Blue Sky in the Morning

The wakening sky, first black, then slight pink, now a light blue, glows off to the East, above Bemus Bay.  It's 4 degrees out side, thus the cold and the sky reminds me a bit of an Arizona sunset.  I wish I could capture it's beauty with a camera. We are so lucky to have a vista, morning and night, unobstructed by house or trees, just a two mile span of water, a tree line, then the enveloping sky.   It's hard to believe it's Friday, February 11 and Nicolas becomes a teenager today, a scary thought.  I don't envy today's parents but fortunately, all my  grandchildren are good kids! They all seem hard working, well behaved, doing well in school and interested in learning.  I think today's parents(especially our kids) are, in many ways, so much better parents than we were, so much more aware of their kids, involved in their lives, attuned to their needs.  Weekends and weekdays for all are taken up with the kids activities, whether school related, involving sports, or some kind of extra curricular activity.  I know that I was oblivious to my kids much of the time, involved either in teaching, coaching, or playing b-ball, and not their lives.  Most of the time, our free time was centered selfishly around my interests, not theirs, like spending summers camping all through Europe, or going to Chautauqua each weekend when in Hudson. Today's parents seem more interested doing what their kids want to do, rather than what their parents want to do.  I think we make up for our lapses with our kids by deluging our grandchildren with our time and affection, not that we think that way.  We just have time time now, and are not obsessed with ourselves, our jobs, our interests...the grandchildren become our major focus or interest.  It would be nice if you could live your life over again, and make up for our the mistakes in child rearing.  By the time you have learned how to be a good parent, you are a grandparent.  What an irony.

We did my favorite past time today, shopping, hitting the Ashville Country Store, Bon  Ton, Sears, Hair cut, Sam's Club and Weggies, all in about three hours.  Evie is off working out but I was lazy, so I stayed home, took a nap, and read.  It's been a pretty nice day outside, sunny much of the time  but cloudy now, as the sun sets in another hour.  I've been watching the amazing story coming from Egypt, and listening to all the talking heads discuss its future.  If this event proves anything, it's that no one knows for sure what will happen next.  Most rebellions like this end up in another dictatorship, like whtat happened in Iran, or Russia, or Cuba, even though the last two week communist overthrows.  Turkey is the one case where the military took over, then returned the rule to a democratic elected party and their leader.  This has been the custom in Turkey whenever the politicians got out of control. Prime Minister Erdogan and his party are trying to lessen this kind of power of the military, so something like it will not happen to them, a good idea, I think, unless its being done to ensure the rise of an ultimately Islamist state, which is the fear of many of our Turkish friends.