Goals and Achievements

Sometimes life is difficult.  One has hopes and dreams, sets goals and plans, only to have them interrupted or discarded, knowing that most are pretty unattainable.  But yet it does not prevent one from continuing to dream, to hope, and maybe eventually to even realize a goal or a plan.

The Breeders Cup is two weeks away. I had hopes of attending the sporting event until I learned the total cost of going and returning, so that I finally decided to stay home. I went to Turf Paradise to reserve a seat and place for the Saturday event.  I did choose the place where I wanted to sit, which is in the reserved t.v. table section near the betting windows.  Since the Breeders Cup is simulcast, all i want to do is to see the t.v. screens and to win huge sums of money.

But the woman said that I would not be able to see the live horses.  If I were going to watch live horse racing I would be in the general section on the ground floor so that I could walk easily in and out to the track to watch the horses from that vantage instead of high up looking down through windows.  I did not bother to explain to her that I was going for the Breeders Cup since it seemed unnecessary if she were to think about it.

At any rate, if I reach my goal of winning the right races with the right amounts of money, I will be able to pursue another goal which is to travel yet to some faraway place.  But to be able to do that, I will have to succeed in reaching and obtaining this goal of a special win.

In the meantime, even at this old age, I still have lots of plans, hopes, and dreams that I hope to achieve despite my declining years.  I am well aware that I do not have much time left to do all that I would like but if I can do a few things right I may at least know that I tried.

Now to try to put my house in order.  That is all for tonight.  I am just thinking aloud on computer paper.

Two new books on Alexander the Great

I went to the half price book store yesterday to see what they might have on the topic  I have been studying for so long. I had never bought Robin Lane Fox's book on ATG because I have so many other books, but there was a hardback published in 1974 that I finally purchased.  I like the illustrations even though they are in black and white, and this is his book on the topic for which he was selected to help make the Oliver Stone movie.  I bought another by a young woman from India which is written for children apparently.  She is another who has followed Alexander's trail in visiting many of the places where he and his famous army traveled.  Her name is Jamila Gavin.  I bought the book since it was cheap but also for a story about a white stag which I found very interesting to read.

People wonder at me and my interest in Alexander.  The first time I saw him in soul experience through autohypnosis I learned that he was a lady's man.   He had four women who are his loves that I recalled through my soul searching.  I also saw Julius Caesar through my soul experience but Caesar is a person who I have left untouched since I had taught the play at Cortez when I first began my teaching career.  I have many projects related to Caesar as a result of that time, and I did not want to go back in time to learn any more about him than I did in that one experience where I saw his scarlet cloak, his home, his wife, and himself riding a chariot.  I remember it as well as when I first saw Alexander.  Since both Louis XIV and Alexander took so much of my personal time I have not tried to study Caesar or Genghis Khan in the same fashion.  I have learned much about this puzzle of time travel through soul searching and as it consumes so much of my time, I will wait for the right time to pursue it if I decide to do so.

I have yet to determine exactly what all this soul searching does reveal about myself in the ability to do it.  I do not necessarily claim anything but the fact that I have tapped into these men's lives.  I consider it a judgement call of some kind. It has revolutionized my thinking about religious beliefs. I am convinced that most belief systems are simply hereditary and all who continue to teach are guilty only of passing on information that had been told to them.  Each one of us has the right to examine and to learn truth for ourselves.  I am not trying to convince anyone of anything but that I have had the opportunity to examine a few men's lives of the past, and while some others have been exposed to me, I have selected so far to let them remain dormant.

I will close for awhile. I am about to take a shower and I see men outside on my patio.

Roofers have arrived!

This remodeling project has been the worst experience I have ever undergone mostly because I was around to see each and every part of it happen.  It has been one long hellish summer which I will never forget.  But finally today, action has begun on putting the roofing material on my apartment section.  So at long last, we can feel that the end is near, and soon this building will be totally finished with all this remodeling for the exterior portion.  Landscaping will follow but that will be mild in comparison to all that has gone on before.  At least, I am hoping that it will be.

Patio furniture and accessories that had been placed in storage were returned to the owners yesterday. Since I had stored my chairs in my own storage area, I had taken them out long before all the neighbors had theirs out. I saw that a few others had done the same as I so that I am not the only one keeping my property safely in my possession.  I stored only those things that I would not need at any particular time so finally all those have reappeared. I had only three boxes filled with pillows for the chairs and pots for the plants.  One big beautiful pot I had forgotten entirely until I saw it again.  All these pots are from my neighbor Richard who gave them to me when he was forced to foreclose on his home.

I inherited them for letting him store his belongings in our family garage while he was having difficulties. I think about him often even yet, having taken in so many of his things.

Our worst fear in this remodeling episode is that the rent will escalate at a price that none of us want so that I am looking and planning already to move to some other place, hopefully, my final move. I am considering Las Vegas area again as I have wanted to move there for some time.  Taxes are the real reason.  Arizona's state taxes are far too high imho.

I will be so happy when this small roofing area is covered so that they can move next door to my neighbor's.  Since it is a small area it should take just a little time to cover completely. I hope that they do the job as completely as possible so that they do not have to return to finish later.  They did do that yesterday on building one which puzzled me.  I had been told that they would be doing my building but instead they were finishing up on Building one....

At least the end is near....thank Heaven!

Brand new phone

It has been a long time since I wrote anything here.  This has been the most hectic and worst summer that I have had in a long time. I can never remember any being as bad as this one has been for me.

But rather than discuss it all now, I want to spend this time dwelling on the positive if I can find a way to do that.

I bought my first cellphone some years ago, and the first cell phone that I bought was an HTC from Sprint which I really liked a lot.  The salesmen who sold it to me was a Leonardo di Caprio lookalike who had come in from Kansas to sell this phone.  Later, a movie at Harkins was starring Leonardo and there was a Sprint tie in to the movie which I did see and do understand the connection between the use of the phone and the movie.  That was a long time ago.

When my contract was up, I traded it in for a Samsung after waiting for the iPhone 5 but since it was so small in size in comparison to what I had had, I went with the Samsung Galaxy 3.  I like some things about Samsung, and some things about HTC. It turns out all these phones are not only competitive but there is a lot of company pride at stake as well as profits.

So now that my two year contract with Sprint came to an end and it was time to trade up I opted for the iPhone 6 plus since Apple decided to compete with Samsung who was clearly performing much better with their phones than Apple had done, keeping only its faithful users. I did not like its small size and said so after I bought my computer.  I like the larger size so I went for the plus which is really the size I need being a senior citizen with bad vision right now.

Since I just bought it, I am learning it and adjusting to the differences. I think everyone should own both phones to appreciate both, especially employees of Apple. Samsung has some features which are clearly better than apple, but apple has features that are clearly better than Samsung. If you could only get the best of both it would be great. But I like the Apple phone I am using at present. I still have a second phone but intend to terminate that phone service and have only one.  Unfortunately, too many times I realize why one should have two phones.  But in my case, one is more than enough.

It has taken me a long time to adjust to the Apple computer as I do not use a computer as much now as I did in the past.  I have no idea what windows 8 is or what windows 10 will be.  I like Apple well enough to use only it but I have had two android phones now, Samsung and HTC.  Both are good operating devices with totally different features. My main objection to both is the ease with which they can be hacked into and that was my main complaint about microsoft.  It is too easy to get viruses  and malware even with protection. I had had protection but they still continued to plague me. I am even concerned a bit about apple and will have it tuned up and checked to see if anyone has gotten into it.

But supposedly, Apple is less likely to get viruses than Windows.

I have to go to Sprint this week to see about turning in my Samsung phone and getting the data from it onto my new phone. I spent the evening cleaning out my photos and wondered how the heck did some get there.  I had not put them there and not all could be the photos that come with the phone.

Many strange games going on in the world of computers but at last I have a phone that is compatible with my computer.  I can even use pages on my phone it turns out...I will try that to see how that works.

But so far, I have limited my apps to the few that I actually use.
Good night. I must go to bed now.

Free movies on Epix this weekend.

I caught several free movies this weekend thanks to Epix trying to gain new viewers so that we had a free preview. I will finally see Leonardo diCaprio's Wolf of Wall Street tonight if I remember to put it on. I have made a mental note to see it, even though the previews annoy me.

I finally learned the reason for the obsession with Zombies when I saw World War Z which is one of the more stupid but possibly valid movies of recent times.  It makes me think of the Ebola outbreak in Africa now.  It has the same health organization stamp and fear mongering tactic.  I am rather convinced that real life is often preceded by reel life.

I may even subscribe to Epix for 6 months...it is a maybe at this point. I do not watch t.v. that much to  pay for movies too.   But it is not a bad price at $5.00 per month for six months...problem is always when those six months are up as they fly by pretty fast.

I did see Jack Reacher too and while I liked it in some ways, I hated it in others.  We have so much real violence I don't appreciate vicarious thrills that are just ugly and violent.  Of course, in a movie, there is always a hero who does great things to bring and end to injustice.  

Anchorman 2 was on but it was so dumb that I ended up watching QVC instead.  Finally, horse racing has come on so I am working on both the lottery games and the horses.  Not betting until the PA race with California Chrome this coming Saturday.

Jack Reacher reminded me of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a lot for some reason. Guess it was the Russian prisoner...would it not be nice if authors and movies would not imitate each other so much....?  It seems that carbon copies is the lifestyle of publishing companies and movie land.

Update on iPhone 6

I deleted the previous post about the iPhone 6.  I sometimes just use this blog to air my feelings on a given day and much of it is just to air it out.  Having reread some of it I decided that I would rewrite it.

I did go to Sprint and am leasing an iPhone 6 for two years.  One has the option of renewing the lease at the end of the two years or buying it for a cost of $210 for my phone. I bought the iPhone 6 plus because I like the larger sized phone.

It should be here soon so when it comes in I will be sure to add to this or write another update!

Creative Writing

I am reading Vicky Shecter's book called Cleopatra's Moon which is about the children of Cleopatra and Mark Antony who were sent to Rome following the death of their parents.  In reading this story, the deaths of both Mark Antony and Cleopatra remind me of Romeo and Juliet.  Vicky does include at the end of the novel some information about the historical version of the lot of these children so that one can tell the difference between fact and fiction.

In that respect, I am impressed with Vicky's imagination and ability to spin a story about these children that makes the reader want to know more about each of them. Unfortunately, little is actually known about them historically so that one can only congratulate Vicky for her vivid imagination in creating possible scenarios.  I enjoy reading the tale from this angle as she creates some pretty fascinating and plausible conflicts.

I am intrigued by her descriptions of the Egyptian lifestyle versus the Roman lifestyle in which we gain some insights into the type of propaganda that the Romans used to create enmity and hostility against Cleopatra.  The daughter's memories of her mother are poignant to consider how royalty always seemed to suffer in years gone by.  To be born into a royal family promised not only luxury and power but also fear and death to so many.

I am an avid reader of many books.  For a time, I was always partial to mystery books for the simple fact of trying to solve the mystery along with the detective.  This came from reading far too many Agatha Christie novels where the reader is always matching wits with the writer so that I always tried to figure out the culprit long before the writer finally revealed it. It is a game that way that many mystery writers like to use.    Both Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie likes to place clues to both mislead and to develop the final conclusion.  That is an art in itself.

Historical fiction is fascinating if one is interested in the characters of real life history at all.  Most of the time, the authors who write historical fiction twist and turn the story lines to be more fiction than actual fact so that the history itself is irrelevant to the story.  A few like to follow history as closely as possible to make it appear the way that that author seems to think the characters would have behaved or thought.  Again, one must be careful to note that despite the character being a real personality, the story itself is only the author's vivid imagination which probably is very different from the real facts.

In the case of Cleopatra's Moon, one can only imagine how the children felt when they were taken to Rome so abruptly to live with Octavius.  There is no written record to verify on which ship they were transported from Alexandria to Rome.  I give Vicky a lot of credit for thinking about these young children to write an entire novel about their experiences so that we can appreciate the sorrowful plight that they suffered.  Were they handled with kid gloves or were they abused and mistreated?  We know that Caesar had been assassinated through fear of his gaining too much power and that the Roman soldiers taunted Jesus Christ for his being a King of the Jews, so it is very likely that the Roman sailors probably showed great disdain and contempt for the young royal children of Egypt as well.  One can only wonder.

The important lesson I am learning from Vicky is the use of good versus evil in this story.  She creates a credible story  of opposing forces with enough conflicts to maintain a fast pace in the telling of the story. I am realizing at how difficult it is for me to create conflicts employing evil sins versus good virtues.  I had had difficulty with that when writing a mystery murder story...I could not think like a murderer enough to develop a murderer.  In my other attempts at creating a plot, I have too often omitted evil characters when I realize that i must employ a few.   Some are there historically but I have yet to fully develop those characters.  I think about my own storyline when reading hers.  She has actually done me a favor through her research and her creativity because I can see where I need to  flesh out my own characters more fully than I have.

It intrigues and fascinates me that Vicky is as interested in Rome and Greece as I have been.  Cleopatra is probably one of the most awesome women in world history simply because she is linked with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.  A very young girl who has snared two of the most powerful Roman soldiers in Rome's history is without doubt a woman of unique talents and power.  She has caught the imagination of many a historian and author, and so it is fascinating to see her through her daughter's eyes.

(to be continued).