Poor typing

If I had known how much I would need typing skills I would have practiced more.  Now high school gives classes under the name of keyboarding, which is a good bit different from typing.  Also more useful, when a keyboard has extra keys like "delete".  No more white-out in gummy little vials, and extra keys like all the function keys and arrow keys that let you move quickly across blocks of text.  I still have to look at the keyboard while I use it, leading to uncaught errors that are blocks of text in the past.  

There are quite a number of things in high school I would do differently now.  For one thing, I'd ditch the Bible I carried.  I never read it, why did I carry it around?  I'm sure it warned guys off;  hard to compete with Jesus.  I would smile more, aiming for a sunny disposition.  High school wasn't really that scary, just crowded with 2000 students.  There were 900 in my graduating class, mostly ordinary kids. The 50th reunion for our class brought 40 or 50 alumni, not much of a showing.  There were kids I knew from elementary school, but they went to a different junior high, where I lost touch, and now they seemed so much more sophisticated than me.  The ones that were jokers in elem. school were still big clowns now.  The chorus classes were the best, giving concerts several times a year.  I still remember singing second soprano for the Hallelujah Chorus.  Now I can't carry a tune in a bucket, what happened with that?  One other class I liked was Drama.  Another student and I were doing a joking part in Hamlet, where two servants did a light slapstick routine.  The only problem with that is when the guy was supposed to slap me,  he slapped me for real, I had a red handprint on my cheek for several hours.  I yelled, "Hey!  What was that for!?"  which Shakespeare never included.  In the psychology class, we spent several weeks learning to "read" body language.  That has proven to be useful. And we did an abbreviated IQ test one semester, and fortunately the instructor never revealed that I had the highest score, that would have sealed my doom. 

The math teacher, ex Marine, taught an advanced class which I truly enjoyed, it was like doing crosswords every day.  Never found matrix math to be a bit of good, or Calculus in high school either.  Crosswords.

The Main Number One that I would change is that Norm wouldn't die in my arms of a stroke at 72.  Just days away from our 46th wedding anniversary, I don't think either of us thought that he would go before me.  He had a mini-stroke earlier, don't know when, but the doctor in the hospital said that it isn't the first stroke you need to worry about, it's the second.  And he shared with me that his father survived his second stroke, and it would have been a mercy if he had not.  If only.  I lay awake at night thinking of all the what ifs.