I am visiting my parents for their 60th wedding anniversary celebration. I am back in the mountains with which I have a love/hate relationship. I love the mountains almost as much as I love the water. They are serene in a majestic unchanging way just as the ocean is majestic in its never ending dance. I hate them because they feel like a trap. You know the I can’t wait to get out of here wanderlust of an impatient teen kind of hate.

Hardly anyone seems to stay married for 60 years anymore. I mean anyone my age. Not all, but most of my friends and acquaintances are not long timers like that. We either married later or are divorced or widowed or never married at all or society wouldn’t let us marry due to their out-dated mores. I’m not judging because there are people who are married for lots of years that can’t stand each other and getting out of a bad relationship is better than trying to set some record for just gutting it out until the bitter end.

I will be seeing all my siblings and a lot of my aunts and uncles and cousins and other acquaintances. I am nervous about that because I don’t like crowds and I hate that feeling of ‘I aught to know you but can’t remember your name’. I seem stand-offish but I’m just not all that comfortable in a group (but I have written that before). As my parents get older I wonder every time I see them if this is the last time. My Dad is frail, but he is a tough old mountain man. My Mom is just too busy for the death angel to find her and she will rassle with him/her/it when the time comes.

Now for some geeky stuff: I am performing an experiment that is really pushing my IT buttons. I am going to try to cut the cord to my PC past. For the next while I am going to try to use my new iPad Air exclusively for all my web surfing and writing and emailing and face-booking and blogging. I want my mouse really bad, but you can’t use a mouse with a touch screen device. I am unsure about using a word processor other than MS Word (which I have used for way longer than I wish to admit). I just loaded Pages on my iPad, but I am open to any good suggestions you may have. I don’t want to spend the $100 MS wants for Word for iPad, I’m just cheap. Also, I think that the days of paying that kind of money for a word processor are gone. There are too many good and free options around.

I also want to use as many free apps as I can. I am willing to pay for software and apps, but this is an experiment isn’t it? I also got the lowest end iPad so I am going to store all my “stuff” on the cloud somewhere. I have a DropBox account and use Google Drive and Evernote and will use iCloud. I want everything on me or in my messenger bag, but I also want everything where I can get to it regardless of where I am or what network enabled device I have. I’m going to try to stay with the free accounts, so I’ll let you know how that progresses as I get more stuff saved on ‘cloud’ storage.

I have never recommended a web site or blog but I am giving a shout out to a great site this just celebrated it’s first year online: The Bitter Southerner (www.bittersoutherner.com). This is a venture about the South, the real South, the new South. If you haven’t stumbled across it and you consider yourself a southerner, give it a try.

Alas, I must go “once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” See y’all around.