The Quest

I've often wondered whether the technology effect is good or bad. By the technology effect I mean the fact that you can readily find information on just about anything online, and you can use your devices for almost everything. For the most part, I love it. What I don't love is the fact that I don't seem to really know things anymore. I rely on Google to give me answers to my questions, my digital calendar to remind me of appointments, my phone to wake me up and do basic math, Facebook to tell me when there's a birthday and remind me what I was doing at this time last year. Growing up, my parents always encouraged us to find answers to our questions. Any time we asked them something, they'd say, "Look it up." What they really meant was that we should consult an encyclopedia or a dictionary. We had about four different sets of encyclopedias (maybe five?), which are now sorely out-dated. I miss looking things up in a book. Searching for subjects in Funk...

As I was walking through Petco today, I passed the ferrets and parakeets. Both reminded me of other ferrets and parakeets I'd encountered. I could tell the story of the diseased ferret that came into my life for a brief moment a few years back, but many of you already know the story... and that's not the one on my mind today. What's really on my mind is Pete. Pete was my green parakeet. My parents gave me Pete for my birthday (I don't remember which one), along with a custom cage that my father made. It had a sliding tray in the bottom that you could remove to clean out the cage and replace the paper. Pete came from my babysitter's house. She raised parakeets. The first challenge I had with Pete was naming him. Apparently, my parents had had several parakeets. I honestly don't remember the birds themselves (maybe they were before my time?), but I remembered that their names were Pete 1, Pete 2, Pete 3, etc. Because I knew this, my young mind could only think...