I did hear this on NPR while driving through snow to take Eileen her supper at work.

William Wright of Chandler, Arizona called our obituary [John Murtha] very informative, but took issue with our wording. We said Murtha won two Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star in Vietnam. Wright says: U.S. military service is not a contest where personnel win declarations, they are awarded and receive declarations. [link to transcript on NPR]

Oh yes. Words do make a difference.

Turning military service into a game show in on air obituary needs to be challenged. Thank you, William Wright of Chandler, Arizona.

I chatted on the phone with my adult daughter, Elizabeth, for about an hour yesterday.

She was madly doing her laundry and chatting with me on the run. I had thought of calling her on Monday night but fell asleep instead. She said she was thinking of me on Monday as she was going out to the famous Jazz club, “The Blue Note,” with a friend.

Today, she is supposed to fly back to Miami to continue assisting with Haiti relief for the next month. But judging from the weather reports for New York, it seems likely her flight will be canceled.

I notice that Google is launching a PR campaign about it’s new social network software. Unfortunately, it hasn’t made it available to this Gmail subscriber. Sigh. I use Facebook quite a bit and they just made some changes that confuse the order of how messages are read.

The intent seems to be to provoke more clicks and keystrokes but it seems to have slowed down interaction. I could be wrong. A clean connectivity web site doesn’t seem that hard to design. However many of the online companies forget that even though advertisers are their customers, their end users are the ones they need to serve with ease of use and simplicity. Just my cranky old opinion.

I’m on page 158 of Kate Atkinson’s first novel, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum.” While I am enjoying it, I do see that I like her other three novels more. She seems to be evolving some of the acerbic wit she displays in “One Good Turn,” “Case Histories,” and “When Will There Be Good News?”

I ripped a bunch of Schubert to my hard drive yesterday in between ransacking my incredibly full kitchen pantry. The pantry is now much more clear and a bit more organized.

Yesterday at mid day my kitchen was full of pots, pans, return bottles, fabric shopping bags, and other stuff. It was difficult to get from one side of the room to other. Whew.

So I don’t have much to blog about today. My brain seems to go on hiatus when I spend the whole day cleaning. Today I need to do some dang church work (recital program, bulletin prep).

At 3:30 I meet to rehearse with the little Jazz group I play with Saturday evening for a church valentine dinner. That’s me. The old guy in the corner playing Jazz with three high school students.