I work with adolescents so I am forced to keep up with this stuff :-) My DS is 10, and I dread the day he gets involved with it all. Some things I have learned, FYI-- Icky, but good to know-- There are now several apps available that "capture" Snapchats. So the sender believes the message will disappear, but the recipient can save it and distribute it. This is frequently used for the sexy/naked images or supposedly private comments dumb kids send each other. There are apps specifically designed to deceive parents looking through their kids' phones. The icon on the phone will look like something innocent, like a calendar or whatever, but when you click on it, it takes you to a password protected messaging or "dating" service. Many of these apps are used by sexual predators; kids get suckered in by the "privacy" aspect. Sending/receiving nude pics of someone under 18 (even when a kid is sending images they have taken of themself) can result in charges of distributing child pornography. Seriously.

I vaguely remember a party line in the home when I was a very small child - maybe 4 or 5 years old. It's funny to me how many countless hours I spent on the phone as a teenager. My girlfriends and I would see each other at school, then be on the phone together in the evening (s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g that curly phone cord into all kinds of unnatural, elongated shapes). I remember just HANGING on the phone too, not really having anything of consequence to talk about. Maybe watching the same TV show and commenting occasionally. When I had a boyfriend, it was often the same thing. Now I do not enjoy talking on the phone much at all. I DO like to speak with my parents (my mom and I have been known to hold marathon, chatty sessions), but for the most part I am just not comfortable making calls or talking to others that way. I'm not even sure why that is, unless I just got it all out of my system as a teen!

I was thinking this morning about how to reduce the polarization. I have no idea how to deal with the social media issue, but I think that the structure of our two party system and the electoral college contribute to polarization. I think that ranked choice voting would be a good first step. Think of a primary with 15 or 20 candidates, which we had in this election and in 2016. You tend to have a lot of candidates in the middle of the field and a few that are farther to the left of right. The middle-of-road vote gets split among a bunch of candidates, which gives the more extreme candidates an opening, even though collectively the middle-of-the-field candidates have more support. In ranked choice voting, you choose your 1st choice candidate, 2nd choice, etc. When they tally the votes, they do it in rounds. After the 1st round, they eliminate the candidate with the lowest number of 1st choice votes. The vote of anyone who listed that candidate as their first choice gets reallocated to their second choice candidate. The votes are retallied and the last place candidate is again dropped. Repeat, until you run out of rankings (I think I've only had to rank up to 5 candidates, even when the field was larger). I hesitate to use concrete examples for fear of setting off censorship. But if you are voting on 3 candidates, who we will call Left, Middle, and Right (though within a party primary, one of those would be "center), and the people who like the Left candidate put Middle as their second choice, and people who like the right candidate put Middle as their second choice, then the candidate in the middle will get the nomination. The primaries are a good place to start (especially since it is purely up to the parties). But what if we went further, and used it in the general election? And what if the Electoral College used ranked-choice voting (that would definitely take a constitutional amendment)? I think with that change you could have more than two major parties, and the ranking would push the final choice toward the middle. I think. I'm obviously ready for some serious reform.

In the name of brevity I left out a few things too. I shorted out my Dad's stove on the second batch of tomato sauce. Dad was gone at the time, before I picked him back up, but he kind of freaked. We got the stove working again, and I found out that burner was on its last legs, but my Dad had been babying it. So subsequent batches of tomatoes I did out on the patio using my butane stove, which was not very convenient or cost effective when the jars have to boil for 35 minutes to sterilize and seal, not to mention cooking the sauces . . . I got my white gas Coleman stove working so figured when the electricity/well pump came back on at the house I could use that, but when I filled up the tank with more gas, the whole thing broke down, won't hold pressure. Probably a gasket issue, but that's out for now until I can work in fixing it. For the next batches of tomatoes we are going to try using our gas grill. Now that the electricity is back on I can use water!! Lots of laundry and cleaning to do too, got very behind. Oh yeah, and we get our puppy Saturday . . . I was also still in the middle of puppy proofing the house . . . and yesterday I got randomly stung by a wasp by our tool shed. Having a pretty bad reaction, although it is just local on my arm, big red spot about the size of a small canning jar lid . . . and a wart showed up on my little finger. I have only had maybe two or three warts in my entire life . . . and I am in the midst of trying to figure out why I have weird nerve irritation on one of my major neural paths. Both my back and chest itch but absolutely nothing on the skin surface. It's from inside. Dr. said there is a major nerve group that goes from spjne to back around ribs to front so the two itches are connected. So now I have three itchy spots if you count the wasp sting on my arm. Distraction with canning keeps it mostly under control but still worrisome. We had a power outage the week before, for two and a half days then, so I had just moved all my stuff BACK into a clean fridge and freezer when the power went out again . . .