HACKED!

Up until last Thursday, Identity Theft and being hacked were merely abstractions to Connie and me — something that happened to other people who weren’t ultra careful like we are. Not any more — for now it has happened to us! The days since then have been nightmarish, to put it mildly. But perhaps, by sharing the experience with you, we may help save you from our fate.

First of all, we are no longer as trusting of safeguards we mistakenly assumed Internet providers had put in place. But before I deal with safeguards, permit me to stop a minute and describe for you what it’s like to be hacked:

The first clue was when Connie checked in first thing Thursday morning, and lo, the entire Address Book of untold hundreds of our e-mail addresses, names, phone numbers, etc., were all missing!

In very short order, here came a non-stop barrage of phone calls (not only from all over North America but also Europe and Africa) from people asking if we were OK. Initially, there were also e-mails, but those mysteriously stopped. The big question: “Are you home? Or are you really stuck in Madrid, Spain (having been mugged), needing $5,000 to be wired to a certain number/address immediately so that you can make it home?” By later in the day, it became increasingly apparent that someone (most likely in Nigeria, China, or Romania, the apparent centers for Identity Theft today; however one in every ten victims actually knows the perpretator, according to Lifelock) had taken control of our e-mail world: writing personal letters to responders to the bogus plea for funds — in Connie’s name, or mine! –, reaffirming our immediate need for money. We’ll most likely never know how much other personal and business mail they misdirected to themselves.

In desperation, Connie began the laborious process of recreating the e-mail address book, one at a time, until she’d found about a hundred. Then weary of it all, we went to bed. Next morning, she discovered that the unseen thief had stolen those too! And deleted our address book again. That’s when we realized the full extent of the hacking. So Connie got on the phone with a representative of our provider (in far-off Manila) and began to work through the mess to a solution. In the middle of which, incoming e-mails mysteriously vanished from the screen in front of her. Talk about staring at a robber face to face!

So what do you do when you’ve been raped of your security and sense of being certain of your own ship? Lots! You race to your bank and credit card providers. You immediately change the passwords to all accounts (more on that later). You soon realize these are but lead dominoes for with a hostile force now owning the names of all those family, friends, business associates, clients, etc., that you interact with, where do you go next? You can’t alert them to the truth, urging them to beward of these semi-demands for funds because all these addresses have been stolen from you! You don’t have their e-mail addresses anymore.

Your next realization is that you need to immediately secure at least one more Internet provider, for the one you thought you had is now snake-bit. That means that more dominoes will fall as you’re forced to order new stationery, business cards, etc. And it goes on and on from there into no one knows where.

Eventually, we changed our password on our e-mail account and mail began to appear again; but two days of our lives had been commandeered by a hostile force determined to destroy us.

Belatedly, we signed up for Identity Theft protection. Really, there is no such thing, but having such a program in place enables you to make pre-emptive strikes when someone somewhere begins pretending to be you, setting up accounts in your name and charging things to them; even buying automobiles, etc., in your name — then, not paying them, leaving your credit rating in shambles.

During the two-hour dialogue with that protective organization, we learned much about this soft underbelly of the “brave new world” of cyberspace. We also learned a lot from our banks and friends and relatives who had given us after-the-fact counsel. Here are some of the things we’ve learned:

• No Internet provider is immune from being hacked, no matter how large — even our national government routinely gets hacked. Nothing is safe anymore to these monsters who are seeking to destroy rather than create on their own.
• Passwords are your key protection (your firewall). They need to be at least twelve digits long, interweaving totally unrelated letters, numbers, and symbols on your keyboard; no full words, no sequential anything — and, after logging in, placing your password in a safe place. And they recommend changing those passwords every six months.
• Odds are staggeringly against us! If a bank is broken into, there is a 95% conviction rate. If you are hacked or your identity is stolen, at best there may be a 1% conviction rate.
• Destroy – don’t put in trash – all records containing your name, address, phone numbers, e-mails, etc., for thieves daily pick through our garbage in order to begin structuring a new identity for themselves and their crimes.
• Ditto, your used prescription medicine containers. Medicare is being defrauded by billions of thieves latching onto such individual prescription records.
• Don’t let credit cards out of your sight if you can possibly avoid it, for unscrupulous employees often surreptitiously make copies of them while your credit card is in their possession.
• Especially, guard with your life Debit Cards, for they can be used to clean out entire bank accounts!
• Online banking is dangerous. Institute safeguards.
• Be extremely careful about how much personal information you place on Facebook. It too is monitored by those who seek to do you harm.
• When blogging or commenting on social media, do not tell people in advance where you will be on certain dates, as thieves may clean out your house while you are away! This goes for web sites too.
• Unscrupulous people may secretly make copies from cards in your hand ar checkouts or even from your wallets or purses!
• Every time we use a credit card, we open ourselves to the danger of losing our identities.
• Especially does your Social Security number need to be protected. Ditto medical policy cards.
• You should take steps to stop in their tracks all pre-approved credit card offers (in the mail).
• Destroy all bank statements you don’t keep for IRS Purposes.
• Never give our personal information to anyone by phone unless you are certain the caller is legitimately who s/he claimes to be.
• You need to place 12-digit passwords on everything.
• When hacked, immediately cancel old credit cards and secure new ones.
• Avoid using your mother’s maiden name, your birth date, the last four digits of your Social Security number or a series of consecutive numbers.
• Either monitor yourself or have an Identity Protection agency monitor for you one of the following three consumer reporting companies:
  • Equifax: 1-800-525-6285
  • Experian: 1-888-397-3742
  • TransUnion: 1-800-680-7289
• After being hacked, put a tickler on your calendar 90 days out, for Identity Thieves often wait 91 days before moving in on you, lulling you into thinking all is well.
• It is imperative that you continually monitor your financial accounts (daily, if possible), watching out for questionable charges. Reason being that thieves usually begin with small charges to your account — to see if it works — then, if those aren’t flagged, they move on to ever larger purchases. And the longer it takes you to catch these things the more difficulty you’ll have in getting banks or credit card companies to swallow the results. If you report loss or theft within two business days of your discovery, your liability is limited to $50. Then it immediately goes up to $500. After 60 days, the loss is all yours. When you report a theft to an institution, always follow it up with a certified-return request letter.

Hopefully, you will personally escape being hacked, by instituting safeguards suggested earlier in this blog.

If you received one of those infamous bogus requests for funds in our names, you have our abject apology!

Blessings!

Do let me know your thoughts, reactions, and responses to this blog.

BREAKTHROUGHS

Once in a long while in this thing we call life, we experience a real breakthrough. Sort of like breaking the sound barrier—which for a very long time was deemed an impossibility. Nowadays, because of regulations that deal with the effects of sonic booms on people below, we rarely hear them. In January, during a cruise to the Southern Caribbean, in Barbados (one of four regular stops in the Americas for the legendary Concorde), I was privileged to explore one of those iconic super-airliners—and to experience a virtual flight re-enacted, complete with sonic boom.

Interestingly enough, the Concorde’s ability to fly at twice the speed of sound was touted as the reason it was such a technological breakthrough: it was expected to pave the way for ever faster passenger planes (more like rockets than traditional planes) and passenger travel into space. It was the world’s gold standard for several decades, during which only the super rich could afford to travel in those semi-rockets. Instead, it was proven too expensive to operate, and air travel reverted back to pre-Concorde flight expectations. Nevertheless, it was a major technological breakthrough, and engineers continue to build on it, and learn from it.

In my own life, I remember such a breakthrough during my college years. Because of a negative mindset, I floundered through my first two years. Reason being, I’d convinced myself I was incapable of earning anything higher than a B in college courses. As a predictable result, that assumption turned out to be a self-fulling prophecy.

Until one memorable day, in a history class taught by the well-known Dr. Walter C. Utt of Pacific Union College in California’s Napa Valley. For reasons that made no sense to me, my exam paper was returned to me marked A-. Surely, I thought, Dr. Utt must have made a mistake! Utt evidently gave me someone else’s grade (someone, unlike me, who was capable of earning A’s).

Unable to make sense out of it, I took the exam to Dr. Utt, and asked him if I’d actually earned an A-. Smilingly, he answered, “Yes, Joe, you earned that grade. Best work you’ve ever done for me.” Back in my room, I just couldn’t get this miracle out of my head, pondering it night and day. Then came the life-changing epiphany: If I’m really capable of earning A-s, if I study a little harder, why couldn’t I earn an A next time?

And so my life changed forever: Amazingly, during the nineteen years that followed, through a bachelors and masters in history from Pacific Union College, a masters in English from University of California – Sacramento, and the Ph.D. in English (History of Ideas emphasis), from Vanderbilt University, in only two or three isolated instances did I ever earn anything less than an A! The barrier had simply been mental; once I’d broken through it once, I was able to soar wherever my dreams would take me.

A second crucial breakthrough took place in stages, each essential in my own life trajectory, for if I failed to conquer that giant called procrastination, little could be expected of me. First came the Eight Magic Words, “If not now—when? If not me—whom?” articulated by the Rabbi Hillel (a contemporary of Christ). Before every opportunity, challenge, invitation, request, etc., is dealt with, first pose these two questions before I either pass or act on them. Second, Kalidasa’s “Salutation to the Dawn,” written over a millennium and a half ago by India’s greatest writer. In this poem, Kalidasa postulated that every day is a miniature lifetime, with a beginning, middle, and end; and only when we so treat each day can we stop frittering away our life energy in our yesterdays, bemoaning the mistakes we made in the past, and worrying about our futures. By concentrating all our energy into our todays, Kalidasa pointed out that we’d thereby cease to waste our times in two dimensions of time we can do nothing about. Third, Helen Mallicoat’s timeless “I Am” poem, in which God declares He is not “I was,” nor is He “I Will Be,” but rather He is “I Am”—only in the “I Am” present may we find Him. Fourth, Life’s Three Eternal Questions: “Who Am I? Where Did I Come From? Where Am I Going?” Only as we continually pose these to ourselves can we avoid veering out of our desired trajectory.

These four anti-procrastination tools did not come to me all at once, but rather over a third of a century. Without them, neither my advanced degrees nor our 74 books would have ever come to be at all.

A third equally significant breakthrough in my life occurred about five or six years ago. Significant because in life we may coast to a certain extent while we are young and have vast stores of vital energy in us; but, inevitably, we can only coast so far and so long before we begin paying the price. In my case, the problem had to do with my addiction to workaholicism. Always I’d assumed that exercise was merely an option rather than a necessity in life. It took me two near-death experiences to wean me away from that error in judgment. And a catalyst: a major health study that resulted in a conclusion I’d never heard of before: that there are no plateaus in life: each of us is either becoming stronger than we were or weaker than we were, every day. Indeed, that our bodies reinvent themselves every 100 days, at any age! It was that “any age” that merged (in my mind) this study with the true life experiences of specific contemporary Americans such as California’s Hulda Crooks and Mavis Lindgren who, late in life, decided to run: Mavis Lindgren in races and Hulda Crooks in running up mountains such as Mt. Whitney and Mt. Fuji, each running circles around those a quarter their age. Over time, they actually became stronger in their 70s and 80s and raced on beyond that.

I was then in what would have become a free-fall health-wise, exercising only sporadically. But I wanted to remain healthful and creative and alive, it was just that until that “100-day study,” I’d never found a tool that was strong enough to reverse my decline. Looking at myself sans rose-tinted glasses, I concluded that I was doomed unless I awoke out of my deadly inertia and vigorously—rain or shine, cold or hot—exercised for 30 – 60 minutes every day of my life! For if I failed to do so, missing days here and there, I’d be lost, for inevitably I’d slip right back into inertia. For close to five years now, I haven’t missed a day, and I feel better than I have in years, and have more energy.

Which brings me to a lateral related breakthrough five nights ago ( the night preceding the Super Moon on March 19—not to be that near or bright for another eighteen years). The moon was gloriously close and brighter than I could ever remember it. I retired at 10:30 p.m. and awoke at 12:30 a.m. by the moon’s radiance. Got up at 1:00 a.m. Concluding that a reason for waking so soon was my failure to get enough vigorous exercise in shoveling four inches of snow off our upper deck, I decided to do stairs (I usually do around 2,100, half up at a semi-run—that 2,100 turning out to be a wall I seemingly could not break through). Keep in mind that we live at close to 10,000 feet elevation so our hearts have to really work to keep us functioning at full torque. However, on this particular night, for some inexplicable reason, I had so much energy I felt I’d never get back to sleep unless I put more pressure on myself; so, for the first time ever, I exercised 5-pound barbells during about a third of the stairs, doing so on the upward segments. Even so, though I broke a sweat sooner, I just didn’t get tired. Not even when I hit the proverbial 2,100-step mental wall: I just smashed through, not stopping until 2,800 steps (a quarter more than ever before); even then, I could easily have topped 3,000!

Which taught me a lesson: even in my 70s, it was possible to keep growing stronger and stronger.

Thank God for breakthroughs!

Do let me know your thoughts, reactions, and responses to this blog.

TREASURES FROM THE PAST #1

One of the responses to the survey has already had its effect: it urged me to keep mining the bullion of the past in my blogs.

I have been working around the clock on my eighth collection of animal stories (Animals of the Jungle). As I searched for stories, in a long-ago essay written by Hildegarde Hawthorne (granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne), published in a magazine for young people early in the twentieth century, I found a timeless treasure of thought perfect as the follow-up to last Wednesday’s blog: “Don’t Wait Until Tomorrow.”

It was inspired by Emerson’s famous poem:

DAYS

“Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bringing diadems and fagots in their hands,
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.”

THE DOORWAY OF THE DAYS
by Hildegarde Hawthorne

A day is a wonderful thing. It is like a great doorway flung wide for you to pass through into all manner of adventures. One after the other, these doorways open to you, each different, each opening on a fresh prospect. Fresh, yourself, after the rest and the stillness of night, you stand each morning on the threshold, and then you step through and are launched on what that day has for you.

Of course, the day, being as it were just this welcoming doorway, can not make you go out to meet what it holds. You can refuse its mighty invitations. It may be a day that opens on shadowy forest paths, on blue headlands, a day where nature is at her most beautiful best. Again it may hold a splendid hour or two of companionship with some one who could tell you much of this nature, who could give you new insight into her mysteries, who could explain what hitherto you had never understood. It might be a day made for running feet and for laughter and joy. It has opened the wide doorway to all this. But of course you can refuse it all. You can turn your back on the prospect before you, spend your hours indoors, fail to meet the friend who was waiting, sulk over some fancied slight or trouble, worry and exhaust yourself in various ways. The doorway of the day will swing close, at last, and the possibilities on which it opened will have gone, perhaps forever.

Supposing you had only one day to live in, like some of the ephemera, whom you may watch in summer, dizzy with their dancing, in a sunbeam. Just one day! Well, it would hold twenty-four hours. How splendid! How much you could do in that time. And how much to choose for the doing, the seeing, the hearing, the feeling, the thinking! A sunrise and a sunset, stars, a moon maybe, winds swaying tree-tops or ruffling water; and then comrades to play with, a fine book to read, music to hear; a ride, perhaps, in a motor-car or on a horse, a walk in a country lane or along a street filled with all manner of things worth looking at; there would be meals to eat, a lesson to study. You would have the joy of bodily exercise, the joy of loving, the delight of conversation with friends. Each hour would hold its own miracle.

At the end, before sleep came, you would find no words to describe the marvel of a day. Room in it for the exercise of all your faculties, for dreams and for reality, for play and for work. A great round day, and you alive in it.

You see, just because there is more than one day, we get too used to them to remember what they really are. We let them slip through our fingers, with their adventures unlived, their beauty unseen. Many a day has been treated as though it were just a bore, when it was simply bursting with exciting thrills. Many a day that held in it a wonderful thing, which you would have cherished all your life, has been allowed to pass away empty. For only what you take from the offerings of each day is yours.

Do you ever think over the manifold ways in which each day is spent by the people on this earth? How an Eskimo spends the day you have given over to school, to football practice, or a game of tennis or to skiing, to a matinee or a quiet time reading while the storm beats on the windows and shouts over the house? How that same day is being spent by a savage in Africa, by a Russian refugee, a coal-miner, a seaman? You can get some notion of all that a day opens on if you let your mind wander a bit in these directions.

It seems to me that the great difference between those who lead a full and interesting life and those who don’t is that the first do not let the fact that there are three hundred and sixty-five days in a year dull the wonderful possibilities of each individual day. They look before and after, of course, for the past and the future add richness to the present. But the day itself is the thing. Because tomorrow you are to go on an entrancing journey, or to the dentist, there is no reason for slighting today. It too has its worth and its gift. Live it. The combination of you and a day is too wonderful to be missed. People throw days away as if they were worthless pebbles, and then complain that life is a poor affair. One of Emerson’s noble sayings was, “Give me health and a day and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous”; and as you grow older you will cherish also in your memories his brief poem on “The Days.” It is a vivid picture in words of what I have been trying to set forth; and every earnest boy and girl can imagine the days going on about their tremendous business rather bewildered and rather amused. Here we are, they say, full of everything. And look how we’re treated and hear how we’re reviled! What’s the matter with these people, anyway?

And then the Days will show each other the unused things they had ready, which were never asked for, like handfuls of fine jewels shining in the light, but which no one stooped to pick up.

“Funny business!” sigh the Days, and if they had heads, there’d be reasons a-plenty for shaking them.

It is interesting to realize that the day that opens its great gate to you is for you only. No one else has just the same day. Even though you go every hour of the twenty-four close with a sister, a brother, a dear friend, and though what happens to you happens too to him or to her, as the case may be, yet the day will not be alike. Half of everything is the thing itself; the other half, its effect on you; and that effect can never be exactly duplicated. That is why it is that one person will get joy and interest out of a day that another will find merely tiresome.

The best will in the world can not keep dull days and dark days entirely away. You are going to miss quantities of things that you could have enjoyed, because you are tired or out of sorts or disgruntled. Other things will come to you that will be hard to bear and sad to live through. But for all that, the greater portion of your days are good days. The doorway they provide leads to much, and it is your own fault if you get only a little.

The fun of being alive and of having these days opening up, one after the other, is tremendous. Out you go to meet them, with your body, your mind, your senses, your questing spirit. You find things to laugh over, or cry over. You find things that set your mind to keen working or that strengthen your muscles or train the faculty of sight or of hearing, that make more proficient your hands, more skillful the whole bearing of your body. You meet something new to you, and have to readjust yourself and your ideas to take it in. To something else you say good-by for the last time. You will have your own interests, however, and the more, the merrier.

As your mind grows and develops, so the interests of your days should grow and extend, and each day coming ought to be more than the one gone, for you yourself are more. The trouble often is that one drops something for each new thing taken up. The play and the ecstasy of youth is lost with the deeper feeling and growing cares of maturity. But the girl or boy who goes on into maturity without losing too much of that young rapture becomes the best sort of man or woman. Don’t let your life go dry; let it keep its sap and freshness. Artists usually excel in this wisdom. The child lives on in them, making them richer and their days more radiant because it has not withered out of them. Keep what has come, and go on to what is due, and you will not be likely to find life a bore or a burden.

I remember how long a day appeared to me when I was a child—not too long, I enjoyed every moment of it, but so much longer than it does now. I had a better understanding of how great a day is, then. Now it seems short; sometimes I feel as though it merely winked at me and vanished. I can quite imagine that when I move on into eternity that eternity will soon seem to be short enough for all I want to do and be. Think of standing and waiting while the great door of eternity swings open and lets you through! But of course a day is after all a portion of eternity, and maybe it is because we are close to one end of eternity in childhood that days are eternal to us then. Why, any spring morning that was fair and welcoming I remember how I would go to lie under a certain apple-tree where the grass grew thick and the bending branches swept it, making a bower of bloom. And there I would dream away several days in a space that must really have been only a couple of hours. I would like to get back the glorious leisure of those days, to feel the promise of eternity in them; but though I haven’t lost the sense of the magnificence of a day, I can’t hold on to its vastness.

Except always in what it offers.

Now and again a day will come with a gift so splendid that you can not help but recognize it and acclaim it. You will say, as you have heard others say, “That was a great day in my life!” But don’t disdain the other days, that blow no trumpets and open no golden treasure-chests. They have their own wonderfulness, that calls to the wonderfulness in you, and through their mighty doorways you step to everything in life.

—St. Nicholas, January 1923

DON’T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW!

Responses are trickling in, in onesies and twosies, as our readers are weighing in, responding to our “First Reader Survey.” We apologize for the delay in posting the March 3 blog—we had a computer glitch. We’re delaying the tabulation of these responses until more come in. But preliminary responses encourage us to hold the course with what has been posted the first year and a half. More on that later.

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It has been said that when each of us approaches the autumn of our lives, and looks back, invariably there are many regrets. One of the few exceptions has to do with memories: almost none of us regrets the expenditure of money that made memories possible. Where we do fault ourselves has to do with not making them.

It is so easy, in this journey called life, to postpone vibrant living on the pretext of not having enough money. In reality, with very few exceptions, we always have money for what we really want to spend it on.

Some years ago, in a large Sabbath School in Texas (our average attendance over a thirteen-year period was around 300—all the chapel would hold), I administered a survey. First of all, I asked each person there to look back through the years and rummage around in their minds for the ten most meaningful incidents or events in their lifetime. At the end, they were to rank them according to the long-term impact on the rest of their lives. Then I devoted the rest of the hour to the process, including the prioritizing. Each person would hand in the summation—no names expected—and quietly walk out. There was absolute silence—I can never forget that.

A week later, I reported on the results. So unexpected were they that I subsequently tried the experiment on other groups—invariably, the results remained the same.

What I fully expected were “big” events: job promotions, honors received, brand new cars, winning big games, inheriting a large estate or a great deal of money—but I didn’t get them. What people valued most in retrospect were memories. Most were surprisingly simple, such as the following:

• One remembered the night her boyfriend broke up with her; she’d escaped to her room, unable to face anyone with her grief. There came a soft knock on her door. Then her mother came in, took one look at her daughter’s tear-stained face, crawled over to her, took her in her arms, and held her all night, not leaving until dawn—thereby forging a bond that lasted for life.
• A heart-stopping sunset seen from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
• The look of absolute trust and adoration on one bride’s face, as she looked at her husband-to-be as she came down the aisle on her father’s arm.
• A never-to-be-forgotten Christmas when there was no money to buy gifts; Dad was out of work and Mom was expecting within only weeks. So they each made their presents with whatever was available, and decorated the scraggliest excuse for a tree anyone could imagine. Yet, in retrospect, so much love was expressed that, with no exception, every member of the family considered that Christmas to be one of the fondest memories of their lifetimes.
• A son of missionary parents begged, borrowed or scraped up enough money to travel clear across America in a bus to Miami, where he boarded a plane to the island in the West Indies where his parents lived—and, totally unannounced, walked in on them on Christmas Day. Later he would say, “The look of unbelieving shock on Mom’s face when she looked up and saw me standing there—well, it’s as clear in my memory as though it were yesterday!
• A teen-age daughter who felt estranged from her undemonstrative father, on a vacation, was reluctant at first to accept her father’s invitation to take a walk with him down the beach. But she agreed to go. Sunset came and went, night fell, and he opened up his heart to her, telling her, in halting words, how much he treasured her, loved her; and she, in turn, shared her long pent-up dreams with him. Arm in arm, they walked that beach far into the night.

Relationships. Feelings. Family. Love. What failed to appear on those 300 survey responses were all the things our media and advertisers tell us are essential to happiness: new cars, expensive gadgetry, job promotions, honors, luxuries, large inheritances, winning big games, buying mansions or yachts or expensive jewelry.

I’ve never been able to look at life the same since.

Epiphanies—we never see them coming, don’t recognize them when they’re happening; only in retrospect do we realize how different our lives would have been had that one day never been. That long-ago survey represents just such a day in our personal journeys. Connie and I resolved to stop postponing living: “Someday—we’ll do this.” “Someday, we’ll travel here, there,” realizing that “someday” never happens unless we will them to; unless we sacrifice to make them happen.

Even though we were always short of money, we traveled with our two children, Greg and Michelle, to beauty-spots all across the nation. Oh we wondered if it was worth it when they bickered constantly in the back seat, and complained until we wanted to scream—and occasionally did. So how passing strange it is to hear them reminisce (now that they’ve grown up and established homes of their own) about the wonderful things they saw and experienced during those long-ago trips: “We were so lucky! Most of our friends never got to see all those places that we did!”

IN CONCLUSION

So . . . I urge each person reading these lines to resolve to henceforth live each day of life to the fullest, and make lasting memories—real ones, not vicarious electronic ones—with their loved ones, families, and friends. For none of us is guaranteed a tomorrow.

We only have this moment!

What about you? Looking back over your own life, what are your own favorite memories? Please let us know during this week.

FIRST READER SURVEY

Now that our blogs have been running for a year and a half, I have a favor to ask of you:  Would you mind telling me which blogs you liked the best (as to type)?  Which ones would you like to see more of?

To make it easy, here are the general categories addressed during Series One’s 65 blogs (some categories overlap):

Number of blogs dealing with:

(26)        Travel in our national parks, monuments, forests, etc., and related lodging.

(7)        Education: Value of, problems with.

(5)        Milestones in the news; significance of.

(4)        Boys: Why we’re losing them.

(4)        Recovering from bad times, tough times, or our mistakes.

(3)        New beginnings, New Year’s Day.

(3)        Reading in our lives.

(3)        Education milestones, alumni gatherings.

(3)        Travel in America [besides our national parks].

(3)        Christmas season: Christmas books and stories.

(2)        Travel abroad.

(2)        Travel on cruise ships.

(1)        Love.

(1)        Life stories of great people (like Lincoln).

(1)        Children.

(1)        Leadership.

(1)        Fragility of life.

(1)        Animals.

(1)        Creativity.

(1)        Organizations we serve in.

(1)        Humor.

1. So which of these did you enjoy most.  Relate to most?  Feel most valuable, helpful, insightful?  Share with others?  Make copies of?
2. Which subject areas would you like to see continued?
3. Which subject areas would you like to see increased.
4. Which subject areas would you like to see reduced?
5. Which non-appearing subject areas would you most like to see addressed?
6. As for illustrations—do you feel they help increase interest in subject?  Do you feel they are worth the trouble? 

It would be most helpful to me if you’d be kind enough to amplify and give reasons for your conclusions.

* * * * *

I’ll report back, letting you know what kind of feedback we received—so please, take a moment and weigh in, so that I’ll know better which subjects I should explore more (or less) during our Series Two.