I woke up this morning with an Earworm. No, not an earwig. You don’t know what that is? Yes, it is different than an earwig. According to Mirriam Webster, an Earworm is song or melody that keeps repeating in one’s mind after it is no longer playing. According to Psychology Today, one study found that nearly 92% of people report having such an experience once a week or more frequently. I definitely fall in the more frequently category. For me, there are good earworms and bad earworms. A Bad Earworm plays and replays catchy songs that I hate or even worse, commercial jingles. Think Meow Mix (Meow, meow, meow, meow. Meow, meow, meow, meow. Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow). My Earworm today is a good Earworm, meaning it is a song I really like even though I’d like to turn it off for a while. I contracted this Earworm listening to a live performance by on YouTube. A forgotten song pops up, often by a performer I haven’t heard in a while, always with catchy lyrics and tune, and … CLICK … the music player in my brain starts playing it, over and over. Today’s Earworm is typical …the tune is On the Radio by Donna Summer, a great song by a performer I perhaps underappreciated.
If you are a college football fan, you probably think this post is about the NCAA Football transfer portal, which allows players enrolled at one school to transfer at any time as long as they have remaining eligibility. It’s not. This post is about the online Health Portal which comes with my health plan here in Utah. By signing on to The Portal, I can make appointments with my doctors, request refills of prescriptions, check the dates of previous visits and review the results of those visits. For person who doesn’t like using the phone, isn’t good with dates and doesn’t maintain a personal calendar recording everything I do (as my wife does), it is a Godsend for monitoring my health care. Another feature is that results of tests, from simple blood work to MRIs, show up quickly in The Portal, often a day or two before the doctor gats back to you with the results. That is a feature on which my wife and I have a difference of opinion. She waits to hear what her doctor says about the results and I look as soon as the results appear in The Portal. 
If there is a hell … and I am in fact bound there … the perfect torture would be sitting in an airport, waiting for a flight that is delayed. Originally, say, it was scheduled for 11:42, boarding at 11:02. It is now10:30 and I have been sitting at the gate for almost an hour trying to ignore the guy in the next row talking loudly into his phone, closing the deal of the century. Seriously, don’t you wonder if there’s no one on the line and these guys just want to sound important. There is a gaggle of business folks returning from a convention, bursting with comradery and yucking it up about something that happened as they finished the day in the hotel bar. There’s a family with three adorable kids who just got off a connecting flight and are so full of energy spontaneous combustion is not out of the question. They squeal and laugh and run. I love kids but I hate airports which cancels out the love of kids. As I am fetching my Bose noise cancelling headphones from my carry-on, I look up just in time to see the departure time click from 11:42 to Delayed 12:05 on the flight status board. Shit! And over the next two hours, the flight delay will advance maddeningly in 20 minute increments until either the flight is cancelled or, finally, blessedly, the loudspeaker announce We will begin boarding in 20 minutes. But wait. This is hell! The flight delays go on for eternity and the businessman never stops talking and the conference goers laugh louder and louder and more adorable kids show up and my headphone batteries are dead. I would be pulling out may hair if I had any.
Yesterday, we needed to get my wife, Muri’s, car smog checked and registered. Unlike smog check and registration in California, here we can do it in a single stop at any authorized shop. And we can generally do it without an appointment and in fifteen minutes or so. When we walked into our favorite auto shop, Tunex, the manager said, How are you? I instinctively answered, I’m good. When I went back to the sit next to my wife in the waiting area, she looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and said, Liar! Hmmm. Well, the truth is we have been going through some difficult times and my answer was a lie. The incident brought me back to a vacation in Clearwater, FL. My kids were really kids back then and my daughter, always a social butterfly, made friend with a girl her age in the pool. We soon met her parents and began to hang around with them. Her dad was Scottish and spoke with a brogue that was sometimes hard for these American ears to understand. One afternoon, he looked at me and said, When you folks say, “How are you?” you don’t really mean it, do you? It’s just a way of saying hello. Of course, he was right, and we had a good laugh about it. 
My wife, Muri, and I could hardly be called philanthropists, but we do our best to support charities. We have been most fortunate in our lives and it only seems right. Muri mostly takes care of the medical research organizations like the American Cancer Society and the American Diabetes Association. We usually support research in areas that have affected us, our family and friends. Monthly, she donates to one or two of our causes, using a rotation formula only she knows. I donate monthly to several causes and donate, mostly online, to causes as the urge strikes me. In addition to medical causes, I donate to animal causes like the ASPCA and Humane society and to environmental causes like the Sierra Club. And political contributions. I never made political donations until 2020, when Trump was threatening to get four more years. I donated to anti-Trump organizations like The Lincoln Project, to the Democratic Party and to critical democratic candidates, quite generously for a mostly non-political guy. 
No, that’s not a typo in the title. In spite of my advanced age, I know what year it is (2021, right?). But I was born on this date in 1944, making this my 78th birthday (2022-1944=78. See? I is still good at math). So the question of the moment is what a music loving septuagenarian music lover will play on his birthday. The obvious (if not original) choice is the classic Happy Birthday we been forced to sing since we were kids. My favorite version:
Like what seems like 90% of the country, I am caught up in the Wordle craze, trying to guess an arbitrary five letter word in six (or fewer) tries. Just in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, here’s how it works. You enter your first guess into the first row of the Wordle board the press Enter. Wordle responds by showing you which letters are actually in the word of the day, green meaning the letter is in the right place in the word and yellow meaning the letter is in the wrong place. Letters that are not in the word are shaded gray. Each guess must be a word in Wordle’s list of acceptable five letter words. The best part is sharing how many guesses you needed (without giving
away the answer) by posting your solution on social media showing only the color of your guesses without letters. Wordle keeps track of how many guesses it takes in a chart shown on the right. You can see that most often, it takes me 4 guesses but that on good days I can get 2 or 3 … or 5 or 6 on bad days. In 63 games, I’ve always gotten the word in at most six guesses. My average score (using the 
On the last day of December 2021, I retired. There was no retirement dinner, no gold watch, just an emailed letter to my business partner stating that I was retiring and the business was now his. We really hadn’t had any business since early in the year … my only responsibilities had been maintaining contact with certain websites that allowed us to work for the government. So, there is really no change in my days to mark the occasion. But even at 77 years old, it feels odd. For over thirty years, I have written in a journal most morning, a remnant of something Julia Cameron called Morning Pages in her book, The Artist’s Way. It was part of a plan to bring out my Inner Artist, and indeed it did. I took classes in creative writing, published a short story and wrote a novel (unpublished). I began painting and photography. I started this blog that has over 2000 posts on it and another to display my art. At the end of my pages each morning, I would write four letters (M for Mystic, A for Artist, S for Scientist and E for entrepreneur). In a small attempt to keep some balance in my life, I would order the letters to correspond to the extent that my previous day was occupied with each of the four. For example, S, A, M, E would mean that most of my time was spent on Science and Art, while spirituality and business were less important. 
Older Eyes 