Years End

Here I am, at the end of another year and as per usual, I am in a reflective mood.

In just a couple more days, it will be 2020 and that is a Bookmark moment, if only for the symmetry of the numeration.

I think about my mother, who died in 1990 and missed the Millennium by a decade, not that she would have been all that impressed, by all of the hoopla that surrounded that moment.

I also think about my father, who continued on alone, until 1997 and how much he was looking forward to stepping into the next Millennium... and then never got to see it.

My parents were very different people.  Mum was all about emotion and stories and The Movies, given a chance, she would have been Bette Davis, in a second and never looked back.

Dad, well he was the cold and rather unemotional part of the equation.  Mathematics, scientific things and love of everything technical in nature... he got me into computers, when he was 69 and I was a very unconvinced 35 year old!

Dad was on-line, when the modem was an external unit, running at 14.4 Bauds and his computer was a 286, with a 35 megabyte hard drive, visiting bulletin boards... I still remember, how ridiculous it all seemed, waiting interminably for the opening page, of the Image Comics website to load and thinking to myself, "This is BS and it will never catch on..." LOL

These days, when a day rarely passes, without me using my trusty iMac, to surf the Net, send E-Mail, or just watch movies, I realize how right my father was and how wrong I was.

It is a great shame that he missed out, on a lot of amazing things, computer related, that he would have loved.

Napster, Google, High Speed Internet and the HUGE hard drives, that we all take for granted these days.  I am uncertain, of how my dad would have taken to my becoming a Mac user, because he was a true believer in Windows and the PC revolution... even though he never even got to see Windows 98!

So, at this auspicious moment, with 2020 bearing down upon us, rapidly, I want to thank my parents, both long dead now but never far from my thoughts, for their contributions, to making me the person that I am.

I might be a loser, in the eyes of the rest of the world, but I am here, for the whole journey and hopefully, when it is all over, I won't have embarrassed too many more people, or made anymore enemies.

Happy New Year!

And

one last cartoon.

Drawing cartoons, has been a life long interest and I really thought that, way before now, I would have been a whole lot better at it... but I keep at it because it still fascinates me.