Wednesday Hodgepodge - 21 October 2015

David and Suzanne McClendon with Jared on-board. 1986.

1. October 21, 2015 is Back to the Future Day.  Did you see the movie? The sequels? In the second film, Doc takes Marty into the future to prevent Marty's future son from making a mistake. They leave 1985 and land on a 'skyway' on October 21st, 2015. So tell us, what were you doing in the fall of 1985?

We saw the first one and the second one, and not the third one. I know exactly what I was doing during the fall of 1985. We found out that I was pregnant with our first child during the third week of October and I was puking my guts out! I was sicker than I'd ever been in my life and on top of the world at the same time.

Our first anniversary photo shoot had to be put off until about March 1986 because I was way too sick in November 1985 to sit for it.

2. If time travel were possible, would you want to go to the future? The past?

I would want to go to the past. My passion is genealogy. I would love to meet the ancestors that I've only heard about from other relatives and also meet those that I've found in my research over the last 36 years.

3. We're not flying cars, but some of the technology imagined in the 80's film has indeed come to pass in real life 2015-flat screen TVs on the wall, tablets, fingerprint recognition, video conferencing, online banking, 3-D movies, motion controlled video games, drone cameras, and smart glasses (Google glass). Do you worry technology is growing at a rate so fast we'll soon be unable to keep up with its demands? Do you think the Internet does more harm than good?

I figure that eventually we'll be able to keep up with it, at least as far as we want to keep up with it. The programs and social sites that change more often than I like or make changes that I do not like, I leave, so no having to keep up with them. Gone are the days when I could handle an AOL chatroom and 10 private messages at a time!

I think that maybe there are some good parts to the Internet, but overall, it has done more harm than good. For all of its "connectedness", people are less connected than ever. People spend more time posting to Facebook than actually interacting with the people right in front of their face. It has lured people into temptations that they might not otherwise have come up against. These temptations have been the cause of many broken marriages and families. I have seen more times than I can count groups of people walking into stores or sitting at tables at restaurants and texting or surfing the web or doing FB on the phone, and not saying a word to the people that they went with into the store or restaurant. They may as well have gone out to dinner alone for all the interacting that went on between them!

4. Your favorite dish prepared in a slow-cooker? Your favorite fast food?

I love roast beef with potatoes, carrots, onions, and broccoli! A pork roast is okay, too. My favorite fast food is the chicken strip dinner from Sonic.

5. No time like the present, down time, face time, pressed for time, in the nick of time, make time, mark time, or just in time...which timely saying most relates to your life right now?

I would have to say pressed for time at this point in my life. Although the work that we do only takes about 5 hours a day (most days), it feels like 48, and I am exhausted in every way by the time we get back home. Then, there are home chores to do and food to cook and clothes to wash and having to go to bed again to start the whole bit over. There's no time for the fun stuff like blogging every day or genealogy research.

6. Tell us about a place you went as a child or younger person that's no longer there or is now something else. How does that make you feel?

I don't know about places that I went as a child. What stands out to me is that most, if not all, of the houses that I lived in as a child no longer exist. The last home that I lived in with my parents was destroyed by a tornado several years ago…with my daddy in it at the time. He survived that, but died of a heart attack 9 December 2012. The home that we lived in before we moved to that last one burned down at some point after we moved out, as did the one before that. How does it make me feel? It makes me realize how easily parts of a person's life can just be totally obliterated and forgotten, like they never existed.

7. Describe your comfort zone.

My comfort zone, for the most part, is anywhere without crowds of people. I would be a good hermit. I have always been extremely shy and I am introverted as well (two entirely different things). I do my best work when it is just the two of us together. If anyone else gets into the mix, then it makes me anxious and stressed and unable to function to a degree. I would love nothing better than a house out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, where I could go outside and breathe something other than the neighbors' cigarette smoke, and have a beautiful yard that we could enjoy, beauty around me that I could share with my blogging buddies through posts and photographs.

8. Insert your own random thought here.

I do not like that our daughters are so far away during all of this flooding. Both campuses are flooding and the one has had a tornado. One of the campuses is at sea level and the other one is on an island. They're in opposite directions and we're too far away to help either one of them. Meanwhile back at the ranch, the ranch is under water, too!