Harrapatuta

One would think that not having a TV or cable would gives me tons of free time for sleep, walks, and if it was 1995, reading.  I do catch a show now and then but the days are painfully quick.  Being old(er) sucks the big weenie in the sky.  At least an NFL football game seems to last forever.  Even an average game gets dissected in HD from every possible angle. If the backup to the backup running back has a sprain, you get to see the sideline reporter catch a bit of audio and there just happens to be a therapist or orthopedic surgeon to explain why this sprain is all right ("Walk it off, Rudy!") or serious.

I "suspended" my Netflix account but I sort of miss it.  It's still one of those badges of honor with me, like the magazine subscriptions I still keep paying for yet never read.  On one of the shelves, I have National Geographic, Smithsonian and a few cooking magazines.  The Smithsonian and NatGeo subscriptions weren't originally mine but I inherited it.  What I should do is sneak them into some doctor's office.  I'm sure they'd be just as interesting as the May 2003 edition of "People" or "Us."  Ok, not really.  I can't imagine where I could find slight cerebral people who can appreciate "The Lost Kingdom of Boom Shakalaka" or "U.S. Banana Boat Diplomacy of 1898."

I was a few minutes into an episode of "Covert Affairs" (Amazon Prime) and I had to stop watching not so much because of the story - spies, pretty Blonde, scary operatives with scary agendas - but because I want to travel and see something unfamiliar.  It's quite upsetting to think that most people - read: me - never move more than 100 miles from where they live.  I don't know about you, but short vacations don't count.  I know of someone who's on a short vacation to Scandinavia and another family in Portugal.  It's probably help if I bothered to learn Spanish or some other useful language.  In college I tried to pick up a smattering of Polish (girlfriend) and even Chinese (friend).  I have a panoply of computer languages that I even get to use, but it's not really the same.  I know I can learn a foreign tongue if I just immersed myself in it much like picking up some cold, hard application.