Pragmatic Redundancy Lane
My first eighteen years I lived in a Mediterranean climate of hot dry summers and not-too-cold foggy winters. There were palm trees. We got snow once. My hometown was diverse and multi-lingual; we had whole communities of descendants of Hispanic, Black, Chinese, Armenian (from the time of their genocide by the Turks) and European immigrants. My ancestors came west in covered wagons, except my Mom's father, son of an English innkeeper. After Queen Victoria's Jubilee He sailed east around Africa, stopping at New Zealand, and on to California, where he married and had four children, then his wife got tuberculosis and died when my mom was four. My Dad's father was an alcoholic Irish blacksmith. That's why my Dad left home as a teen-ager, studied electronics, got a job with the phone company and looked to the future. My Mom and Dad met at the phone company where she had gotten a job as a switchboard operator.
I was a bookworm. My parents, professed agnostics, subscribed to magazines: Life, National Geographic, Reader's Digest. Every month, as soon as I was able, I read those cover to cover, and if I didn't know a word I could walk over to the bookcase, on top of which a huge unabridged Webster's Dictionary lay open. Then I discovered my dad's Scientific American, Radio Electronics, Popular Electronics, Radio Shack, CQ , Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Analog magazine stacks. As a teen I got into sci-fi, but radio and electronics left me cold.
My interest in electronics was nil, though I wanted and got a hand-sized transistor radio one Christmas. I went into mourning when it stopped working since it was not due to just a dead battery. My mourning turned to joy when my dad was able to fix it himself. The phone company in one of their monthly magazines called my dad a "wizard." He had a good job at the phone company for forty years, once in a while troubleshooting their microwave relay stations in the foothills of the Sierras. My Mom saved money in envelopes for our wonderful family vacations, usually near Santa Cruz, but once in a tent in Yosemite valley where we waited for dark and watched the "Fire-fall", and once in a log cabin on the shore of Bass Lake, where Dad taught me how to fish.
We were among the minority of households with a television in the early fifties, so I was among the first generation of daily Disney educated children. Old costume epics (historical dramas), This is Your life, and the post-WWII series Victory at Sea were my other favorites (the theme song still gives me thrills - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3dwsRSA6KE ). After watching a John Wayne war movie I remember writing in my first diary, "Watched Bataan. Everybody got killed."
When I was ten, my dad took me to a downtown theater to see Forbidden Planet (based on The Tempest by Shakespeare) with special effects by Disney. It was the first movie (1957) to use a totally electronic music soundtrack and compositions by "aliens." Beside the really scary monster being an invisible empowerment of human evil, the thing that went deep was the last scene when the Captain sums up the Big Lesson, that we humans should remember "that we are not God."
My Dad had a ham radio and built things like a metal detector and new circuit board designs. He was very keen one evening in 1959 to take me out on the front lawn after dark and point out Sputnik to me - like a small star sliding across the heavens, and I think I remember hearing it as well... beeping out from his ham radio speaker.
As a young teen I did a lot of babysitting for my younger brother and for neighbor kids. I found it fascinating to talk with young children. But, one of my fondest memories as a teen is the impromptu talk my dad gave me in the living room one night, about Claude Shannon, his hero, and about information theory. His excitement was penetrating. It was important to him because it was the basis of his life's work in the field of electronic communications. So without realizing it, I absorbed a bit (double entendre intended) of information theory from my father.
I first worked with a computer, an IBM mainframe, when I took a course in BASIC programming for liberal arts students at UC-Berkeley in 1966. Our final test was to program the computer (using punch cards) to win at tic-tac-toe. For this they made available the punch card machines and the mainframe, which filled an air-conditioned room. I think I was more impressed by the air-conditioning.
At Berkeley I met a math grad student from Cal-Tech; we married. We'd go out for a beer with his thesis advisor and I'd sit quietly. Their talking about the esoterics of group theory made my brain hum, like toddler-talk...things like “Is the complexity of a finite semigroup effectively computable?” After four years we came to a crossroads; we decided to separate. I left the University of Florida where hubby had gotten an assoc. professorship, and where I had enrolled in the education department, hoping to become a teacher. I went back to Berkeley by myself, but had little money.
Then I found a job babysitting at a remote ex-resort in Plumas National Forest. At the time the rustic facility of cabins and dining hall was being used as a ranch for judicially-placed emotionally disturbed boys, two of whom had brain-damage. That was an education in itself. There I met a Jewish guy from NYC and we began "dating." I took advantage of California's new "no-fault" divorce law, went to one court appearance, then removed my wedding ring.
Because my sister and her husband, a guy who tracked subatomic particles in a bubble chamber and analyzed missile systems, became Christians and prayed for us, both my boyfriend and I in separate places met Yeshua around the same time and then got married and baptized and have spent since 1971 together, and only about three of those years with a TV (before personal computers). In 1984 we saw a revolutionary personal computer that could do graphics! How amazing! I had to have a Mac 128, and I have been trying to keep up with two geek sons ever since.
We were on staff at a wonderful Messianic congregation for ten years, and then in 1989 God called us to Israel. Americans may think that getting involved in the Gulf War was a bad idea. War is always bad, but all I knew is that I was so relieved that, when the air raid sirens began howling after midnight, my three-year old was willing to put on his gas mask to "look like Darth Vader," and thanked God that America decided to go after Saddam Hussein after twenty-three scud missiles landed in Israel - we heard two of them from miles away. People in other countries tend to ignore that, because they are fixated on Saddam's missing WMDs. We thank God they were missing.
We are not living in Israel because we thought it might be interesting, or even that it was a good idea. When God specifically tells you something, you know who said it and that He will help you do it.
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I was a bookworm. My parents, professed agnostics, subscribed to magazines: Life, National Geographic, Reader's Digest. Every month, as soon as I was able, I read those cover to cover, and if I didn't know a word I could walk over to the bookcase, on top of which a huge unabridged Webster's Dictionary lay open. Then I discovered my dad's Scientific American, Radio Electronics, Popular Electronics, Radio Shack, CQ , Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Analog magazine stacks. As a teen I got into sci-fi, but radio and electronics left me cold.
My interest in electronics was nil, though I wanted and got a hand-sized transistor radio one Christmas. I went into mourning when it stopped working since it was not due to just a dead battery. My mourning turned to joy when my dad was able to fix it himself. The phone company in one of their monthly magazines called my dad a "wizard." He had a good job at the phone company for forty years, once in a while troubleshooting their microwave relay stations in the foothills of the Sierras. My Mom saved money in envelopes for our wonderful family vacations, usually near Santa Cruz, but once in a tent in Yosemite valley where we waited for dark and watched the "Fire-fall", and once in a log cabin on the shore of Bass Lake, where Dad taught me how to fish.
We were among the minority of households with a television in the early fifties, so I was among the first generation of daily Disney educated children. Old costume epics (historical dramas), This is Your life, and the post-WWII series Victory at Sea were my other favorites (the theme song still gives me thrills - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3dwsRSA6KE ). After watching a John Wayne war movie I remember writing in my first diary, "Watched Bataan. Everybody got killed."
When I was ten, my dad took me to a downtown theater to see Forbidden Planet (based on The Tempest by Shakespeare) with special effects by Disney. It was the first movie (1957) to use a totally electronic music soundtrack and compositions by "aliens." Beside the really scary monster being an invisible empowerment of human evil, the thing that went deep was the last scene when the Captain sums up the Big Lesson, that we humans should remember "that we are not God."
My Dad had a ham radio and built things like a metal detector and new circuit board designs. He was very keen one evening in 1959 to take me out on the front lawn after dark and point out Sputnik to me - like a small star sliding across the heavens, and I think I remember hearing it as well... beeping out from his ham radio speaker.
As a young teen I did a lot of babysitting for my younger brother and for neighbor kids. I found it fascinating to talk with young children. But, one of my fondest memories as a teen is the impromptu talk my dad gave me in the living room one night, about Claude Shannon, his hero, and about information theory. His excitement was penetrating. It was important to him because it was the basis of his life's work in the field of electronic communications. So without realizing it, I absorbed a bit (double entendre intended) of information theory from my father.
I first worked with a computer, an IBM mainframe, when I took a course in BASIC programming for liberal arts students at UC-Berkeley in 1966. Our final test was to program the computer (using punch cards) to win at tic-tac-toe. For this they made available the punch card machines and the mainframe, which filled an air-conditioned room. I think I was more impressed by the air-conditioning.
At Berkeley I met a math grad student from Cal-Tech; we married. We'd go out for a beer with his thesis advisor and I'd sit quietly. Their talking about the esoterics of group theory made my brain hum, like toddler-talk...things like “Is the complexity of a finite semigroup effectively computable?” After four years we came to a crossroads; we decided to separate. I left the University of Florida where hubby had gotten an assoc. professorship, and where I had enrolled in the education department, hoping to become a teacher. I went back to Berkeley by myself, but had little money.
Then I found a job babysitting at a remote ex-resort in Plumas National Forest. At the time the rustic facility of cabins and dining hall was being used as a ranch for judicially-placed emotionally disturbed boys, two of whom had brain-damage. That was an education in itself. There I met a Jewish guy from NYC and we began "dating." I took advantage of California's new "no-fault" divorce law, went to one court appearance, then removed my wedding ring.
Because my sister and her husband, a guy who tracked subatomic particles in a bubble chamber and analyzed missile systems, became Christians and prayed for us, both my boyfriend and I in separate places met Yeshua around the same time and then got married and baptized and have spent since 1971 together, and only about three of those years with a TV (before personal computers). In 1984 we saw a revolutionary personal computer that could do graphics! How amazing! I had to have a Mac 128, and I have been trying to keep up with two geek sons ever since.
We were on staff at a wonderful Messianic congregation for ten years, and then in 1989 God called us to Israel. Americans may think that getting involved in the Gulf War was a bad idea. War is always bad, but all I knew is that I was so relieved that, when the air raid sirens began howling after midnight, my three-year old was willing to put on his gas mask to "look like Darth Vader," and thanked God that America decided to go after Saddam Hussein after twenty-three scud missiles landed in Israel - we heard two of them from miles away. People in other countries tend to ignore that, because they are fixated on Saddam's missing WMDs. We thank God they were missing.
We are not living in Israel because we thought it might be interesting, or even that it was a good idea. When God specifically tells you something, you know who said it and that He will help you do it.
[To go back to where you were, hit your browser back arrow.]