Now Tyler, you're not so nerdy as that avatar.

About not knowing what the religion is all about, I'll let you in on the secret hand shake here, most of the others sitting there reverently in church don't either. Everybody assumes that the others get it and so who am I to disagree with what everyone else has settled on?

There's a sizable group of Mormons, who call themselves the New Order Mormons - they have their own forum on Aimoo - who've in various ways and degrees come to an astonishing discovery, namely, wow there are lots and lots and lots of others who think this is all a crock too. I thought I was some kind of freak, but I'm far from being alone. Thing is, I'm literally married to the whole nine yards of Mormonism, and Mormonism is for sure one big nine yards of a person's life. There was the temple marriage, the kids on mission, and there're all these relatives including a devoted devout spouse and kids whose lives all revolve around this community built on this remnant of the dark ages belief system.

There're quite a few Mormons who are in a bit of a bind in that the core beliefs don't sit quite right within them but who have all these family and community ties to it. A lot of people deal with this with by saying to themselves, well, nothing's perfect in this world. You kind of have to do the best you can with what you have a lot of the time.

Kind of like that old saying about marriage: Approach it with your eyes wide open, and then once you're in it, it's best to keep your eyes closed a lot of the time. It's best for the sake of the kids, you know.

To which I can relate. Oh yeah. I can relate.

Well, I certainly am no position to judge people for doing that, but there is a bit of danger to it. Too much accommodation to stuff that doesn't sit right within you kind of clouds your spirit over time. Thing is, as that window accumulates more and more of this, you don't tend to notice it, until that is, something comes along that blows away a bit of the dust and grime, and you see the world anew as for the first time in decades. And you think, holy cow, there's a whole world out there I've lost sight of. Who am I kidding? What am I protecting here in keeping up this disingenuous act of sanctimony?

Well, I'm talking to myself here. I tend to do that.

So let's talk about you. What do you think about me?

What? Who told you that? Jim? Well keep in mind that Jim embelishes a bit to make for a better story. I guess that's all right, as the original usually wasn't near as interesting as Jim's telling.

I feel sorry for us nerds of the analog age. For entertainment, we had to make do with Flash Gordon. The special effects were lowwwww budget to say the least, consisting of a cardboard spaceship riding on a visible wire and trailing hardly convincing smoke. Can you say Hokey?

Everything electronic had vacuum tubes in it. A regular computer of today has more transistors in it than all the vacuum tubes within all of Utah when I was a kid. I was lucky to come across an old car radio that I sometimes had to run like heck with after I'd "found" it. Or, we'd go to the telephone exchange building and maybe would find some bits of multistrand telephone cable in the trash can in back.

The electrical creations of my youth were cobbled together mostly from discarded telephone cable and old car radio parts and also some old TV parts our local TV repairman would give us.

Maybe the neatest thing I ever "found" was a city construction site flasher. It had a magnetically operated srpring loaded wheel that would pulse a transformer to fire a big old neon tube. Man, that was so neat by my standards. I hooked the transformer up to an old mechanical phone dial I'd fished out of the trash can at the telephone exchange. What is a phone dial, you ask? Oh that's what they had on telephones just after we went from human operators at telephone exchanges to electromechanical telephone exchanges. You can see them on old movies where Cary Grant calls up Dorris Day. Seems like Cary Grant is taking all day to dial the number. For some reason, those old movies had to take us completely through th entire dialing process. Seemed like it took forever but then again it was less time than it takes for a Windows operating system of today to boot. Anyway, I used a phone dial to make a neon strobe light. I'd dial nine, and it'd flash nine times. Oh man, that was so neat.

Oh, and later on, when Jim went off to be an American War Hero in the United States Air Force, somehow some mil spec electronic parts would occasionally show up within my electronic creations. I don't know how that happened.

To this very day, I've a few mil spec electronic parts kicking around.