Today we had our biennial (I think that’s the right word. Once every two years. For some reason I find it impossible to get biennial and semiannual straight) CPR and AED training at work. You probably all know what CPR is. An AED is the defibrillating machine various institutions (including ours) keep available in case of emergency.
I was deeply embarrassed to realize I had only a vague recollection of the previous training. If somebody had dropped in front of me with a heart attack yesterday, I’d have been useless. Now I’m up to speed again (sort of) and the instructor told me where to look on YouTube for a refresher video.
Old dog. New tricks. It’s a challenge.
The term “light bill” came to my mind today. Do you young folks know what a light bill is?
When I was a kid, my dad used to talk about paying the light bill. He meant the electric bill. Because back when rural electification came in, in the wake of World War II, that’s what everybody called it. There was one main purpose for getting your house hooked up to the grid, and that was to run electric lights. No more oil lamps (I don’t think they used gas in the country. That was a city luxury) with their smudge and bother and fire risk. Suddenly you could bid the fair day linger a while indoors, and read into the night.
Even then they did other things with electricity, of course. I believe they had a radio before they got electric power, but now they could feed it off an outlet, rather than buying batteries. I’m not sure what else they would have run off electricity in the early days. Ice boxes kept food cold, and clothes washing was still done by hand, at least at first. Dr. Heppelmeyer’s Patent Miracle Nerve Panacea and Hair Growth Stimulator might have warranted a plug-in, at least until it turned the cat’s hair white.
My great-grandfather, whose farm was across the road from ours, was one of the first farmers in the area to have electric light (he was a strict pietist, but loved technology and innovation. This was not uncommon), but he ran his off a battery of batteries, kept up in the attic. When I showed the Norwegian relatives that house at Christmas, one of them asked how they recharged the batteries, and I hadn’t the faintest idea. Perhaps they had to refresh the acid periodically, or scrape off the lead plates. Probably it was something else.
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). Now, he has a book for teenagers and young adults in which he answers a few fundamental questions. 
leads a reader into the reasons he may pander to his crowd by asking:
