A Tribute to The Great One... A Love Affair with Technology... Why isn't George's birthday a holiday?
Originally posted at starwars.com on May 12, 2006 (Mothers Day & GL's Birthday)
Shouldn't George's birthday be a holiday? Not just a national holiday, but also a Galactic Holiday!
Is it Mother's Day...or is it Mothers' Day? My older grandson named my mother "The Great One" instead of Great-Grandma when he was about 3...
I'm really here today to say: MY MOM IS TERRIFIC! And she'll never see this because I'm not going to tell her it's here... it would spoil the surprise of her gift...
I won't see her until June and I want it to be a surprise, so I told her I got her something that I have to deliver personally, and I promised she'd really like...and she said I was definitely my father's daughter in that he loved surprises... that was a great compliment to me!
And she won't find this on her own because she doesn't "get" Star Wars... or anything SciFi for that matter... I've tried to explain that Star Wars is so much more than SciFi, but then, she's tried to explain knitting to me a dozen times and it doesn't take...(I can visualize where the yarn and the needles are supposed to go, but I can't make my hands do the deed!) At least I can make pancakes like she does...and I learned how to be a terrific Grandmother...
Anyway, in spite of not understanding SciFi, she taught us all that loving something that's fun is a good thing! In the fourth grade it was "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." and in the fifth grade it was "Star Trek." She never told me I couldn't be a spy or the captain of a starship or anything else I thought up...
I really admire my mom because she survived my childhood... Let's just put it this way, if I'd been my mother, I wouldn't have survived to adulthood... (Which just happened this year, I think)
What I really wanted to give her was the gift of time travel... I want to go back to the 60s and not be such a difficult child! Not that I was bad, or got into trouble... I was just difficult... I was bored in school (too smart for my own good), too emotional (still am), thought too much (still do), and got silly opinions into my head... (Like when I was 9 and decided everyone from California was a sissy...) I've pretty much overcome that particular failing, or at least I know how to keep my silly ideas to myself! (With age comes a greater understanding of the difference between Knowledge and Wisdom...)
So I really wanted to get her something special for a gift that she would never buy herself... she has a houseful of stuff already... (She still has some of her wedding gifts from 1941!) And something USEFUL... She's had the same PC since 1998, and I'm constantly trying to troubleshoot it through email or over the phone... every time I visit, I fix it... so I got her a new computer... that's the big surprise...
Technology is so amazing, my first PC cost $900... it ran at a blazing speed of 12 MHz and had a 10 MB hard drive, a 3.5" floppy drive, 640 K of RAM (that "K" is not a typo) and a green screen monitor... 6 years later I bought a new computer for $900... it had a color monitor, ran at 40 MHz, had two Megs of RAM and a modem... It was so hot ... I kept that PC for 5 years, although by then the only thing left that was original was a few wires... the PC I bought then ran at 350 MHz, had 128 Megs of RAM, a CD Drive, and a 40 MB hard drive... and it cost about $900... everything had gotten better and faster, and had a lot more stuff on it for the same price... my current desktop I bought used for $500 and then spent probably $400 on upgrades.... You do the math... {GRIN}
Two weeks ago I went to dell.com and ordered up a new desktop system for Mom and a new laptop for me... and if I hadn't made any additions to them the total for BOTH of them together would have been about... you guessed it... $900... (May Sith Lightning strike me if I'm lying!)? And we're talking about GHz of speed, Gigabytes of hard drive space, built in modems & networking, stereo sound, flat panel monitor for the desktop... the laptop has wireless networking that picked up the DSL router off my desktop without me having to do anything!
I wish I could live another 100 years just to see what technology will bring to the future... and to the Star Wars Universe!
Happy Mother's Day to all you moms and grammas, and happy Lucas Day to all of us!
May the Force be with us all...
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