Judy and I are staying at the Elks Lodge in St. Helens Oregon. We enjoy walking about town but that gets old after a while. As we walked by the end of the path into the woods we remembered that we had walked this path before. We thought we knew where it came out over on Gray Cliffs Drive.
We plunged down the path into the thicket by a dried-up creek bed. The brush and grasses tickling our ankles because the trail was not very well kept. I started thinking back to a blog I wrote back in 2005, on October 24, (I looked it up), called, "A Walk In the Icky Woods." I am proud of that blog it's one of my classics. It got me to thinking of the difference between then and now. In 2004 to have a map with you you needed a GPS and a paper map to keep track of where you had gone. Now there are several applications for your cell phone that will present you with the latest up-to-date map and keep track of your exercise, your heart rate and give you an ETA for arrival at your destination. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the maps or the technology. For all practical purposes the icky Woods are exactly the same. There are still spiders spinning webs across the trail, there are still small creeks burbling alongside the trail. And of course if your battery goes dead you are just as lost.
There is one other small difference between this blog and the 2004 blog. I am trying out a new software program called Dragon 12. Dragon 12 takes a dictation from my microphone and turns it into text. You will probably notice a subtle difference in the way I express myself because I do not speak as I write.
I still must edit the text after I get it to dictated. But that is surprisingly easy compared to getting rid of all the double strikes and extraneous letters that my shaky fingers produce on the keyboard. So yes keep up with your technology but every once in a while go for a walk in the inky woods.
Post Script:
You can plainly see I did not get this out on 5th of August. So how about another story.
This is a story about a man and his wife who were concerned that their screen door was not tidy. The wife person complained of bugs getting through the screen. The husband person had a Laissez Faire attitude towards the whole project.
However, one sunny Sunday he had a couple of extra hours and figured he could knock off this little project in that time. The first thing to do was to take the door off its hinges. Next he spent two hours trying to find the little roller wheel jobbie to tuck the rubber spline into the screen door groove. Wife person directed him right to it.
The next task is to actually replace the fiberglass mesh. We needed a large flat surface where we could lay the door flat. That we finally found in the middle of the main salon. We had about 10 inches to stand in on each side of the screen door. We were both stiff and sore by the time we got the splines rolled into each groove. We wound up spending the rest of the day on this project. We propped the finished door up against the couch and went to bed.
To fit the door to the hinges to the door requires teamwork. Our arms simply aren’t long enough to reach and screw bolts and nuts together. On the first attempt we discovered we were trying to bolt that screen door to the wrong side of the hinges. An impossible task.
Each pair of bolts interferes with this mate so they have to be done in exact sequence. It is important to set the heights of the door on the hinges, and we misjudged it the first time but we had it dead on the second time.
This wonderful couple lived happily ever after with their beautiful new screen door. Woe be unto the person who puts a foot through the shiny, taut, new screen.
See this on line at https://www.dinsmore-enterprises.com/
