Trivia on a Thursday

Thanks so much for all your lovely comments. I have not had the time to visit you all yet, but fully intend to this weekend. I topple into bed every night with a growing list of all the things I meant to do and never got round to doing. Groan.

There are lots of posts about at the moment on being "busy". I absolutely agree with them all. We spend too much time doing and too little being. I am the supreme example of this at the moment. I was wide awake last night when my mother and my son went to bed, and 2 minutes later, I dozed off in the chair and woke near midnight. I never did do all that paperwork I intended doing.

I have just deleted a paragraph of moans. I have been thinking about Heather all day. It sort of puts things into perspective. So what if the Inland Revenue NEVER answer their phones, and just tell you to try later? So what if school politics are still volatile? So what if you constantly feel guilty for not taking your mother out more often?

And now for something very different... I am watching a TV programme called "The Human Footprint" and it is all about the lifetime of an average person and the stats involved. Apparently the average marriage lasts 11 and a half years now. That is appalling. They showed the average number of clothes you will buy in a life time. It covered an entire ancient church. We have seen a pile of food that the average person will eat in a life time, and also the sewage generated. I could have done without that part. It is fascinating. The average age we will reach is 78.5 I think. We will get through 15 computers each. The environmental cost of producing a small laptop is the same as a car. We will send 40 tons of waste to landfill sights in our lifetime. Each. (See why it is fascinating?) We will each own on average of 8 cars each. We walk over 15 000 miles in a life time and drive average 452 652 miles. Which means 136, 900 litres of petrol. 59 foreign holidays. TV is watched average of 2 944 days in our lives. 8 years. 40% of people do NOT read at all. This is all British, I add. 2455 newspapers. 24 trees will be used for each of us to read those papers. We will vote in about 50 elections. Drink 74 802 cups of tea. (Not me!) 314 visits to the doctor. 30 000 tablets prescribed. 61 and a half litres of tears. We will have had 104 390 dreams. Our memories and dreams are the most enduring things we possess. Each of us will know on average 1700 people.

So, it is time for sleep again. Tomorrow is Friday, and another week has flown by. I need to slow down.

Television

It is late and I should be crawling into bed for some much needed sleep, but I have been watching Extreme Makeover Home Edition. I am completely hooked I confess. The new season has started and I will be a zombie till it is over. And then there are the re-runs of course. The feel good factor is great, and I think it must be such a wonderful job to have...... to give people who really deserve it, the home of their dreams. Making people happy (or happier rather, as they are all super, positive, hope-filled people) is a lovely concept.

Then there is CSI in all its forms. And Medical Investigations. And Bones. They are all American programmes, but I love them all.

I tried to do a hyperlink thingy. I can't. I don't know what to do. It is driving me crackers. And I hate having to ask my child to show me what to do and then he moves so fast I can't see a thing. At least I knew what a hyperlink was. That is something. I remember the first calculators, that were the size of a modern laptop. And you had to plug them in to the mains. I remember going on a school trip to see a computer. It took up the entire basement of a massive building (the Old Mutual in Cape Town). I remember that in South Africa we only got TV in 1972 or 3. It was banned before. I did Matric maths using a log book and slide rule. I remember thinking life was complete with the advent of the fax machine. That was 1990. The home fax. Then came email, the internet, broadband, mobile phones. Cordless telephones and kettles. Microwaves. I sound as though I am a dinosaur. When I had my first son, my gynae didn't trust new fangled ultrasounds and epidurals. Car seats for kids and safety belts did not exist. Where was I???? Hyperlinks. Sigh. I did learn how to add photos to this blog. So I will learn how to do the hyperlinks. One day.