It has been said that personal home pages are basically vanity pages.  Ego trips of some kind.  Not much of an ego lift considering that the average personal page gets very few visits.  Of the millions out there very few will have any interest in this sort of web site.  Let's face it, pages such as mine are simply boring to the vast majority of people.  And of the kindred souls out there only a very few will find their way to ones web page.  So, personally, I consider this small attempt at page authoring as just another of my hobbies.  A pastime that take very little effort when I don't feel like doing anything else.  Others may think what they wish.  The 'vanity' logic could be applied to almost any activity.  A gardening enthusiast certainly feel great when a stranger stops by to admire the flowers.  But he or she will still grow the flowers when no one stops by.  There's personal satisfaction in growing and admiring beautiful flowers.

When I retired, I wanted to make sure I remained active even though I no longer had to go to work in the morning.  I had a few acres of land in a rural area on which I was building a house, so a little gardening seemed the way to go.  My mother had maintained a beautiful flower garden admired by everyone until she was well into her eighties.  Some of her green thumb should have rubbed off on me.  Actually I started with a few hundred bulbs in the fall before my retirement.  An enterprising squirrel followed some fifteen feet behind digging up the bulbs I had planted but I felt that with enough bulbs some would survive.  And some did.  Fully retired the following spring, I put in a vegetable garden as well as all sorts of flowers and shrubs.  But I was soon under attack from all sides.  Sometimes deer would wander into my yard in broad daylight to munch on my shrubs.  And the  squirrels and chipmunks were forever investigating  every spot where the earth was turned.  Then there were the bugs.  Mosquitoes and blackflies by the millions.  So I surrendered after the first year to the deer, rabbits, and whatever beast or insect thought they has as much right to my plantings as I did.   I now stick to transplanting well started saplings from my own property.  I dig them up with my front end loader and bring them where I want them with plenty of their native soil.  Wildflowers usually come with them.  In a few years I've managed to start an emerging forest around my house.

It has been said that in retirement one should be busy with what they love to do.  Some travel, golf, play bingo, or a thousand other things.  I don't travel well and I don't care for bingo.  So I stick with the things I like to do.  It seems the older I get the more time I spend tinkering with my computers.  In fact I've devoted two separate pages to them.  The first one details my early interest in electronics to the present day pentiums.  For those who might be interested, the second one contains pictures and short descriptions of my still small collection of older computers.  All the images on the page were taken with my Kodak DC120 digital camera which means I no longer have to wait to have my pictures developed and then to scan them before I can put them on my web page.  The speed at which technology moves these days is making it very hard for this old relic to keep up.  I can be reached   ksikola@muskoka.com  if anyone cares to comment.
 
 
 

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