It's Only Stuff

I spent a leisurely morning offline, reading the newspaper over breakfast and then watching last week's Lost on Tivo while I laid out my pills for the coming week. Eventually I sent My Beautiful Wife a text message asking how her workday was going. She responded that she'd mostly been glued to Twitter following the "EQ and HI tsunami" reports. What?!?! I turned on the TV and booted up the Macbook and learned about the powerful earthquake in Chile and the tsunami warnings around the Pacific rim.

I checked in with Twitter friends in Hawaii and learned they were safely ensconced above the danger zone. Someone tweeted the URL for a CBS station on Oahu that was streaming live coverage. A Twitter friend in Santiago, Chile had posted "Terremoto en Chile" ten hours earlier. Another had messaged back to her in Spanish, "Can you phone my parents?" and later the tweet shown above, which translates as, "Now I know about my parents. Very scared but they're fine. The house is damaged but it's only stuff." Soon I was watching The Weather Channel on TV and both CNN and Hawaiian CBS coverage simultaneously on the laptop, mesmerized by the ocean's retreat in Hilo Bay.

I'd been absorbed in this for some time before I realized that this would be a perfect time to make my regular Saturday call to Mom. My mother was a Navy WAVE stationed on Oahu in World War II, which began her life-long love affair with Hawaii. She had just come in the door when I rang, and I told her to turn on the TV. We watched coverage of the earthquake damage, the aftershocks, the tsunami's advance; together, two thousand miles apart.

There is no cure

"If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning."
— Catherine Aird

Recently I confessed that I've been untrue to my blog. I've been off gallivanting with Twitter, Facebook, SecondLife, and more, while my poor blog sits with the wind howling through the gaping holes between posts. Half-written entries sit twiddling their thumbs awaiting cleanup and completion. A draft I call the Quote Silo sits jam-packed with quotations at the ready — selected for topics I thought I might blog — longing for their soul mates. And while I haven't exactly fallen into the depths of blogging decrepitude, periodically it occurs to me that I should blog more often, as a record for myself and interested others of what I've been up to since I made the leap. After all, I haven't actually landed yet.

But there is simply so much to explore! There are identities to try on, ideas to try out, more logins and passwords than I ever wanted, and so much to read. I love the reading and the learning and I find myself following link after link and the time simply passes. KJ and I recently read a short and hilarious little book called An Uncommon Reader. The premise: what would happen if the Queen of England suddenly became a voracious reader? I'm doing my own version (except I'm not a queen etc. etc.).

Now the purists among my friends will argue that web surfing is not the same as Reading Books, and I won't argue with them. But I'll close with another quote.

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."
— Dorothy Parker