Here and there...

The birthday presents my stepdad gave me in my youth were all sort of symbolic. The year I turned 18, he gave me a razor—the kind that used a double-edged blade—a shaving brush, and a container of soap for the brush. I used the items once or twice, but as my facial hair was pretty light at the time, they soon fell into disuse.

It may be an old wives' tale, but I've heard it said that the more often a young man shaves what few facial hairs he might have, the sooner does more substantial hair develop on that face. True or not, I got to the point where shaving daily was Something That Had To Be Done by about the middle of boot camp, where the presence of unshaved facial hair was considered a Bad Thing, particularly so during inspections.

Since then, there have been any number of "improvements" to the humble razor. Twin edges then two blades set in parallel, then eventually three blades, and then four. This past Christmas saw the acquisition of a razor that uses five parallel blades embedded in a plastic holder, which gives me the feeling not so much of shaving as of planing whiskers from my face.

* * *While driving around today with Galina, I tried to look up the address of the couple that, basically, had been my parents' only surviving friends, only to find that the husband had died this past August.

It sent a pang through me, because even though I didn't know the couple very well, it was apparent to me that, despite his age, the husband was still clear-minded and intent on doing "some work of noble note" before the end, and that resonated with me.

* * *My netbook has developed an ugly tendency to hang unexpectedly from time to time, and since the system logs show no hint of anything causing this to happen, I am beginning to suspect a hardware problem—with the most likely source of the problem being a flaky memory location that returns a value that causes Windows to immediately lose consciousness.

Cheers...