The title of this blog post is aspirational. One of my goals in life is to make up for my shortcomings as a father by being the best grandfather I can be. I also tried to be the best Dad I could be, but I feel more prepared at this stage in my life to succeed than I did in my younger days. One of the primary benefits of having been a teenage parent was the head start it gave me on becoming a grandfather. The oldest of my grandchildren will turn 20 this year, while the youngest two are just in kindergarten. There are 13 of them all together. It plays hell at Christmastime, not that I do much of the shopping. Wonder Woman handles that. About all I do is bring the packages in from the porch and accept hugs from the kiddos after they open them.

I've got several of the kids on my mind today. I've been assembling the gear for a weekend camping trip with five of them, ranging from five-year old Evie to 14-year-old Aiden. Despite the threat of a cold night on Saturday, we have gathered our tents, sleeping bags, flashlights and cooking gear to head for Jones Lake State Park for the weekend. I've gotten everyone's favorite camping food, s'mores fixings and a massive charger for all their electronics. Harper, my aspiring TikTok superstar, will surely be making videos while hanging out with her cousins in the woods. Wonder Woman will be in charge, of course. We got them all fishing poles last fall, so that's definitely going to be on their itinerary.

My other kindergarten grandchild is James. He lives a couple of hours away. He's eight years younger than his sister. He'd been with the same group of kids in pre-school for several years but unfortunately, none of them ended up going to the same elementary school he attends. It threw him for a loop and this hasn't been an easy year for him because of it. It really breaks my heart to see him struggling with the social aspect of the school experience so early. He's a bright boy, so the academic part of the experience is going OK, I just want him to make some friends to enrich the experience. Thankfully, his folks aren't planning on moving, so he will have the stability to get to know his classmates as time goes on.

One of my other grandsons, Connor, is a high-school junior. He has an illness called Friedreich's Ataxia that affects his mobility. He drives a car with hand controls and uses a motorized wheelchair at school. Furthermore, he can walk some, but his illness makes it difficult. With the destruction of the Department of Education by the fascists in Washington, coupled with the undercover attack on the disabled as part of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, we do not know what is going to happen to the services he gets. To make it all even more infuriating, his Dad, our son-in-law, is a 100% disabled vet from injuries sustained in an IED explosion in Afghanistan. We don't know what's going to happen with his Veteran's Administration healthcare and services, either. My anger at the Republicans who wave flags and enable this bullshit is very, very personal. Whatever happens, Wonder Woman and I will be there for them.

I'm glad I have all of these people to love. I may not be the world's best Granddad yet, but I will continue to work toward being that man.

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When I bought my first computer in 1993, an IBM PS1 Consultant, 486/33SX, it had a 140 MB hard drive. I kept the computer for three years, and although I added a CD-ROM, sound card and extra RAM, I never increased the amount of storage. A quick check of the computer I use today, an M2 MacBook Air reveals that I have 78 apps that take up more storage by themselves than I had available on that first computer. My camera, a Canon 6D takes photos so large that six of them would have filled the hard drive of that first computer.

I still have documents I created on that machine. In fact, I have a great many things I wrote and preserved from the 1990s, including digital photos from the expensive Kodak camera that belonged to my job. Many of the documents were written in Microsoft Works, a productivity suite it stopped selling 16 years ago. There was never a Mac version of it. At some point, I had to jump through some hoops to recover the information from those files using a document interpreter. These days, I save everything I write as plain text so that I don't ever face that problem again. I did not save everything I wrote from that era, but I was able to use The Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive to recover numerous web pages from my first blog.

When Napster was popular, you could download almost any song you could think of just by searching for it. I accumulated all 500 of the Rolling Stones top albums that way. While I was still living that pirate life, a short time actually, I also collected the full discographies of several prolific artists and groups and that's why I have 25+ albums (each) by Neil Young, Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Bob Dylan.

In setting up my new home office recently, I rounded up the embarrassingly large collection of hard drives I'd accumulated over the years: 7 portable 1 TB drives, 2 portable 2 TB drives, 2 powered external 1 TB drives, 5 internal 1 TB drives and 2 powered external 3 TB hard drives. That's 24 TB of storage added to the 5 TB that I have available on the computers I use daily. The drives contained various collections of software, photos, music, podcasts, movies, TV shows, hard drive back-ups and documents collected over the past 30+ years.

I recently added over a thousand more files to keep up with when I downloaded our entire Amazon Kindle and Audible collections. We had over 500 books in each of those. My challenge is to consolidate all of that information, removing duplicates as I go along. My goal is to have a local copy, a copy kept offsite but readily available and a copy in the cloud. A lot of this information is only important to me. My kids will probably preserve the photos and may avail themselves of some music, but who will want an archive of decades of my writing? If you ask them, they'd most likely says yes, but it is a lot of work to maintain so many files and like all 21st century people, their collections of digital data are growing too.

My decision to create a home lab made things even more complicated since now I have three computers to maintain and a fluctuating number of virtual machines. This means I have a half dozen large USB thumb drives with operating system installations on them. Yay! More data! Having high-speed Internet also allows me to suck information off the internet at an outrageous rate. I can download dozens of GB of data in a morning if I feel like it, and of course, I often feel like it. I don't know for sure, but I suspect there may be a diagnosis associated with my personality type.

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One thing I learned prior to traveling to Ireland is that the people of that country grow really and truly tired of Americans (meaning people who were born and raised in the United States) coming over to the Emerald Isle and proclaiming themselves to be Irish because one of their 32 great-great-great-great grandfathers was from County Cork. I made it very clear to any of the Irish people I spoke to that I was not one of "those" Americans. One fellow couldn't believe that I wasn't trying to claim to be his long lost cousin. I explained that my grandmother was of Scottish descent. He asked me her family name. "McFadyen," I told him. He assumed a triumphant look and led me to a monument located right beside the famous Free Derry wall. The monument was to a man whose last name was, you guessed it, McFadyen. He told me that I might not claim Ireland but that Ireland would claim me.

Honestly, I don't really care that much where any of my long dead relatives came from in the sense that i just can't identify with national pride. It's seldom a good thing is it? It leads to nationalism and feelings and acts of unearned and undeserved superiority. I'm fine with other folks who feel some sort of spiritual kinship with the home of their ancestors, as long as they aren't obnoxious about it. Just don't tell me that you know you'd be good at bullfighting because you have Spanish blood or any kind crap like that.

As a general rule, most cultures have two sides. For every selfless act of sacrifice, there tends to be a corresponding act of something horrible. Even the Irish, a people I hold in high esteem for persevering under years of exploitive English colonialism, seldom talk about their Nazi sympathies. Wait, what? Well, after Irish independence, certain folks decided that any enemy of England was a friend of Ireland and well, that kind of led to a certain acceptance of Germany that was most underserved. Read about it in the Irish Times

The heroic American Army of World War Two had soldiers stationed in America guarding their fellow citizens in Japanese Internment Camps. That doesn't take away anything from the men who landed on Omaha Beach, it just solidifies the fact that it's a very grey world, no matter how black and white we wish it could be.

For my fellow pale skinned brethren, expressing something as warped as racial pride is just weird AF to me. Thankfully, the tendency of white people to express that notion was on the decline prior to the last election, although it seems to be making a comeback. I can see where traditionally oppressed people have a sense of "Yay! We survived!" but I'm not sure what their genocidal oppressors have to celebrate. Don't even come at me with an "But not all white people" argument either.

I am much more inclined to identify with my self-chosen tribe of freedom fighters. I celebrate my people based on what they did and not on geography or the amount of melanin in their skin or the shape of their eyes. Our real families are the people we choose and not the blood in our veins. My people were the abolitionists, the Freedom Riders, the IWW and the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. My people were Susan B. Anthony, Fannie Lou Hamer, Fred Korematsu and Sitting Bull. My people started Occupy Wall Street and rioted in the streets of Seattle. They were gunned down at Kent State by the Ohio NationalGuard and in a Greensboro housing project by the KKK. My people are finding ways to resist the tide of fascism right this red hot minute.

If you feel the same way, then you are my sister or my brother. I love you.

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Sometimes being online is absolutely like panning for gold. I can be perusing one of the blogging platforms I frequent and discover the most heart touching essay by someone i've never encountered before. They could be writing about anything, a relationship, or work or just anything about surviving life in 2025. When I find someone like that, it brightens my day and gives me something to look forward to. I felt that way when I found Keenan and Annie.

There are times when even a well done commercial site providing high-quality content is a joy to spend time on there. The Atlantic or The Verge or Wired on a good day are prime examples. I happen to like and respect quite a few journalists. Some of them are doing some absolutely vital work for our democracy right now, and i appreciate it. I also like the tech nerds, who I can tell are just as excited to find an interesting new tool as I would be in their shoes. After all these years, I still think computers can be fun. I'm not jaded yet.

But.

But then... I log on to Mastodon or Bluesky and I see a message in my inbox, not from some software curious Mac fan, but from an incredibly attractive woman, appearing younger than my adult kids, who is just dying to find out how I'm doing tonight. Sigh. It only takes a minute to block and delete those kind of scam messages. They are such downers, though. There's some lonely guy out there, maybe someone who isn't as sharp mentally as they once were who is going to fall for that kind of thing tonight. He will get taken to the cleaners and have his heart broken. I don't like the constant reminders of that reality.

Other times, I'm just doing my thing, minding my own business and I get a text message, which is cool if it is a friend or our kids or grandkids. What's not cool is when it's someone from the political party I don't support crowing about the latest MAGA atrocity as if it's a good thing and asking me to send them money.

Lately, I've voluntarily been extricating myself from my involvement with the websites of the billionaire class. It's not a project to be taken on lightly. It changes the Internet, injecting friction into areas where I am not used to it. I have to think instead of using muscle memory. Having a new email address for the first time in 20 years is disconcerting. Leaving Facebook was absolutely the right thing to do, but I miss the people from my old job and high school friends I only saw on there. For years, I've been able to watch whatever blockbuster show I wanted because subscribing to ALL the streaming services wasn't that expensive. Now, having a moral code is giving me FOMO. What if something superb comes on Amazon Prime after my divorce from Jeff Bezos goes through? I hate the thought.

It's been a good weekend. I got to spend a few hours with my oldest friend today. Wonder Woman and I wrapped a good British TV show. I have a couple of trips to look forward to, And, I am still retired.

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