Good morning! Today is not only Cinco de Mayo, it’s also Taco Tuesday! On top of that, it’s my middle daughter’s 20th birthday, leaving us with only one more child in the ‘teens.
The days are long but the years are short.
Yesterday was “May the Fourth be with You” Day. I remember going with a friend to see the original Star Wars movie when it landed in theaters in 1977. We were awed by the story, the characters and the special effects. I bought posters, action figures and a t-shirt (that I still have!). That was 43 years ago.
The days are long but the years are short.
Yesterday I was knocked off the Internet because of a problem with my ISP. I started the day fine, but access dropped around 10:30 a.m. The recorded message on their customer service line told me that they expected to have the problem fixed by “5:36 p.m.” How they deduced that specific minute is beyond me, but that made it impossible for me to do any work for my paid gig. Fortunately, I had no scheduled meetings and the company runs a solid operation that has demonstrated the priority of their employees, especially during this time of CoronaCare.ᵀᴹ
While I was waiting for Internet access to be restored, I needed to mail a few things, first at the UPS store and then at the Post Office. Because I work from home full-time, I rarely need to go anywhere, so this was the first time I had gone to a store in what seems like forever. It was weird to experience first hand the impact of the Chinese Lung Pox: every single person wearing a mask, some wearing gloves, hash marks every six feet on the floor to keep customers appropriately spread apart. I didn’t have a mask with me, so I fashioned one from a piece of chamois used to clean my sunglasses and just pressed it to my nose and mouth.
My questions: are these measures really helping at this point? Aren’t we all going to be exposed to it eventually?
Internet service was finally restored between 10 and 10:30 p.m. last night, resulting in this truncated—and personal—Daily Broadside.
The days are long …
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I don’t know who created the saying, “The days are long but the years are short.” It may be one of those bits of accumulated wisdom that gathers itself over years and then is woven into the fabric of shared culture, but no one is exactly sure where the thread came from.
Gretchen Rubin takes credit for it when she says, “And of everything that I’ve ever written, that short video story—with its single sentence, “The days are long, but the years are short”—seems to resonate most deeply with people.”