My old coot tends to haunt me by clinking ice cubes when I am home alone during the cocktail hour. I believe he is also responsible for leading us to Maggie, a chop-shop Honda Civic that has lived a good, long second life in the hands of one of the beach urchins. (The Engineer was probably involved with that one too.) And then there was the life-changing day I found a perfect piece of purple beach glass underneath my kayak. At the end of that day, the loverly career that I have today began the rather tortuous process of falling into my lap. (Crazy? Yeah, maybe…)

The Commander? She haunts me on the Internet.

Yes, really.

You are reading my blahg, so take a gander at the little Flickr widget on the right. I have a whole bunch of random photos out on Flickr and that widget is set to show a random selection. I do not know what photos you are seeing. What *I* usually see are photos of The Commander. Old photos from when she was young, with us when we were kids, with her grandchildren, making funny faces with Grandroobly, hanging out with Radical Betty and Cam, all kinds of stuff. I know this widget is supposed to display *random* photos, so it’s weird to me that my mother shows up in all or most of the photos almost all the time. Occasionally I do get a truly random set but more often than not, it’s all The Comm. Is she haunting me [grin]?

Today, I got the message in the photo from Twitter in my email. Actually, it came to Froggy and yes, he is on Twitter. He usually doesn’t tweet much of anything because he is usually banished to his “londry” basket to sleep off all those laundry detergent / listerine cocktails. Yes, The Commander had a Twitter account. I think she tweeted about 15 times. Her first *real* tweet was, “I’ve been sorting pins”.

The Commander finagled her first computer back in the late 1990s. I will never forget receiving an email from Jack & Fran Fin. Whaaaaa? Totally out of the blue. We (my brother and I) had been kind of bugging her to get online. We were both full of advice, some of it conflicting, and she decided to just do it herself. Grandroobly never quite caught on* but that would be a whole ‘nother story and I think he enjoyed looking at pictures that people sent, etc.

Our online lives accelerated during the last few years of The Comm’s life. She tried to keep up. She used on-line banking (and struggled with it a bit…). She set up that Twitter account (with the GG’s help). She bought an iPhone!!! And learned to text message! She never joined facebook. I thought about helping her with that a few times but I decided that if facebook was too complicated for me (and it is but I just muddle), it would be incomprehensible to her. I will never forget the day that I set up The Comm for a facebook chat (on my account) with her granddaughter in Cali (at that time). She told everyone she encountered about that chat.

I am joking about my moom haunting me via the internet. I can’t help wondering what new-fangled technologies will flummox me when I reach the end of my life and am so focused on things like how to get to the bathroom, etc., that I can’t absorb new technology. The Commander persevered almost until the end.

* Short story: My dad was a banking executive who was involved in the original transformation of his bank’s records to computerized format. It was not a fun experience. On the other hand, after he retired from that job, he worked free-lance doing bookkeeping for some rich old ladies and he was entranced when I showed him Excel on our old MacPlus.

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