When Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, he wrote of three inalienable rights. Among the three, was the “pursuit of happiness”. While some people think that the phrase, “pursuit of happiness” is about the acquiring of material wealth, as portrayed in the recent movie by the same name. In reality, that isn’t the case. Scholars know that Jefferson admired Epicurus, a Greek philosopher, who founded a system of philosophy. The following description of Epicurianism is from Wikipedia:

The philosophy originated by Epicurus propounded an ethic of individual pleasure as the sole or chief good in life. Hence, Epicurus advocated living in such a way as to derive the greatest amount of pleasure possible during one’s lifetime, yet doing so moderately in order to avoid the suffering incurred by overindulgence in such pleasure. The emphasis was placed on pleasures of the mind rather than on physical pleasures. Therefore, according to Epicurus, with whom a person eats is of greater importance than what is eaten.

So Jefferson was advocating a pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right, he was in essence advocating a pursuit of Epicureanism philosophy as a fundamental aspect of a free man’s life.

You might wonder why I am talking about Epicureanism. Why is it so important, that I would make an effort to share these ideas with you.

Well, I think that happiness is something that you should pursue, and it is absolutely worth pursuing. Happiness does not necessarily come automatically with other goals like attaining an education, advancement at work, raising a family, or striving for any other goal. Happiness should be a goal unto itself and you should pursue it, the same way that you might pursue your other goals. Those other goals may or may not bring you happiness, and, at best, attaining those other goals most likely will only bring you temporary happiness. Therefore, you should make happiness a goal unto itself.

Make sure that whatever you do in life, make sure that you set aside a little time each week to think about what gives you happiness and make finding a little happiness each week, one of your goals for that week. You may not succeed every week, but just thinking about it and working on a plan, should provide some hope for the next week. Furthermore, I believe you should encourage and help your partners, family and friends to find a little happiness each week.

This essay was written over the spring and summer of 2016 by Mike Willegal

Over the last few years, we have had a plague of small moths, especially in the spring time. There are so many, that the larva from these moths defoliate certain types of trees in the spring. So far, these trees have managed to survive, but I’m wondering how many more years that they will be able to tolerate this. The moths are attacted to the lights inside the house at night. There are so many moths, that they get into the house almost every time you open a door at night.

While discussing the disapperance of the Bats with a neighbor the other day, I think I came up with the likely reason that the moth population has run amok. Bats eat moths and other similar sized flying insects, such as dragonflys. With the bats out of the picture, the moths have had little to curb their population, except the available food supply.

Note that bats typically do not eat mosquitos, since mosquitos are too small too provide much nourishment. Dragonflys do eat mosquitos, so with the bats gone, there may also be a reduction in the mosquito population as one consumer of the dragonfly population has been taken out of the picture. Come to think of it, the mosquito population does seems to be low for this time of year.

The balance of nature sure is sensitive and it’s surprising to see it out of whack in our own backyard.

I have had two negative experiences.

A while back, a Powerbook trackpad failed while still under service contract and Apple didn’t want to fix it because the service person claimed something was spilled on it. Though the machine was used by other family members, I know of no actual spill. They wanted something like $900 to repair it. I ended up getting an aftermarket trackpad off of ebay and fixing it myself for $40. So much for the extended warentee. I must admit that a service manager called me after I sent negative response to their after service questionnaire. He offered to have another look at it, but by then, I decided I could handle it, myself.

My iMac hard drive was recently recalled due to a high failure rate. I made an appointment and took it in to their store. Result – after waiting around for a while, someone checked out my machine and made sure that it operatated correctly, found that they had the replacement drive in stock, then said that they would have it ready in 3 to 5 days. I asked if they were going to migrate the data. The answer was no, it was going to take so long because changing hard-drives was a “delicate” operation. 5 days to change a hard drive, without migrating data – Apple, give me a break – you can do better than that.

While waiting for help on the iMac hard drive, a woman came in complaining about intermittent WI-FI connectivity with her iPhone. I can’t imagine the Apple “genius” solving that problem.