27 Jan 2002 #0204.html

New Beginnings

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Dear Paul and Kate, Melanie and Jared, Bridget and Justin, Sara, Ben and Sarah, Heather, Audrey, Rachel, and Matt via hardcopy,

cc: file, Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Lloyd and Luana Warner, Diane Cluff, and Maxine Shirts.

Welcome to "Thoughtlets." This is a weekly review of an idea, belief, thought, or words that will hopefully be of some benefit to you, my children, with an electronic copy to on-line extended family members. Any of you can ask me not to clutter your mail box at any time.

"Rachel is the Laurel's President in Nottingham Country Ward now. This week was New Beginnings for Young Women. I was so impressed with the way she introduced each of the six girls who will be joining the Beehive class this year. The roses we picked up for them at Albertson's were so beautiful. Very symbolic of these young girls. It was a very nice program, and it was a real pleasure to share it with her and Andrea. Wish you all could have been here with us.

Hayden Hudson, whom Matt and I Home Teach even though he is not yet a member, sent me the following about millenial new beginnings:

`The following makes one stop to think about all the things that we have seen developed. ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO Now that we are in the 21st Century, it might be fun to look back at the beginning of the last century and see what it was like. The average life expectancy in the United States was 47. Only 14% of the homes in the United States had a bathtub. Only 8% of the homes had a telephone. A three minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars. There were only 8,000 cars in the US and 144 miles of paved roads. The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph. Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California. With a mere 1.4 million residents, California was only the twenty-first most populous State in the Union. The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower. The average wage in the US was twenty-two cents an hour. The average US worker made between $200 and $400 per year. A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, dentist $2500 per year, a veterinarian between $1500 and $4000 per year and a mechanical engineer about $5000 per year. More than 95% of all births in the United States took place at home. Ninety percent of all US physicians had no college education. Instead, they attended medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press and by the government as "substandard." Sugar cost four cents a pound. Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen. Coffee cost fifteen cents a pound. Most women only washed their hair once a month and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo. Canada passed a law prohibiting poor people from entering the Country for any reason, either as travelers or immigrants. The five leading causes of death in the US were: 1. Pneumonia and influenza 2. Tuberculosis 3. Diarrhea 4. Heart disease 5. Stroke The American flag had 45 stars. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii and Alaska hadn't been admitted to the Union yet. Drive-by-shootings -- in which teenage boys galloped down the street on horses and started randomly shooting at houses, carriages, or anything else that caught their fancy -- were an ongoing problem in Denver and other cities in the West. The population of Las Vegas, Nevada was thirty. The remote desert community was inhabited by only a handful of ranchers and their families. Plutonium, insulin, and antibiotics hadn't been discovered yet. Scotch tape, crossword puzzles, canned beer and iced tea hadn't been invented. There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day. One in ten US adults couldn't read or write. Only 6% of all Americans had graduated from high school. Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at corner drugstores. According to one pharmacist, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health." Coca-Cola contained cocaine instead of caffeine. Punch card data processing had recently been developed, and early predecessors of the modern computer were used for the first time by the government to help compile the census. Eighteen percent of households in the United States had at least one full-time servant or domestic. Can we even imagine what life will be like in 2101?'


On the business front, which occupies all of my attention these days, I had a good meeting with the principals at Petris, and a good teleconferece with Christian Singfield in Brisbane, and all of the principals at Lawrence Technology and at CDX in Dallas. It takes forever for folks to make a decision, even though I wore my new blue tie and new socks that Melanie and Jared gave me, and so I still don't have a signed contract in my hand. Hopefully we will get some of these opportunities tied down and start seeing some income flow in over the next few weeks. Andrea is definitely tired of being the wife of an entrepreneur, and would like to see a new beginnings. For those interested, tomorrow I should finish up some examples of data capture and distribution using the Infinite GridSM for a contract Petris is pursuing with the AAPG, which Walden 3-D and Dynamic Resources and our consultants will hopefully do the lion's share of the work on. You can see these pages at http://www.walden3d.com/aapg, although right now the only active pages are the bottom blue bar, which goes to the Infinite GridSM and the large scale composite images in the subdirectory at http://www.walden3d.com/aapg/images directory.

On the family front, we have a new cell phone which gives 3,500 minutes of free calls on weekends and after 9:00 at night. Even though I'm not very good on the phone, I will attempt to call more regularly to see how each of you are doing. Audrey and Heather talk to Andrea each week, and when I answer the phone they ask for Mom, so I won't push envelopes there. In my new beginnings I called this afternoon. Roice's phone number is disconnected. Ben and Sarah's answering machine picked up. Paul and Kate were just leaving for a church meeting. Melanie was at the neighbor's house. I got Sara's answering machine. Rob has a good heart, and I continue to hope and pray for him, and, I'm sorry to say, that is all, since he has been explicit as to not wanting any communcation with me.

On the Internet front, for the last six months there have been some absolutely horrible e-mails come to andrea@walden3d.com, to info@walden3d.com, and to rnelson@walden3d.com. I don't know who put us on these e-mail lists. I do know the worst ones are to Andrea, and these Thoughtlets are the only place where her e-mail address has ever been used. This week there were new lows in the titles, talking about improper family relationships. For everyone's information, all e-mail to andrea@walden3d.com is automatically forwarded to my e-mail, and so I have been able to file the garbage to hand over to private detectives and police. Although I do not currently have the resources to pursue the source(s), I have kept all of the e-mails, which includes the header information, and it is only a matter of time before a new beginnings where I will have the resources to go after the source of this pornography, and to do so with a vengence.

On the personal front, counting swallows (../0153.html) is a new beginning that is helping me. To prove my point, at the bottom of this Thoughtlet is data for the first month, and an associated graph. Andrea asks me how counting swallows helps. Diane Cluff wrote and told me it would be impossible for her to do this. And to me it is a simple scientific experiment. Given a little data, I can watch the trends, identify what helps and what doesn't, avoid that which doesn't help, and do that which helps. For instance, it helps to drink a lot of water. It doesn't help to eat popcorn, especially big bags with butter and 50 swallows per bag. It suprised me how the scales showed this the next day (probably salt keeping in the water). Oh well! Now I know. I'm 11.76% of the way to my goal after only one month (geophysicists are often accused of carrying the decimal places out beyond significant values, yet in my gut I figure the real action in a Forier Series occures just beyond the nyquist), and so hopefully you will all be seeing less of me by Thanksgiving, when on this trend I should be over 100% of the way to my goal.

I hope you each have a great week, and as we start this new year, you are each satisified with your invidual new beginnings."

I'm interested in sharing weekly a "thoughtlet" (little statements of big thoughts which mean a lot to me) with you because I know how important the written word can be. I am concerned about how easy it is to drift and forget our roots and our potential among all of distractions of daily life. To download any of these thoughtlets go to http://www.walden3d.com/thoughtlets or e-mail me at rnelson@walden3d.com.

With all my love,
Dad
(H. Roice Nelson, Jr.)

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Copyright © 2002 H. Roice Nelson, Jr.