Password, Password, Who's Got the Password?

Oh, here's a story. You know we all have a bunch of passwords, right? Well, every few months I change mine, especially since getting a rather threatening message from a would-be criminal who basically told me he had so many millions of passwords, chances were he had one of mine or my family's. Very unsettling.

So I change my passwords a lot. And I have about 30 of them. And since I know that one of a crook's methods of getting into my stuff is to find my password on a less secure site (say a forum board) and try that password on a more secure site (say a bank), I use different passwords.

Last night I got the idea that I would write them all down and put them some place safe. The thought was that if something happened to me, My Love would be able to get into all my junk and retrieve stuff, shut things down, etc., etc. A little morbid, maybe, but it seemed brilliant at the time.

If you know me, you may guess what's coming next.


Yep. I promptly lost the page. Not only that, but I thought I had lost it some place public, not just somewhere in my home. A list of all my accounts with the passwords and sign on names was now floating around in the world somewhere for anybody to find and hack into my whole life.

Paaaaanic.....

I found the list after about twenty minutes of very quiet, very tense searching and two trips out to my truck, and my heart rate dropped back down to a reasonable level. Maybe it's time to get one of those password encryption apps/programs? Time to join the 21st Century?

Probably not...

Confounding Coincidence

I have a hard time knowing where to start this story.

 

My daughter's mom, my ex-wife, passed away three years ago this March. My daughter, who is now twenty-four, has been hit heartbreakingly hard by this loss.

 

When she died, we put all of her worldly possessions in a storage unit temporarily. As these things often do, temporarily turned in to just under three years and only now is the storage unit nearly empty of what was a household and lifetime of the profoundly sentimental and the utterly mundane.

 

Last Friday, my daughter was going through one of her mom's many boxes and found a letter she had written. It was addressed to my daughter and was written just shy of five months before her mom passed. The powerful words answered some of my daughter's questions about her mom's passing, affirmed the love they shared and supported the decisions my daughter has made since she lost her mom. It was devastating and cathartic at the same time.

That Sunday was Oscar night. While watching the show I received a text at about 8 o'clock from my sister who lives in Arizona. She was also watching and said that the Oscars always reminded her of my mom, who would sit with her writing tablet and make note of the winners as the show progressed.

 

My mom passed when I was five years old and I don't remember her at all, so this kind of recollection is always welcome.

 

An hour later I received a text from my daughter. It was a picture of a letter she had found among her mom's effects.

The letter was addressed to me. The letter was written by my Arizona sister.

The letter was written on the same type of tablet my Arizona sister had been picturing an hour earlier. By same type, I mean it could have even been the same tablet used for the 1971 award notations.

 

The date on the letter, December 7, 1972, was five months, to the day, before my mom would die in a car accident.

 

Two letters, involving two moms, both written five months before they would pass much, much too young.

 

A memory from my sister is all but physically manifested an hour after she texts me about it.

 

Sometimes the content and timing of coincidences is so powerful that the word coincidence no longer fits the situation.

 

I can't help but picture those two moms having a little palaver somewhere and deciding to pull a fast one on us lowly mortals.

 

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Brief Review of Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey

This is my first experience with Mr. Howey's work read via recommendation from a trusted friend.

I'm not, per se, a great fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, although Wind-Up Girl was fantastic. So I approached this story with a hint of trepidation.

In short, it was excellent.

The setting is extremely well-drawn, details fed to the reader carefully and meaningfully over time.

The story is complex and involves different points of view, micro and macro influences, short and long-term histories.

The cast is vast, varied, deep and fully-developed.

And I guarantee you don't know what's going to happen next.

I will say that reading this as five separate stories would be deeply frustrating, as the so-called endings of each section are not so much cliff-hanger as cliff, not to mention they are way too short individually to be satisfying. The way this needs to be read is right here, as one great novel.

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Back to It!

Resolutions aside, here's a brief summary of what went down in December and where I'm at now in writing and, well, everything.

 

I want to start by saying that this year, especially, we all have a very strong common reason to appreciate every glimmer of good in our lives. This post is not about that tragedy. But before I talk about my little tiny life, I want to say for the record I sincerely believe we all owe it to humanness itself to remember and appreciate.

 

Negatives:

 

1) We almost ran out of gas getting the Christmas Tree at George's in Paynes Creek. But we didn't.

2) My sister's home in the country is our traditional Christmas Eve location and this year she decided to drive her family to Idaho to spend it with my brother and his family. So we tried to bring that Christmas Eve magic to our house, but it didn't turn out. The picture above is my brother's house. Can you really blame her?

3) The place where we've purchased our Christmas Eve dungeness crab for the last, oh, 100 years, closed down. Someone took it over. The someone who took it over ran out of crab. So I was forced to purchase frozen snow crab as a replacement. No one ate it.

4) Our tree fell down a few days before Christmas, very nearly beaning my daughter, who was sleeping under it. We had to rewrap some well-watered gifts and redecorate the tree.

 

5) My son (11) broke some rules and found himself grounded for the first time in his life, and for the entirety of winter break.

6) He also got a terrible, 102 degree temperature flu around the 21st or 22nd. I decided it looked like a lot of fun, so I got said flu on Christmas Eve. My oldest daughter took it back to Sacramento with her. It was one of those week-long endeavors for which I am eternally grateful.

 

7) Since there was so much sick going on, Christmas Day was spent at home, just seven of us, instead of at my love's family dinner.

 

8) I got up Christmas morning, went back to bed, got up for a couple of hours in the evening and then didn't leave the bedroom until some time on the 27th.

 

Positives:

1) It's also the Christmas we got Marcy. Marcy is my son's cat. Above all the gadgets and toys he wanted, this kitten was the real thing, the one real thing he wanted. And we had decided against it until a few days prior. The way we did it was we shopped for all the care items one would need to have a cat and wrapped that for Christmas morning. This way he could pick his kitten. He sobbed. And he's not a sobbing kind of kid. Like the Red Ryder BB gun, it may be the best present he has ever gotten or will ever get.

2) A few days later we took my daughter (13) and picked a dog out at the rescue. Why we did it this way is she had asked for a Chinchilla for Christmas and we decided not to go there. But when my boy got his cat, her need for a pet of her own became first and foremost in her mind. Her name (the dog) is Haley and she's wonderful. The two new animals in our home have brought in new life and new personality and our two younger kids will now have that experience. (I should note that we had three animals, two dogs and a cat, that were older and all passed within the last two years. So we've been without pet for several months.)

 

3) This was the year, the first in a while, when both our older kids 23 and 24 made it back for Christmas Eve AND Christmas Day. And because of sicknesses, it was just us. We lazed around and watched movies, ate goodies, generally trashed the house and just loved on each other. This made these days special in a way I haven't felt in a long time. My older daughter said it best, "I couldn't have had a better Christmas."

4) This past Saturday, I got my bike out of layaway. It's a 2012 Jamis Ventura Sport. It's beautiful and I took it for its maiden voyage yesterday, 25 miles around town and around the Sacramento River Trail. What an amazing difference from my old Schwinn mountain bike. Since I'd been sick and since I hadn't ridden anything indoors or outdoors for two weeks, it just about did me in, but it didn't matter.

 

So now the tree is gone, the decorations have all been put away, the house is clean and the older kids have returned to their homes. The strongest memories I have this year are of the best moments.

 

So it's a new year.

 

I'm ready to ride my bike as much as weather will allow.

 

I'm ready to write my story as much as my creative juices will allow.

 

I'm ready to live my life as much as life will allow.

 

I'm ready to love my family as much as my heart will allow.

 

It's a good place to be.

 

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