Need Answers?

Try Answers.com a site that is celebrating its first birthday. Unlike most search engines which give you a list of websites to browse and nothing more, Answers.com gives you information about the topic on which you searched, along with links to selected sites. A search for "Walt Disney World" brought up a Wikipedia article on it, along with links to various websites about it. A search for my mother's medical condition brought up a dictionary definition of it, an article about it from Medicinenet.com (the article, not a link to it), a Wikipedia article about it, and to pay for all this knowledge, a list of books I can buy. The information was written for the lay person and generally seemed to comport with what I know (since I'm not a medical expert, I won't comment as to the technical correctness of the information). It gave links to a couple of sites I know to be of high quality on the subject. Give it a try, you might like it.

Finding a Real Live Person

I don't know about you, but I get so tired of listening to "push 1 for English or 2 for Spanish" followed by "push 1 for sales, 2 for customer service, 3 for accounts payable, ....." which is then followed by another set of buttons to push, which may or may not give me the information I need, and may or may not get me to a person who MIGHT be able to help me. I guess I'm not the only one who feels this way because there is a website which tells you which button to push to get as quickly as possible to a real human. http://paulenglish.com/ivr/ is a cooperative venture so if you have some extra time and want to try to beat the system, lend them a hand.

Anybody Out There?

Am I writing just to see myself in print, or is someone actually reading all (or even some) of this?

You Never Know

Today we had a New Year's party and invited a lot of old friends we haven't seen in a long time. Most who came were people we knew when we were single, who got married about the same time we did and who had kids about the same time we had our two older ones. The older kids are in seventh and eighth grades now, and it was a shock to see how much some of them had grown. After a while, the talk among the adults turned to "have you heard of or seen......" Various old friends. One of my friends said something that gave me food for thought, something I'm going to share with you. She said "we never know how we have affected the people who come through our lives, whether for good or for bad". Being with old friends, especially this post-Katrina holiday, reminded me of all the people who have been in my life--family, friends, co-workers, students, Girl Scouts, fellow parents, fellow parishioners--the list goes on and on, and I pray that the effect I have had has been more good than bad. Happy New Year!