Play On

Hello World, Well, the time has surely come, as indeed it must, when the calendar has rolled around once again to the cats' all-time favorite day of the church year, namely, Palm Sunday, and not a moment too soon. Of course, palms could be fun at any time, but there's definitely something about the scent of fresh palms that will turn even the most world-weary couch-puss into a high-flying kitty acrobat at a stroke. Fortunately, no one among our feline population is of the Eastern Orthodox persuasion, so they don't have to wait around as the Greeks and their ilk lag behind the rest of Christianity until Holy Week gets underway, bringing up the rear as it usually does, year in and year out. It happens that the holidays line up together this year, which isn't often the case, so cats of all nations can play with their palms simultaneously, regardless of their differing locations or religious affiliations. I'm happy to get on board in the spirit of inter-denominational camaraderie, but frankly, the petitions to change the name to Paws Sunday instead, I thought were just way too much. On the local front, we had several warm days here, and were suddenly confronted with the spectacle of a veritable explosion of daffodils all over the yard, from the creamiest of whites and the brightest of yellows, all the way to the fieriest of oranges and back again, like waves of beauty pageant contestants in extravagant gowns all trying to outdo each other. Also popping open were rambunctious bunches of wind flowers, anemone blanda, glory of the snow, hyacinths, and even the scattered remnants of blue squill, as if determined to prove that Old Man Winter hadn't gotten the best of them, with all the tricks up his sleeve. I spotted buds on the magnolia, and we all know that nobody has to ask the forsythia twice to put on a show. Heck, at this rate, can rampant alien mutant poison ivy be far behind? I think not! Speaking of rest and relaxation at last, anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last decade can tell you that there is certainly no lack of computer games for their phones, and my iPhone is no different, with the likes of Bejeweled Blitz, Boggle, Bookworm, Candy Crush and WordSearch, as well as Fix-it Felix, Mah Jongg, retro pinball, word jumble, and a few others just for the heck of it. Recently I was trying out a new game that I was not familiar with, and in my fledgling efforts to understand the rules, very quickly found out that I was not fast enough to succeed with the tasks at hand, and was summarily timed out of the first level before I ever got started. Frankly, I thought this was ignominious enough as it was, only to be greeted next with this ridiculously flamboyant screen: ====================================== CONGRATULATIONS! You formed 0 words - A new high total! You scored 0 points - A new high score! Do you want to share this with your friends? ====================================== Here I'm thinking, with accomplishments like these, I don't dare hope to impress anyone out there in the wilds of cyberspace with my brilliant mind or linguistic mastery, not by any means. I'm sure everyone will be relieved to hear that the game very helpfully keeps track of my stats, so I can be reminded of this dubious achievement any time that I'm feeling a little too competent for my own good. Maybe playing with palms is more my speed after all. In fact, it reminded me of the time at work that I needed to date-stamp some requisitions that just arrived in the mail, and set out for what we always referred to as "the little salespersons room" with single-minded purpose and a full head of steam - only to find myself at my destination, holding the papers in my hand, and for the life of me, standing before the water cooler, of all places, with no idea what I was doing there, and a blank slate where my brain should have been. I think it was the same week that I very resolutely carried an empty cup out of my office for some water, and instead found myself in a different room entirely, standing in front of the copier for some reason, with that same blank look of a merry wanderer led astray by their poor addled brain cells, such as they were. Just at a guess, I would have to figure it was going to take a lot longer to get water out of the copier, rather than the water cooler for instance - a concept which would have been flagrantly obvious to the most wayward schoolchild, but somehow eluded me at that moment like the most complicated conundrum that had stumped the greatest minds of the modern world. There would be a joke in here somewhere if I was blonde, which appears not to be the case on the outside of my head, but frankly, it's the inside that I'm starting to worry about, and with good reason, believe me. Speaking of modern technology, or rather just the opposite, my age-old steam-powered PC in the living room finally reached the point where after it was turned off, it didn't seem to want to turn back on again, and one day it took 45 minutes to get it up and running - with the additional drawback that it was still Lent, so using disreputable language was out of the question, no matter how well-suited to the occasion it might have been, and I ought to know. At that point, I decided to just leave it turned on all the time, and at least eliminate the rebooting problem right from the start. I can certainly understand now why the tech mavens have been recommending this idea all along, because it has dramatic advantages over the old way, and that's not just a lot of terabytes and megahertz, by golly. Since the computer is always going, all you have to do is just walk right up and start using it - no dawdling around waiting for it to slog through its entire start-up sequence, before you can do anything, or close the myriad dialog boxes about updates, settings, threats or revisions, that it thinks are so much more important than letting you get on with what you want to do, thanks not. Suddenly it behaves a lot more like a smartphone, where you can just pick it up and start using it immediately with a swipe of your finger, without being held hostage by all the extraneous folderol the operating system wants to do first. I realize now that I honestly could have saved years of my life if I had done this sooner, rather than waiting countless hours for untold computer to finally boot up, especially in the bad old days when the processors were not only slow but balky besides. Personally, this is my idea of a boon to mankind, and a revolutionary approach to computers that finally drags their usefulness, albeit kicking and screaming, right into the 21st century and beyond, at least for me. Now, it must be said that it might not help me play games any better than I ever did before, but then again, with high scores of zero as it is, it appears that it would be hard to get any worse, I dare say. Elle