I must admit personally, to having a number of watches myself.  I have a workout watch, a dress watch, a casual watch, and even a few fake timepiece watches lying around.  And I don’t consider myself all that obsessed with time.  Of course I don’t have a ton of money for watches, even though I do like the fancier and more expensive brand names.  Too save a few bucks, I’m not above buying a fake Bentley Edition, or Breilting replica to add to my collection.  There’s no point going broke to look good these days, I figure.  And, ever since the advent of digital time keeping, the allure of quality Swiss made watches has gone by the wayside.

But, let’s get back to the original topic, of why time is so important to everyone.  I think it has a lot more to it, then simply getting to your next appointment on time.  It allows us to measure our lives.  Not just where we are, or where we’re going, but where we’ve been.  It’s a way of measuring our lives.  It’s how we keep track of our past accomplishments, and achievements.  We associate certain locations, events and people with a given point in time.  Without that marking of time, how we we remember the sixties, the seventies, or the eighties.  It helps us hold everything together, and try to make sense of our past.  And after all, you all know that old axiom, about those how don’t understand the past are bound to repeat it.  Not that repeating things can be all bad.  I just like to have a little control over the things I choose to do again.

I was one of the first in the department to learn HTML, and a few years after leaving would take my first steps to creating my own website. I always had a fascination with games, so while I worked full time as a PeopleSoft consultant travelling around North America, I spent time creating my first video game, and the website that would promote it. I remember coming up with my first domain name during a team meeting in San Francisco. While everyone else was chattering away endlessly about the problems with our project implementation, I was scribbling down possible domain names.

Having decided on a name, I then needed to buy it, and have it hosted somewhere. One of the big gaming portals I frequented at the time I met someone who was willing to host game developers websites for free. He would even register the domain name for me. That worked great for a while, but eventually he got bored or tired of all the problems and stopped offering the service. So, I thought how tough could it be. I had an old PC at home, so I installed Linux on it, and got my own web-server up and running from home. I used a service called dyn-dns to deal with my constantly changing IP number and I was off to the races.

Eventually, one website grew into several, and I need a more reliable and affordable web hosting solution. I continue to use several paid hosting companies, and am always on the look out for more.   Since buying that first website back in November of 2000, this has been an incredible fun and fruitful experience. I continue to be fascinated by the internet, and all the wonderful services it offers. I can hardly wait to see what the next ten years will bring.

I’m not sure if that was when I starting drinking alcoholically, but from that point on alcohol was the most important thing in my life. More important then relationships and most jobs, alcohol determined where I would go and what I would do. I was twenty four the first time an employer told me they were concerned about my drinking. It would be three more years before I even considered stopping and twelve more years before I would finally find the life I was searching for; a spiritual guide for my life and something bigger than myself to believe in.

Ever since I was a child, I felt as if there was an order in the universe; that something existed out there that was more powerful and wise than I was. Many afternoons I would spend sitting high in a tree and wondering what was “out there” beyond the clouds and the vast universe. I wasn’t sure if I believed in God, but I wanted to believe in something. Little did I realize that later in life my alcoholism would lead me to a spiritual life that is more fulfilling than anything I could have ever imagined.

At the age of thirty six, I finally accepted my alcoholism and truly sought everything I could learn about alcoholism treatment. What I found was a spiritual life that was the answer to everything I had ever dreamed of; a life full of purpose, gratitude, love, and happiness. Sobriety has given me a life worth living and the satisfaction with life I had always dreamed of having.

Everyone knows that they should respect their elders. It is a cultural rule and it is just good manners. But not everyone does and sometimes people even ask why they should. The five reasons why you should respect your elders will answer this question once and for all.

Your Elders Have Seen A Lot

When you have been alive a long time, you have seen a lot. You know the patterns of life, the ups and downs. Respect your elders because they have knowledge and perspective that can only be gained through experience. They have seen the fruits of their labors and of others’ labors. They know where certain lifestyles and attitudes get you in life and can share this information.

Your Elders Have Wisdom

More than just being able to tell you what happens when you live your life a certain way, your elders have picked up on the underlying lessons of life. They have gained wisdom. They have realized that whatever happens, life goes on. Hearts get broken and life goes on. People die and life goes on. They have the wisdom that can teach you how life is and, more importantly, how to deal with it.

Elderly Persons May Have Health Problems

Another reason to respect your elders is that persons who are actually elderly may have health problems or even just physical limitations. You should treat them with respect because you never know what limitations or health problems they may have.

Respect Them Like You Want To Be Respected When You Are The Elder

If you want a good reason to respect your elders then just think about how you would like to be treated when you are the elder. If you would like to be respected when you are in that position then you should be treating your elders with respect. It goes back to treating others how you would like to be treated.

Because You Should Respect Everyone

In truth, you shouldn’t respect people because they are your elders. You should just respect everyone because every person is a unique human being with feelings. Every person deserves your respect just because they are a human being just like you. Respecting your elders is a good thing but it is not like there are groups of people who you should respect and other groups that you should not respect.

All people deserve to be treated with kindness and respect. There are no exceptions. Every person in the world has their own life, their own challenges, and their own problems. You never know what a person is going through or what their life is like. You never know when a person is having the worst day of their life so you should treat all people at all times with respect. And kindness too.

These five reasons why you should respect your elders get to the core of honoring the human condition. As people age, they gain experience and wisdom and those are gains that should be respected.

T. Rheinecker blogs about how to choose among BSN program options.

But facts don’t lie. Triple A says that most Winter driving emergencies happen within 10 miles of your home and most of those are what the Drivers would consider “routine” trips. These routine trips turned into survival situations in a blink of an eye. Just before Christmas Ever, we had a huge snowstorm. A few days later a pickup was found covered up by snow just outside town. Inside was a local man who had frozen to death. Apparently he had went off the road and then the snow plows didn’t notice his white pickup and covered it up as they cleared the roads. Could you survive if your car ran off an embankment or you were stranded in a non-obvious place along the highway?

With a little emergency preparedness planning, you don’t have to become a statistic. A few items thrown into a bag and a few more items stored in your car may mean the difference between you surviving a Winter accident and being found in the Spring when the snow melts.

Here are a few things you’ll need should you find yourself in such a situation.

• Several warm blankets or Winter sleeping bags
• Some MRE’s with heaters
• Signal device. Whistles, blaze orange cloth, etc
• Fire making supplies, ie; waterproof matches, bic lighter, etc
• Flashlights and batteries
• Emergency “space” blankets
• Water
• ice melt or cat litter for tire traction
• Jumper cables
• Cell phone charger
• Glow sticks (great as a long burning emergency signal at night)

With just a little planning and honing of your survival skills, you won’t find yourself in a life or death situation if you run off the road this Winter!

That happened for me for the first time in January of 1983.  It was to be my last year of drum corp, and I was travelling to Boston, Massachetutes to join the 27th Lancers.  This was a twelve hour drive from where I lived in Canada, so probably about 700 miles.  So, maybe thousands was an exagerration.  But, I would be there for an incredibly long time.  From January till the end of August.  That’s usually the end of a drum corp season.

Trying to decide which story to tell is a little bit tough here.  Not that there aren’t man, beleive me, there were lots.  When I first moved there, I lived in the suburb of Revere with two other guys and a girl.  We live in a little three story walk-up above some slightly crazy people.  They lady below used to complain constantly about our music and that we were making wierd noises to try and drive her crazy.  Personally I think she was already there.  One day, her son attacked one of my room mates as we made our way down the stairs to go to the laundrymat.  The son even then called the ppolice to report himself.  Craziness was heridatary in that family for sure.

Then there was the time, I was with eight or ten buddies spending a day at Revere beach.  It was jut before summer, and we were getting into the usual young person trouble.  Drinking and smoking on the beach were all fun and games, till a couple of bodies floated up on the beach.  Creepy huh?  One of them lived and one of them died.  Apparently they had been out fishing the night before and fell overboard.  Police and ambulances showed up of course.  Kinda of crazy when your already breaking a number of laws on a public beach.  Not as crazy as the foam coming out of the one guys mouth, which I saw from the crowd. Yeeech!

That’s just a couple of the stories from that eight month adventure.  But the rest will have to wait for another post.

One of the best things I have found for keeping myself sane is simply trying to be a little bit organized.  I have taken to making lists almost every day.  These are basically check lists which I do my best to complete before the day ends, but if something carries over to the next day, I realize that the world will not end.  Simply seeing what has been spinning around in my head goes a long way toward keeping my stress levels down to a manageable level.

If you are one of the many people who gets up every day with thoughts spinning through your head, you probably understand where I am coming from.  When you have yourself, your job, your family and other household needs popping up in your mind constantly, you often end the day with very little accomplished.  You move from task to task, starting each and then moving on before completing anything.  This leads to a very unproductive day and more spinning thoughts the next morning.

I now make checklists for just about everything.  Sometimes these lists are made to be completed by days end and other times they may be designed to carry over the course of a week.  Each time I check something off I feel as though I’ve made a little bit of progress.  I have a checklist for weekly chores, a checklist of things I must accomplish at work, and even a checklist of leisure activities.  I included this to make sure that I never lose sight of the importance of just relaxing once in a while.  My goal for the new year is to start a checklist for investing, but I haven’t even made that one up yet!  If you ask me, checklists made up of small steps are the way to have a more productive and organized life.

I’m not sure who he was dialing, but I was convinced we were in big trouble.  I think I thought it was some bigger authority.  For weeks after, every time a police car drove by my house I was terrified.  I was only 5 years old.  Even one of my earliest memories of kindergartden was not very good.  I remember doing some assignment, and watching the teacher come around to check everyones work.  I knew I had made a mistake in the assignment, and was terrified that I would be in big trouble once she found out.

Things continue this way.  It’s a wonder I ever managed to survive growing up.  I remember taking swimming lessons, and being petrified to dive into the deep end of the pool.  Either off the diving board, or the side of the pool.  Not sure why, but I was.  I’ve never been much of a thrill seeker, and remember the first time I rented a pair of jet skis.  The guy renting the skis came out after a few minutes, to make sure my jet ski was ok.  Apparently I was going so slow he thought the machine was broken.  It wasn’t.  It was just me.

Somehow though I managed to survive childhood and grow up into a full fledged mostly normal adult.  Married with kids, and a job for a while.  Although my jobs started to become a little more unusual a few years ago.  I took a consulting job in the late nineties, where I travell non stop all over North America as a computer consultant.  None of my friends did anything like this.  Eventually, I quit a full time steady (boring) job at a bank to make a living on the internet.

And a few years prior to that, I bought a sailboat without ever having been on one before in my life.  I had never sailed one, or been on one that someone else sailed.  Well, except for a little dinghy that I puttered around a small lake with.  But, that didn’t stop me from buying a 30 foot hunter sailboat with more controls and lines than I had a clue as to what to do with.

I guess, I grew out of most of those childhood fears in one way or another.  I have since then dove in the pool many times, and even jumped off a 10 meter diving board.  No idea why.  However, I do still get a little nervous when talkin with my kids principal.

Our TRS-80 came with a keyboard, a monitor, and a cassette tape drive.  At first, I don’t think we had the cassette tape drive, but added it on later when we realized how annoying it was to only type programs into the computer, and then have to do it again every time we turned it off and back on again.  It’s good to be able to save your work.

I learned a few things from that computer that continue to haunt me to this day.  The first thing I learned, was how to write a computer program.  The TRS-80 came with it’s own BASIC instructional booklet, and allowed you to write programs in the BASIC programming language.  This was cool, and I was desperately hooked.

I also learned how to play games on a computer.  Yes, even in the mid seventies you could play computer games.  But what was really cool, was that you could also write your own computer games.  Sure, they were incredibly simple and graphics were totally non existent, but they were games none the less.  I think the first game I wrote was something where you had to guess a number between 1 and 10 and the computer would give you clues.  It used a random number generator to pick the number.

I also learned to play the game backgammon on the TRS80.  It came with one, I didn’t have to write it, and it was pretty cool.  I had never played backgammon before, and learned it exclusively from the computer.  Although for years afterwords, when I tried playing it on a real board in the real world, I never knew how to setup the board.

Still my passion for computer games and making computer games was ignited.  One that continues to this day.  Unfortunately, I was never able to make a career out of it, but I do own several gaming related websites.  With any luck, I’ll make enough off of those to start a gaming company and hire myself as Chief Game Designer Extraordinaire.