The Gold Standard

I've never really thought I had the BEST stuff. You see, I have always been a hard working, middle class kind of guy and we always bought what we could afford and financed the rest. But I have always appreciated the finer things in life. Even if they were just slightly out of my grasp. Cars, vacations, good music, techno-toys, beautiful women. Robin Leach talking about them. You know what I mean.

But, recently, I have had a shift in my thinking. As I look around me, I do believe I'm beginning to have a few of the best things that life has to offer. (Note: Best, in my mind, is not necessarily the most expensive. Best, as a subjective concept, means that which I compare everything else to.)

As I was growing up, via my father's influence, I always thought the only car or truck to own was a Chevy. I usually drove a junker. Later in life I usually had a new company car every two years and would buy the most recent one for my wife to drive. So we always had two late model, four-door sedans in the garage.

But I always thought how cool it would be to drive a Jeep Wrangler. I grew up seeing Jeeps in war movies and TV shows, and when SUV's became popular a while back I would look at them and say, "They're nice... but they aren't a Jeep." We are now driving a Jeep Wrangler and a Cherokee.

Like everyone else, I have always enjoyed vacations. For a lot of years I enjoyed the concept of vacations. Oh, I got time off every year. We just couldn't afford to go anywhere. What with the payments on all of my mediocre stuff, it just wasn't in the cards. Later on, we would find quiet get-a-ways, that were quite pleasant, and fit our budget.

But I always thought that resort vacations would be the best. Places where you spend your days sitting in the sun, drinking tropical drinks. Conversing with friends and strangers alike. And your evenings allow you to wander from one casual deck party to the next. Music filling the air, the breeze carrying the scent of Bar-B-Que and flowers. We now live year round at a nudist resort in the Poconos.

I have always liked to listen to good music. My musical tastes are very eclectic so I've always had a lot of albums and later CD's. I had the big stereo rack systems and boom boxes at various times. One of my fondest memories was cruising along, picking up an oldies super-station out of Cleveland, all the windows down in my heap-of-the-moment, my arm around my girl-of-the-moment. The stars were bright, the air was warm, the evening was young. Later on, commercial radio buried us with... well, commercials. It made it harder to capture the moment.

So the rack systems and albums didn't make music too portable. 8-tracks, cassettes and CD's helped but I had stuff to carry around. MP3 is OK but rather selfish and commercial radio buries you with... well, commercials. I've now subscribed to commercial-free Sirius Satellite Radio. We have every kind of music to choose from, a player in each of the vehicles and the house and I use bluetooth wireless speakers for music on the deck.

I am self-taught on the computer. My first computer was an Adam Computer that had a memory tape instead of a hard drive and ran on BASIC language. My first real PC was a clone. I read every computer book I could find, bought and tested software, installed and upgraded components, tinkered under the hood, and spent a small fortune, a little at a time, on never-quite-the-best computers. I jumped on the internet as soon as it was available, starting with BBS list sites and FTP downloads. And basically, kept up.

But the platforms and operating systems were quirky, the software buggy, and the error messages common. Along came the viruses, and spyware and trojan horses and doomsday bugs and unnecessary upgrades, all being controlled by a paranoid megalomaniac. And every now and then I'd peek over the fence at Apple. I'd hear rumors of stable operating systems, no viruses or spyware, plug-and-play that... well, plugs and plays. I am writing this on my new MacBook Pro. And all the rumors are TRUE!

That only leaves the beautiful women. And to tell you the truth, with my wife, I kinda hit that one out of the park a long time ago. Talk about your gold standard.