from panicky readers.. One man asked me to talk his father out of selling his house and moving to a cabin in the mountains.

 

I must admit that I absorbed some of this fear and may have written some worrisome stories about it. Fortunately, my editor toned them down. When the century began, there was no calamity even in countries like Italy, which had taken no precautions. I was roasted about this mercilessly at a retirement event. I deserved it.

Old-Fashioned Manners at Granny Camp

 

I was in love with Mrs. Brianchi, my preschool teacher. I asked my mother once why Mrs. Brianchi sat over a back wheel of the bus. “I think she likes the bumpy ride,” my mother said.

 

So of course I married a preschool teacher. I knew I would be surrounded by children through our married life. First, there was her son Chris. Besides a daughter of our own and a bunch of foster children, we had summer camps at Oak Grove.

 

There were three soccer camps for Sara and her friends from Arlington. Pickett hired the Halifax County Middle School soccer coach to teach them. They even got to play the middle school team. The next year we had to keep the 10-year-old girls from flirting with a good looking male coach from Washington.

 

Then there were bike camps, where I helped the kids to ride. A horse camp. There were even adult camps—couples workshops, college reunions, meditation weekends and a journaling retreat this July 28-30.

 

Nowadays the big staple is Granny Camps. Just about every year, Pickett has had four grandchildren from her previous marriage or two from this one to come and frolic on the farm. This year, they are all gathering for her 80^th birthday in August.

 

At a Granny Camp in July, Bryce and Aria found there is no free lunch. Everybody cooks. Pickett is a lot more patient than I am at teaching them to mix up waffle batter. Table manners are required, or you leave the table. If you raise your inside voice too much, you have to run once around the house outside (a big house.). 

 

No electronic tablets allowed. Children are required to read books, and so most have gotten better at it. At this year’s Granny Camp we  acted out the Harry Potter story. We had brooms for Quidditch matches, tons of envelopes for Harry’s invitation to Hogwarts, and lots of wizard capes and Harry Potter glasses. I am not sure how to act out an invisibility cloak. Our three dogs played the three-headed dog masterfully but were shocked when the children screamed.

 

There are times when the kids drive us nuts. I had to cancel one board game when one child knocked over the pieces. They can be endlessly loud and silly. One squirted me with the hose when playing in the yard. They complain that I am grumpy. So be it!

 

 I had to cajole and argue with Bryce to get him to read me a book. 

All of a sudden, he read me five! I was ecstatic.

 

I was kind of dejected one night, recovering from a long illness. Aria asked me to sing to them at bedtime.  I told them I sang “What a  Wonderful World”  at their parents’ wedding at Oak Grove.   I really got into the song with them. “I hear babies cry and watch them grow. They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.”

 

 “That’s your best song,” Bryce said as they applauded and then went to sleep.

 

Yes, I think to myself, what a wonderful world!