Coming to you live from 1893...

Meters swum today: 2000. Whoo-hoo!
Playing in the background: the soothing hum of electric clippers

Hello all, I am at Dallas Heritage Village where my time traveling neocraftsperson friends, Tammy and Tracy, are shearing sheep! I have enormous respect for turn of the century farmers. Merely catching one of the large obstreperous wooly things looks like work enough. Then you gotta get them to lie down (yanking their feets out from under them looks to be the best method), hold them still and run a pair of clippers all over their bodies. Meanwhile, it's not like you can tell them to hold still, so they kick and squirm and sometimes get nicked. Then they bleed and the troop of Girl Scouts watching this extravaganza starts screaming, "You're killing him!" A day in the life of a living history museum docent, I guess. And I complain when our server goes down and my monitor forgets which backdrop it was using.

Couple days ago we had a bad storm here and the power went out. Not in my part of town but points further north. Some folks still don't have electricity and you'd think it was the apocalypse from the tone some of the distressed residents were using with the reporters. "Oh, it's terrible, I have to light candles and there's no hot water for showers!" Uh well, ya could go to bed when it gets dark, and take showers at the gym, couldn't ya? I probably shouldn't say anything because we've never lost power for more than a few hours, and never in summer when it's brutally hot (winter wouldn't be so bad because we have a gas fireplace.)

We do take a lot of this stuff for granted, tho. You shear sheep to get wool to make blankets. You burn oil to turn big turbines to make electricity that travels hundreds of miles across power lines made of rubber and metal that come from factories that run on electricity so it can come to your house, or your living history museum, to power the electric clippers that shear the sheep.

(Yes, they did have electric clippers in 1893.)

Anyway, everything we use, from electricity to wool to Blackberries (like this here 1893 model), comes from somewhere. Things are made up of other things that come from somewhere. Somebody makes those things. That's somebody's job. Think about this for long enough and you see how interconnected we all are. We need each other. Everybody does something important, however small. Makes you wonder if the person to whom you give the finger on the freeway could be the guy who makes the component part of your engine that keeps it from leaping out of your hood in a big ugly mess when you slam on your brakes in heavy traffic.

There's only one thing for it. Be nice to everybody.

Sucks, don't it?

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