As is often the case, I recruited someone who grew up deftly playing video games to help me with a tech-heavy installation this week. Where I had gotten frustrated with an old-school read-the-manual approach (i.e. eventually toss the inscrutable instructions into the recycle bin), he tried and erred and patiently unraveled the problem one tiny fragment at a time.

I've taken to dumping the mail order catalogs right into the recycle bin without looking them over. I used to take them upstairs and they would pile up (often unread for weeks).

Norma was one of the many people over the last twenty years who gave me advice. She was born in 1922 and last week, she was laid to rest. "Consider wearing lipstick," she once told me.