TheBanyanTree: Wolf Moon 2010 - Something has been lost...

[Kitty]

Ah, a brother of the mind.

I, too, carry a pocket calendar in my purse on which appointments are noted 
when I'm away from my bound At-a-Glance larger calendar.  It lays on the 
table beside my armchair where most of a day's business is conducted.

I used to keep the pocket calendars, but there's more information on my 
A-a-G, so each year, like you, I transfer permanent (altho not as extensive 
as your) information from the waning to the waxing year's.  And every year, 
the former year's joins the past years' in the file cabinet.

I love the look and feel of the bright, untouched pages that await the 
addition of data.  The most modern technology hasn't overtaken me ... yet.

Kitty
mzzkitty at sssnet.com
kcp-parkplace.blogspot.com
parkplaceohio.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dale M. Parish" <parishdm at att.net>
To: "Tree Banyan" <thebanyantree at remsset.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2011 1:07 AM
Subject: TheBanyanTree: Wolf Moon 2010 - Something has been lost...


Something has been lost, I've noticed, in the period between Christmas and 
New Years.  For years, I've received a copy of the Farmer's Almanac in my 
stocking.  For over twenty years, I carried in my breast pocket my bound 
At-A-Glance pocket calendar book.  It became an annual tradition to set 
aside one night between Christmas and New Year's to take my new calendar 
book and methodically go through each section and transfer the phone 
numbers, addresses, birthdays, anniversaries, contacts, cost codes, account 
numbers, encrypted combinations and passwords, and every thing that the 
little address book carried for me that I might need to remember from a 
written copy.

In addition, I treated my little pocket calendars as a history, and each 
year, after retirement, I filed away last year's book with all its 
predecessors, leaving a history of where I'd been, with whom I'd met, and 
who was important to me that year.

During the act of transferring contacts, I would leave out those people whom 
I felt I'd not be doing business with in the new year, and any phone numbers 
or names I couldn't remember who they were would be left out, thinking that 
if I remembered someone later that I needed, I could always go back and get 
the number out of the old book.  I seldom did.

After copying all the contact information, I'd page through the calendar, 
day by day, and migrate any anniversaries that I wanted to carry forward--  
birthdays I'd picked up on through the year, expiration dates of 
subscriptions, renewal dates of leases, anything that would reoccur in the 
new year.  Then I'd break out the Farmer's Almanac.

I used the traditional symbology in my weekly calendar to mark the first, 
full, last, and new moon in ink.  That was the only thing that got marked in 
ink.  Everything else got penciled in.  I think the movement of the spheres 
isn't likely to change in my lifetime, so could be marked permanantly. 
After the moon phases were completed for the year, then I'd go back through 
the calendar and mark sunrise and set for each Sunday from the Farmer's 
Almanac.  Following that, I'd look up all the meteor showers, lunar and 
solar eclipses expected to be visible from Texas and mark them.

But about eleven years ago, my boss gave me a "PDA" for Christmas-- a Palm 
Pilot.  After my initial scoff, I started looking at the calendar features--  
an event could be repeated annually or almost any other frequency or 
combination.  Not to mention that there was available for it a program that 
would give sun rise and set, moon rise and set, eclipses, day length, sun 
azimuth, etc. for any place on the planet.  Additionally, the contacts list 
let one categorize individuals, attach notes such as account numbers, 
combinations, and the like.  Plus, birthdays and anniversaries of 
individuals showed up in the calendar automagically.  This was a big 
improvement on the calendar book.  I was hooked.

But, as I've upgraded the original Palm Pilot to newer models with more 
memory, higher resolution, and now to "smart phone" features, when each old 
model is retired, the data contents is copied into the new version and there 
is no physical history to show for it.  I know I could archive a copy of the 
data to some fixed media, but like my old 5.25" floppies, eventually, there 
will be nothing with which to read them outside of a museum somewhere. 
While I keep backups, there's nothing readable without the current hardware 
and software. So what good is it for historical purposes?

Printing it out would be, I think, a waste.  A waste of paper, in that the 
compactness of the pocket sized calendar book reduced a year's worth of 
history into less than 50 cubic centimeters.  The formats readily available 
for printing PDA calendars and memos isn't conducive to compactness.  So my 
last eleven years worth of history are intangible now.  Something has been 
lost.

Dale
--
Dale M. Parish
628 Parish RD
Orange TX 77632