I have peach fuzz. Not an all-out mustache, but peach fuzz.
If I curl my upper lip just right, I can feel them as they touch the skin just beneath my nose. The caress of the facial hair is not unwelcome, I find. It is much more pleasant on my sensitive skin than my husband’s five o’clock shadow can be.
I have peach fuzz. Not an all-out mustache, but peach fuzz.
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My idea for the technology fast started when Jennifer Lawrence’s naked pictures made it from her personal device to the internet. The invasion of her personal life bothered me. That got me to thinking about privacy. Do we have it anymore? I don’t think so. The work e-mails we send are monitored by our businesses. The personal e-mails we send are monitored by Google. The Facebook messages we send are monitored by the folks at Facebook. The same goes for Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. But the truth is that it does not stop there. The mail we send can be intercepted by the post office. The text messages we send can be tracked by our phone companies, as can our phone calls. If we use our debit cards or check cards, those purchases are tracked by our banks. Using a navigation system on your phone or on your dashboard? Chances are that your destinations are being recorded. I think that the same applies for home phone lines. It is not just our communications that are being monitored.
Article by: Cyndia Rios Myers
Original Photo Credit: Flickr As I type this, I am at my desk, sitting ramrod straight. I am trying to not make any quick, jerky movements, as I don’t want to aggravate Labyrinthitis that is currently affecting my inner ear. Or ears. It might be one or both. Thanks to a savvy ER doctor, I’m on two separate medications to treat the two horrible symptoms I am feeling - nausea and vertigo/dizziness. Apparently, Labyrinthitis is brought on by a virus or bacteria. Who knows what the heck I was exposed to that brought on this awful irritation and swelling of my inner ear? I joined the Navy during a low engagement time, and got out of the Navy less than a month before the events of 9/11, so I didn’t see any wartime engagement.
Still, it was the Navy, so I had lots of time at sea. My job was that of an OS, or an Operations Specialist. People in my rating specialized in several shipbound warfare areas; undersea warfare, anti-aircraft warfare, surface warfare, and a couple of other areas, too. Being that our eyes had to be open to all sorts of “pictures,” meant that we had to work in an area where we could “see” (through radar and not through windows) everything around us. That space was called Combat Information Center, CIC, or simply “Combat.” We Operations Specialists didn’t work there alone, but shared the space with other ratings such as those of Fire Controlmen, Electronic Warfare Specialists, and an occasional Sonar Technician or two. I was raised in a home where both English and Spanish words bounced off the walls. Actually, it was probably more unilingual as my parents spoke only Spanish to each other. My older sister learned English in school, and I learned English from her. By the time my little brother came around, English was the predominant language in our home. Understandably, English was my first language, but Spanish was a somewhat strong second one, as my mother and father continued to speak to me in it, even while I answered them in another.
However, a permanent move from the United States to Puerto Rico changed all of that. At the age of ten, I shelved English as my language of choice and replaced it with my rusty Spanish. My first few months there were very rough. While I was able to speak to my sister, brother, and mother in English, we were greatly outnumbered by Spanish speakers. My aunts, uncles and cousins laughed at me while they corrected my speech. I didn’t like being mocked, so I worked hard at mastering Spanish. On a sunny autumn day in 1982, three girls set off from their homes on South Tenth Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and headed five blocks west to Forest Home Avenue School on West Burnham Street to collect a little boy from his Pre-Kindergarten class. The three girls were close friends; two of them were sisters that were two years apart in age, and the third was a classmate of the older of the two sisters. The sisters and the friend had the good fortune to live across the street from each other. They enjoyed spending time at each other’s houses; the parents of the sisters even enjoyed the company of the parents of the other girl.
Have you seen the latest in greatest in televisions? I have, but only because I went to my local Best Buy in search of something else. (Which is an interesting conversation on its own. See the sidebar for more information on that). The curved panels intrigued me as soon as I saw them just past the video game section of the store (my son was perusing that latest Wii U video game offerings). They demanded my attention, and I gave in.
Barracks rooms are very interesting things for landlocked sailors. Some barracks are nicer than others. They can look like upper- scale efficiency hotel rooms with a kitchenette, bathroom, living room, and a bedroom. Some feature three beds; you pray that the other two roommates will be clean, nice, and quiet. Others feature a two-man-room with a bathroom, and a small fridge and a microwave. Some rooms are housed in buildings that are falling apart, and some are even on condemned lists. What they all have in common, though, is that they beat the heck out of berthing spaces on ships.
Upon checking out of my ship, I’d been assigned to a barracks building that was pretty new. Part of me wanted to be excited about the fact that I was leaving my tight digs on the ship for a nicer room, but I could not hide the truth. I was scared, as the ship was the only home I knew. On it were housed my shipmates, my job, my friends, and my boyfriend at the time. Soon, my home at sea would push off the pier and would leave me stranded ashore during the most vulnerable time of my life. Still, I carried on. We are currently in the market for a new laptop for our son. His needs aren’t that vast; he needs something that can do light word processing, iTunes, get online, e-mail, and most importantly, Minecraft.
What is our budget? Actually, it would be his budget. We had a long, hard talk with him and told him that he could either buy his own laptop now with money from his savings account, or that he could wait a few months until his birthday when we would buy him a laptop. Did I mention that he is under the age of ten? Due to his age, he is not very skilled in the ways of delayed gratification, which means that he wants a new laptop tomorrow. To put a positive spin on this, I decided to make a homeschool lesson out of this (did I mention that I homeschool him? I do). “You must be so excited to drive!” exclaimed my sister’s niece.
“Uh-no,” was my 39 year old sister’s succinct reply. “How can you not be? You can go anywhere!” said the fifteen year old with such zeal. “And I want to go nowhere,” answered my sister. I wasn’t there for the exchange, but that’s how my sister relayed it. We laughed as we recalled the pre-driving age excitement of our earlier years. Heck, I can still remember the way it felt so very long ago. |
AuthorCyndia is a writer based out of San Diego, whose past experiences include six years in the Navy (full of lovely sea-sickness), many adventures working in customer service, and being happily dragged across the country while her husband finishes his own career in the military. When not writing essays, articles, women's fiction/suspense novels, or paranormal novellas, Cyndia can be found reading, cooking, hiking, homeschooling her son, watching HGTV, or unapologetically wasting time on Pinterest and other social media outlets. You can keep up with her musings here or on Facebook. Archives
September 2015
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