I don't know what it is- if it's the white background or what- but I don't feel like I know where the he ... I am. I still don't know how to find the conversation side and I did read the instructions and don't usually feel stupid. I am literate and the only way I can find anything is to put it in the search bar. I really am trying but less and less. I will probably keep checking in here but it won't be my regular path on the web. If it aint broke................ :(

There are still people around who have that sense, but they are outglitzed and outshouted by the current atmosphere - they are the voice crying in the wilderness

I can't add much to what's already been said, but I still have to post just to say "yay!' There are too many good animals out there who need loving homes, and it makes me so happy when I hear of good, responsible people opening their homes and their hearts to another one. I can all but promise a new little one will heal your heart. Of course they will never replace Theo - but love is a great healer of pain. A few years ago, in what ended up being just a really weird coincidence, I had one beloved dog die one day and picked up a new puppy the very next day. It was basically emotional whiplash - but I can tell you that tiny new puppy healed my heart. I was concerned about the timing, but it ended up being the best thing for me.

I don't think we necessarily gloss over bad times when we get nostalgic. As I age, I have come to realize it's not just a rose-colored-glasses look back, some times actually WERE better than others. World War Two and the Depression were HORRIBLE events but we overcame them and there was a sense of joy that came from that time and era afterwards. It was the best time in history for the middle class. I know that not every person on the planet experienced the good times, but my family was able to escape ethnic cleansing and death by fascism and come to the US and better their lives. Not leave all the troubles behind, but it was tangibly better than hiding out from bands of marauding Cossacks all the time. I grew up with not only a sense of good fortune, but a commitment to problem solving so that fewer people would have to go through the hard times my family experienced. The generation that beat back fascism at a young age was game for taking on all kinds of problems with confidence of victory. We live in a totally different era now. So many of the middle class experiences and institutions I grew up with are fading away. And also the people who brought them to us. And what has taken its place is tangibly not the same. I try to keep up the traditions, but I am more and more in the minority. I still participate in many of the family and cultural and social/economic events of my youth, watching participation dwindle. And I'm not opposed to new kinds of traditions, but even those are a tough sell. And I'm not such a young thing myself anymore, with bounding energy. A great homage to nostalgia is the movie, "Avalon" where the narrator replays his working class upbringing in a close knit family and the gradual betterment of their lives financially but loosening of emotional ties. There is a sad scene in the end when he takes his son to see his great grandfather in a nursing home, so that the son can get to know him the way he did, and hear the old family stories that he loved so much growing up, and when the grandfather starts to tell the old tale of how he met the grandmother, his story can't compete with the parade that is on the TV which has all the great grandchild's attention. And this was before the even more in-your-face influence of the cell phone/mini computer screen. I do what I can, and take my pleasures where I can. Joy is intimately related to connection, IMHO. Our church pastor preached on this very topic last Sunday. It's not surprising that joy is hard to come by in these socially distant days . . . but we have to keep trying. As far as the pastor's message, the joy of connecting to God is always available no matter what the circumstances. Although easier said than achieved, IMHO. Our pastor wasn't just blabbing either, he lost his first wife and two daughters in one fell swoop out of the blue one day, due to a car accident. He was at a meeting for work . . . they were out shopping. Not unlike what happened to Joe Biden. Our pastor said joy comes often right next to loss, in his experience. Not necessarily in mine. In my experience, joy comes from participating in ongoing connections. Sunrise, sunset.