Bertram's Blog

The Problem With Writing About People You Know

April 25, 2014 — Pat Bertram

A few weeks ago when I was having lunch with friends from my exercise class, someone suggested that I write a book about the class. One lovely woman even volunteered to be a murder victim, and the teacher offered to be the murderer (or rather, she offered a motive for the crime that indicated she was the one who did the dire deed).

I thought it would be fun — write a chapter now and again, print it out, and let everyone read it. If they had suggestions about what they wanted their character to do, I could incorporate their ideas in subsequent chapters.

The more I got to thinking about it, though, the more impossible it seemed. The idiosyncrasies that make people unique, interesting, lovable are not necessarily traits they are proud of. In fact, they might not know they have the traits or if they do know, they might not realize that others see those traits. We always hope people see us as better than we see ourselves, and we certainly don’t want to know that someone might see what we wish no one saw. And even when we do know our shortcomings, such as being overweight, I’m not sure we would take kindly to being immortalized in such a way. (Not that my books are immortal, but you know what I mean.)

Although the characters would be written without judgment, just a simple swish of a literary brush, these women might feel hurt, and I am not interested in hurting anyone, especially not people I’ve grown fond of. Now, if one of them had done me wrong, I would gladly put her in a book and kill her off, but so far the worst offense was . . . hmmm. Can’t think of anything except for perhaps a brief touch of cattiness.

Yesterday one of the women asked me about the project, and when I told her my dilemma, she suggested writing the book but using a different setting for the group. A rowing crew, for example. That way I could write the people as I saw them, and no one would be the wiser. “Except me, of course,” she said, “but you wouldn’t say anything bad about me.” The problem with her scenario is that I know nothing about rowing, and anyway, what is a rowing crew of no-longer-young women doing in the middle of the desert? (Though that could be a story in itself!)

I suppose I could hand out a questionnaire, asking the women if they would like to be part of the project, if I could use their real name and if not what name they would like me to use, and most importantly, how they would like to be described. I’d end up with a cast of wonderfully graceful, talented, brilliant, and beautiful characters of course, but there is truth in that. Despite their idiosyncrasies (or maybe because of them), despite their aging bodies and physical limitations, they are all in their own way, wonderfully graceful, talented, brilliant, and beautiful.

One problem is that each of these wonderfully graceful, talented, brilliant, and beautiful women would have to have larceny in her heart since each would be a suspect with a dark secret she is trying to hide, and that could lead to confusion about how I actually perceived each of them.

The main problem, of course, is that if I figure a way around all the other problems, I might actually have to write the dang thing.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in life, relationships, writing. Tags: characterization, murdering a friend, putting people in a book, writing about people you know. 7 Comments »

If You Want to be Happier …

April 24, 2014 — Pat Bertram

A recent study by the London School of Economics measured the relative value of different leisure activities, giving them the emotional equivalent of a raise in pay.

Their conclusion: dance is associated with the happiest people, and was worth £1,671 ($2,808.28) a year.

Swimming came next with a worth of £1,630

And visiting libraries came in third with a worth of £1,359

Other values of your search for happiness:

Taking part in team sports – £1,127

Arts and crafts – £1,020

Attending plays – £999

Individual sports – £828

Attending concerts – £742

Conversely, keeping fit through classes and gym exercise brought so much unhappiness, it was the equivalent of a pay cut of £1,318.

So, if you want to be happier, dance! As Snoopy said, “To live is to dance, to dance is to live.”

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Posted in culture, life. Tags: dancing and happiness, how to be happier, importance of libraries, London School of Economics study, what is the relaive worth of dancing, what makes people happy. 7 Comments »

Are We Responsible for Responsiblity?

April 23, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been thinking a lot about responsibility lately. Well, no wonder — I’m looking after my 97-year-old father and doing the best I can for my dysfunctional brother. I’ve always had an enormous sense of responsibility but now I’m wondering if perhaps that isn’t a good thing.

I was the oldest girl in a large family, and as such, I had responsibility thrust on me at an early age. (I never used to admit I was from a large family. I felt ashamed, as if I had been the one to choose to have a large family in overpopulated times. It took me half a lifetime to realize I had no blame in the matter. No responsibility.)

Responsibility means: 1) the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or of having control over someone. 2) the state or fact of being accountable or to blame for something. 3) the opportunity or ability to act independently and make decisions without authorization. 4) a thing that one is required to do as part of a job, role, or legal obligation. 5) a moral obligation to behave correctly toward or in respect of.

It’s unusual for all the definitions of a word to apply in one of my rambling discussions with myself, but in this case, all of them do. Well, except for perhaps #3. I often have a hard time making decisions when all things are equal and it doesn’t make any difference to me what I decide. For example, I can never decide where to go to lunch if I’m out with friends. It’s being with the friends that matters to me, not the food that accompanies the conversation.

I’ve never liked having control over anyone, another leftover from childhood when I would be left in charge, yet I do often feel as if I have a duty to certain people, or perhaps a moral obligation to them. I also sometimes feel responsible for situations that have nothing to do with me, other than that I am there and I care. For example, if I express an opinion or preference, no matter how casual, and another person acts on that opinion with bad results, I blame myself, though I’m learning not to.

Some of my youthful research into spirituality added to this sense of responsibility. If life is created by thoughts, including ours, then everything we do affects the whole. I don’t believe, as many people do, that we create our own illnesses, or that we remain sick because our belief isn’t strong enough to make us well. Nor do I believe we create our problematic situations. I do know that sometimes (maybe most times) things simply happen, and all we can do is deal with them, and yet, the idea still lingers that somehow, somewhere, we are the authors of our lives, the ones responsible for putting ourselves in crises.

I once liked the saying: “No snowflake in an avalanche ever thinks it’s responsible.” It wasn’t until just now that it dawned on me that no snowflake is responsible. The snowflake didn’t create the weather, didn’t create the snowfall, didn’t create the conditions for an avalanche. It didn’t even choose where it was to land.

I’m not much of a snowflake in our society. I’ve only owned one car, and that still-running 42-year-old vehicle has but 153,000 miles on it. I recycle the old-fashioned way — wear out, use up, make do. I trod as lightly as I can, and yet, I am still a snowflake, however unwittingly, causing the avalanche of human destruction on this earth.

So, where does responsibility begin and end? Am I responsible for the earth, for our society’s problems, for my family, my father, my brother?

Am I responsible for the death of my life mate/soul mate? Now that I know the answer to. Of course I am not responsible, and yet there is something deep in me, something beyond consciousness, that believes perhaps I didn’t do enough, didn’t hold on to him tightly enough, didn’t love enough.

See? An enormous sense of misplaced responsibility.

So, are we responsible for responsibility? If things go wrong in the world (or in a family or community), how much of the accountability or the blame belongs to us? Do we in fact have control over anything, or do things just happen — will we, nill we?

Research into the mind shows that often a decision is made before we become aware we made the decision. One test had people choose which light to light up, but often the light lit up before it was chosen, which led researchers to wonder if the people chose the light in the millisecond after it lit up. Perhaps, as this research might indicate, we have no real choice in what happens. In which case, how can there be responsibility?

I suppose it’s also possible that no matter what we do, we’d get the same results. Although that idea wasn’t formulated when I wrote the first chapter of Break Time, the soon-to-be-published steampunk anthology, it’s how the story progressed. Every time Al went back to the past to save his wife and child from death, they ended up dying in another accident. If the end is the same no matter what we do, how can there be responsibility?

And is it possible (or even acceptable) to unshoulder a lifetime of responsibility?

Just wondering.

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Posted in culture, life, relationships. Tags: no snowflake in an avalanche, responsibility, responsible for family, responsible for society's problems, responsible for the earth, responsiblity to a sibling. 6 Comments »

The Reality of Water

April 22, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Whenever I think of taking off on foot and seeing where the trail leads me, I always come up against one truth that pops the dream and brings me back to reality.

Water.

There is a drought in the west this year. Water is being drained from Lake Mead as if it were a bathtub with the stopper removed. Some communities are warning residents to conserve, while the developers continue to build houses by the hundreds in this area alone, which will cause further problems in the future. Certain watering spots along the southern portion of the Pacific Crest Trail have dried up, forcing thru hikers to carry more water, drink less, or arrange for water deliveries.

A gallon of water weighs almost nine pounds, and hikers generally consume a gallon a day so carrying just a couple of days worth of water makes for a very heavy pack. Some cross-country walkers fashion pushcarts to carry the necessary water through the long desolate waterless areas, but wheels of any kind are usually not allowed on trails in national parks, so that is not a solution for PCT thru walkers.

More than anything else we take water for granted, and yet it is the one thing we cannot live without. Supposedly we can live without food for three weeks, but a mere three days without water puts us in serious trouble. Actually, we’d be in trouble long before the three days were up, with skin rashes, thick tongue, and hallucinations leading the list of dehydration horrors. Add heat and wind to the trauma, conditions that often prevail in the desert west, and we’d have a serious problem within just a couple of days.

Considering that 75% of us are chronically dehydrated, there is a chance that we wouldn’t even last two or three days. And considering that in 37% of Americans, the thirst mechanism is so weak that it is often mistaken for hunger, we could be dying of thirst and not even know it.

Even mild dehydration will slow down our metabolism as much as 3%. And a mere 2% drop in body water can trigger fuzzy short-term memory trouble with basic math, and difficulty focusing on the computer screen or on a printed page. And perhaps even lead us to make critical errors of judgment on the trail. To make matters worse, our thirst mechanism often doesn’t kick in until we’ve already lost 2% of our body’s water volume, which means we need to drink before we even get thirsty.

Water is vastly important, more than simply a means of survival.

One glass of water shut down midnight hunger pangs for 100% of the dieters in a University of Washington study.

Lack of water is the #1 trigger of daytime fatigue.

Research has indicated that 8-10 glasses of water a day could significantly ease back and joint pain for up to 80% of sufferers.

Drinking eight glasses of water daily will decrease the risk of colon cancer by 45%, plus it can slash the risk of breast cancer by 79%, and one is 50% less likely to develop bladder cancer.

In addition, extra water can help alleviate pain from heartburn, arthritis, colitis, angina, migraines. It can help lower cholesterol, help cure asthma, hypertension, excess body weight, and ulcers.

And, if that’s not enough to make you want to drink more water, water can also help plump up the skin and make you look younger, especially if you are aging prematurely.

Drinking eight glasses of water a day is considered old-fashioned now, and unnecessary, but who are the ones telling us this? Doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and the soft drink industry, that’s who, the very people who will benefit by our dehydration.

Even though I do drink plenty of water, I tend to get dehydrated easily, which leads to chest congestion (probably to protect those delicate tissues), coughs, and fatigue. I always carry a bottle of water with me, sometimes two. I can’t even imagine going without water for a single hour out in the desert winds and heat, let alone two or three days. (I’m going to have to rethink my water source. I can’t stand the taste of this tap water, though the unpalatable truth is that it takes three times the amount of water to make a water bottle than it does to fill it. Yikes. I always used to attach a filter to my water faucet, but since this isn’t my house, I can’t do that.)

I suppose I could pick a trail with plenty of watering spots and just carry a load of water purifying tablets, though considering all the hikers who have warned me I would need to pack antibiotics and drugs that would cure Giardia if I should get infected, I’m not sure I’d trust those purifiers.

There has to be an answer to my dilemma — going on an epic adventure without having to deal with water issues — but so far, I haven’t found it.

Meantime, I’m going to take a break and drink a glass of water. I hope you will too.

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Posted in culture, life. Tags: 3 days to die of thirst, dehydration, drinking eight glasses of water a day, drought, how much water does it take to make a water bottle, importance of water, mild dehydration. 6 Comments »

Gyro Thinking

April 21, 2014 — Pat Bertram

A gyro ball is a piece of exercise equipment used for strengthening the wrist, fingers, and forearm. It’s about the size of a tennis ball, and is composed of an outer covering and a free-spinning inner gyroscope. The faster the inner ball spins, the more strength you need to hold on to the device, and yet, all you need to keep the gyro going is a gentle circular motion of the wrist.

It seems to me that sometimes we can get caught up in gryo thinking where our thoughts spin and spin, and all it takes to keep those thoughts accelerating with ever increasing strength is to nudge ourselves with reminders of those thoughts. Sometimes the gryo gains such strength that it seems impossible to ever break the cycle.

In my case, what winds up my gyro are affronts. Pure hurts I can deal with face on. Pure anger generally burns itself out within a few hours or maybe a couple of days at most. But affronts — being disregarded or deliberately disrespected — go deep, probably because they touch on ancient hurts and ancient angers.

This is a game two can play. If another person also experiences a similar slight or an offense from the same source, you can really rev each other up. You start out by talking things out, but so often what you are really doing is keeping each other’s wheels spinning.

I’ve never heard of gyro thinking, though I’m sure there is another, more technical name for it. It’s just something I have recently become aware of. (Which makes me wonder — did my having a name for such thinking make way for the concept itself? I only made the correlation after hearing about a gyro ball exerciser and learning how it works.)

I’m not subject to such spinning thoughts very often any more, but when I do feel affronted, I am learning not to feed the gyro. Learning to let the thoughts pass through my mind without holding on to them. Learning to let the spinning wheel turn on its own until it comes to a peaceful stop.

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Posted in culture, life, relationships. Tags: feeding the gyro, gyro ball exerciser, gyro thinking, let thoughts pass out of your mind, pure anger, spinning thoughts. Leave a Comment »

Hunting the Wild Poppy

April 20, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I took myself on a trip to go hunting for wild poppies. To be honest, it wasn’t much of a hunt. I had a location, maps to show me the way, and a whole day to follow wherever the road might lead me. I generally get lost when I’m by myself — a map doesn’t do much good if you’re driving and can’t look at it, and non-existent road signs only exacerbate the problem. (A gps in my phone doesn’t help if the battery goes dead.) Still, I took only a couple of easily corrected wrong turns. I drove on long stretches of desert highway, and then I saw it . . . a poppy nodding in the wind by the side of the road, and I knew I was on the right track.

Gradually, the poppy blooms increased — lining the roads with streams of color.

Off in the distance, the hills glowed orange, and my heart quickened at the realization I was in for a special treat.

Many people just stopped by the side of the road to take photos of the poppies, but I paid to enter the reserve and walk along the miles of paths. I heeded the rules and did not feed, pet, pick, or trample the wild poppies. The reserve is a natural habitat, with no artificial stimulation, not even any watering. The land is left alone to do with as it wishes. And this year it wished to shower me with color.

Oh, my. I’ve never seen anything like those swaths of poppies — it was as if a sunset had fallen from the sky and lay at my feet.

It truly is good to know that in all the turmoil of the world, in all the fights between industrialists and conservationists, in all the swirl of population growth, in all the land-grabbing and land-grubbing, there exists these pristine spots where we can refresh our souls.

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Posted in life, photography. Tags: California poppies, poppies, poppy reserve. 17 Comments »

Break Time is Edited and De-Widowed!

April 19, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I wasted all afternoon getting rid of widows in the Break Time manuscript, the steampunk anthology I wrote with several other authors. Well, not all the widows. My character is a widow, and I can’t get rid of her. The widows I tried to get rid of are the printing variety. The problem is, when you get rid of one of those sneaky little things, another one or two pops up.

To be honest, I don’t see that there is a problem with widows. Widows are the last couple of words of a paragraph that end up at the top of the next page. Truly — so what? I can see that there is a problem when the last few words of the last paragraph of a chapter end up on a page all by themselves. The words seem so . . . lonely. Besides, it would be be like a stop sign, taking readers out of the story. But if a second paragraph begins immediately after the widowed words, who but a purist would even care? And anyway, with ebooks so prevalent, there are no pages, so there can be no widows. Break Tiime will be published as both a print book and an ebook, however, so apparently, widows are a consideration.

If it were just a matter of fixing one or two such problems, that would be fine, but if you alter the formatting so that the widow disappears, it alters the formatting for the rest of the chapter or story, moving the lines around and creating new widows. So you have to fix the new problems, which creates more widows . . . and the next thing you know, the entire evening is gone. Wasted.

That’s the problem with editing — ripples. Anything you do ripples through the whole manuscript. Still . . . we have all done the best we can with Break Time. It’s as good as all its editors can make it.

So . . . hallelujah! Break Time should be ready on its scheduled release date — May 1.

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Posted in writing. Tags: Break Time, editing, steampunk anthology, widows and typesetting, widows in printing. 7 Comments »

Scheduled Obsolescence

April 18, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I’ve grown up with planned obsolescence, so that idea is nothing new to me, but scheduled obsolescence took me by surprise.

There are various types of planned obsolescence. Psychological obsolescence is common in the fashion and automotive industries. Each year, the companies create new designs to make last year’s designs psychologically less appealing, though the product itself is still usable. Physical obsolescence is prevalent in other manufacturing fields, where the designers decide how long a product should last and then only use materials geared to last that long. (In a way this makes sense — if a vegetable grater, for example, goes dull after a year or two, there’s no real reason to make the thing out of expensive materials that will last long after the product has outlived any usefulness.) Often, manufacturers even go so far as to use inferior materials that will make the product wear out faster and speed up replacement time.

Some people argue that planned obsolescence encourages competition and improvement while others claim it increases waste. I don’t believe in waste, though I do understand the need to keep the economy going — if everyone was like me, the economy would have ground to a halt years ago. I mean, how many people out there bought a car forty-two years ago and are still driving it as their one and only source of vehicular transportation? (If you guessed the car is a Volkswagen you’re correct. Back then, Volkswagen bragged about not believing in planned obsolescence, which has worked in my favor.) And then there’s my poor hair dryer that died just this morning — it was only twenty-five years old! If you’re smart (or thrifty) you can often bypass planned obsolescence by doing such things as unplugging lamps and other electrical equipment rather than using the cheaply-made and soon-to-break on/off switches. As for fashion — well, I couldn’t even begin to tell you what was in fashion, either today or twenty years ago.

In some cases, planned obsolescence worked in my favor. Planned obsolescence (thank heavens for spell check! I have mistyped the word obsolescence every single time I’ve used it!) helps keep products cheap. When my camera died after only a couple of years (oddly, the screen burned out right after I took what turned out to be the last photo of my now deceased life mate/soul mate), it would have cost more to repair the camera than to replace it. And when that second camera died in a tragic fall shortly after purchase, I was able to get a replacement that works better than either of the others.

But I’m getting off track. As I said, I’m used to planned obsolescence, but last night I came up against scheduled obsolescence. The end of support for Windows XP made me interested in when support for Vista, my current operating system, will end. I discovered that the end had been scheduled for April 10, 2012, but that they extended it to April 10, 2017. Whew! I still have three years! By then, of course, my computer will be so outdated and so slow I will probably be glad to update my whole system. Or maybe technology will have changed out of all recognition making me want to hang on to this poor machine until its last byte. If nothing else, I could use it as a word processor, unconnected to the internet. That way any vulnerabilities won’t be a problem.

Still, it does seem strange to have the exact date when my operating system is scheduled to become obsolete.

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Posted in culture, internet, life. Tags: end of support for Vista, planned obsolescence, psychological obsolescence, scheduled obsolescence, Vista. 5 Comments »

XP and the End of Days

April 17, 2014 — Pat Bertram

End of days. Sounds like the world crashing down on our heads, doesn’t it? But in this case, all it signifies is that Microsoft is discontinuing support of its XP operating system. To hear tech people tell about it, it is the end of days. So many people are using this supposedly outdated system, that running a computer using Windows XP is a PUBLIC HEALTH RISK! Those outdated systems CAN BE USED TO INFECT OTHER SYSTEMS! They are a danger by becoming a part of a system of bots that ATTACK OTHERS online!

Yep, the end of days is here. And yet, how often have we heard the same old story? At the beginning, computers were called the devil’s work. The spread of computer technology was hailed as the end of civilization as we know it. The millennium bug was supposed to usher in an age of chaos. The current Heartbleed Vulnerability is supposed to make us defenseless against theft of personal information. And now the end of support for Windows XP puts us all at risk.

I suppose the risk factor is true. It is a matter of fact that the spread of computer technology brought massive changes to the world. The millennium bug did take one vast chunk of time to fix, averting disaster at the last minute. And there are always vulnerabilities in computer code that puts us at risk. That’s why we have constant updates to our systems, our browsers, the programs we use — to repair those vulnerabilities.

Apparently, what makes the XP problem so terrible is that more than 30% of personal computers still utilize that particular operating system. Microsoft obviously has never heard of the old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Why else would they have followed up a program that worked, that people loved, with the excoriated Vista? But then, you don’t get to be one of the richest people in the world by embracing the status quo. Some people believe ending support for XP is Microsoft’s way of forcing all those customers to upgrade their systems, but the timing stinks since the newest system, Windows 9, won’t be available for a few more months, so people will be forced to buy soon-to-be-outdated systems.

Still, with so many people hanging on to XP, some because they trust the system, some because they can’t afford to upgrade, there will be plenty of support for “fixes” from outside sources — for a fee, I’m sure. 32% of all PCs is one huge mass of power.

I suppose I should worry about XP, but frankly, I’m more worried about my own operating system. I’m one of the few who have Vista who actually like it, though to be honest, it’s way too powerful for my needs. It’s geared to run the entertainment center for an entire household, and all I use it for is to run my rapidly aging laptop. I can already sense the doom for Vista. If support for XP has ended, can Vista be far behind? They have already stopped upgrading IE for Vista. IE9 is the best I can do, and there are so many bugs in the browser, it’s impossible to use at times. (For example, it keeps trying to open Adobe reader, and since the newer Adobe readers don’t seem to work with Vista, I have an outdated version of that, too, and it takes forever to load the page and the reader. Strangely, the reader has nothing to do with the web page, which adds to the absurdity.) Of course I also have Firefox and Google Chrome, but both of those browsers have features I don’t like and lack ones I do, so I’m never quite sure which one to use. I often have all three open (which is probably a technological mistake, but so far it’s the best I can do).

When Microsoft retires support for Vista, no one but me will care since most people have already updated their systems. There won’t be any furor, no rhetoric about end of times. Just a quiet sigh while I try to figure out what to do about the matter.

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Posted in internet. Tags: browsers, end of support for XP, end of time, IE for Vista, millenium bug, Vista, Windows XP. 11 Comments »

Ah, the Small Joys of Life!

April 16, 2014 — Pat Bertram

A few days ago I ranted about my experience with this area’s designated communications company, and the hassle the representative gave me when they called to tell me some upgraded equipment would be here on Thursday. It seemed important to them that I know the exact date, yet after all that frustration on both our parts, they got the day wrong. The equipment came today. Wednesday. Not a problem, of course, just ironic considering their unpleasantness.

Installation was supposed to take only a few minutes, but wise in the ways of technology updates, I waited until the afternoon when I had many free hours. And I needed them all. Setting up the equipment was easy. I just followed the directions. The hardest part was in moving the couch to access the cable connection. The next hardest part was figuring out which power cord went to the router and which to the modem since neither cord they sent matched the image on the instructions. (I don’t know why I need a router when I didn’t have one before, unless the router was somehow part of the old modem.) Still, my guess seemed to work because all the appropriate lights came on. I even connected my computer to the wireless network despite their having given me two different sets of passwords and network IDs. And then all my efforts came screeching to a halt. My computer didn’t recognize the connection, or maybe the connection didn’t recognize my computer. Every time I tried to open a browser, I got an error message saying they hadn’t sent a package and to call the communication company.

Of course, the representative didn’t know what was wrong, either. She made me reinstall everything. (Luckily, it was just hardware I had to deal with, and hardware is easy —simply a matter of unplugging cords and plugging them in again.) In the end, after many different suggestions and attempts to connect to the internet, she told me to try restarting the computer, and that did the trick.

Although this updated equipment is supposed to make my computer run faster when on the internet, it seems the same to me. Of course, my computer is aged as computers go — more than 7-years-old — but still, there should have been some difference, especially since I added extra memory not too long ago. I’m just glad it doesn’t run slower, which is what happened after the last upgrade.

Despite the nuisance of the experience, I’m smiling as I write this blog. I learned something fun from it. Because of getting two different sets of login information, I could see a pattern in how they came up with passwords. joyfultuba265 was one. jaggedtomato193 was another. (Well, no it wasn’t. I’m not about to plaster my password all over the internet, though I don’t suppose it would matter. It only would work if you were camped outside my father’s house, and if you’re so desperate for free wifi that you would do such a thing, then be my guest.)

It used to be that people were cautioned not to use whole words for passwords, but recently I read that you should. That new decryption programs seemed geared more for nonsense. (Like those riddles where you rack your brain for a solution to no avail, and when someone tells you the answer, it’s so simple you feel like an idiot for not catching on, especially since your five-year-old came up with the answer hours ago.) Either way, from now on when I need a password, I’ll have fun with it. brokenapple964. crookedcucumber157. sillysink414. bananaunt762.

Ah, the small joys of life!

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