About Last Night

Gillian was home sick yesterday. Stomach ache and headache. I stayed home with her, too, and just went to work for my desk time and book club. By evening, she was feeling just fine.

She decided to go to bed at 9pm, so she could get up at her usual 5:30am. I went to bed at 10pm, and read until 11pm. Before turning in, I went in to check on her. Gillian was laying there, awake, and complained to me that she had been trying to go to sleep for the last 2 hours. I told her to just relax, and just try to go to sleep, but she did rest all day, so I wasn't surprised she was having trouble going to sleep.

I went to bed.

A little while later, I hear someone by my bed. It was Gillian. "Do you know where my MP3 player is? I found my earbuds."

I told her no, I didn't know where it was, and go to bed. Her response was, "Whatever."

A few minutes later, I had a hunch, and got up. Yep. Her door was closed and her light was on. I walked in, and there she is, pulling her dresser away from the wall, looking for her MP3 player.

She did find her portable drive......

I told her to go to bed, made sure she was in bed, pushed her dresser back against her wall, and turned off the light.

But, a few minutes later......."Mom, I think one of the cats is in the dresser!" Sooooooo, I got up, saw both cats, and told the girl, nothing is in your dresser, I opened the drawers, and all was well. I tucked her in, told her to STAY in bed, and shut off her light! And I announced, "Tonight has turned into a Comedy of Errors!"

And I laughed all the way back to bed.

Gray or Grey?

After just updating my Facebook status with (Elaine Hayes Reitz) "thinks a chilly, gray Sunday is the perfect day to just putz around the house," I started to wonder about that age old question:

What's the difference between "grey" and "gray"? (OK, it's probably just me that thinks this is an age old question, so just humor me.)

The English language is such a wonderfully strange and complex language. Plus, depending where you live, English can be a very different language! Word spellings rarely seem to follow any sort of rules - for every rule there seem to be more exceptions to that rule than words that actually follow the rule!

So, after updating my Facebook status, I decided to discover, once and for all, the difference between "gray" and "grey". You know what I discovered?

For all intents and purposes, GRAY is the American spelling. GREY is the British spelling. But both are correct.

Yeesh. That was it?

It's a Generational Thing

I love when I have the time to just let my mind wander and think about whatever it wants. You just never know what thoughts will pop into your head!

Last night I started thinking about technology and the differences between my generation and Gillian's generation. What we each take for granted that the generation before did not have.

For my generation, it was fairly limited. Television, of course, and maybe air conditioners. I remember when music cassettes became so popular they edged out LPs. But the big thing would have to be television. I remember my parents talking about sitting around the radio for entertainment, and my dad talking about his favorite radio shows - The Shadow, Jack Armstrong, Little Orphan Annie. As a kid, I couldn't imagine a world without TV!

And then there was this HUGE technology explosion! CDs, cell phones, computers, Internet, laptop computers, iPhone, Playstation, Xbox, Wii, the list goes on and on! Gillian, a member of the Millenials, has absolutely no concept of a world without them.

Sometimes I wonder if there's been an evolutionary shift. The kids of Gillian's age group seem to have an instinctive understanding of all this technology. They just know how it works. And they gravitate toward anything new.

It's just amazing to me. Technology changes and improves so quickly anymore. The saying, "As soon as you buy a computer it's out of date" is so true. But to the Millenials, it is what it is! They aren't amazed by the speed of upgrades and new technology.

That's just their world.