Overwrite Is Gone

Do you remember back in the days of "word processors" the Overwrite mode?  If you were typing, you would be in insert mode by default, but you could press the insert key and it would change to overwrite mode.  Overwrite was great if you wanted to get rid of a bunch of text and didn't feel like pressing the backspace or delete key forever.

This was back in the days before the mouse.  Or that's when it started.  Over time, we gained the ability to select a large amount of text by highlighting it and just do a single delete.  At that point preserving information became more important and a paradigm shift happened where pushing out existing text was better than accidentally deleting something possibly important.

And that's what happened often, right?  You wouldn't know you were in overwrite mode and you'd get to typing for a good while.  You'd look up to find out you'd written over something gold, something you wouldn't be able to recreate or maybe you weren't even sure what you overwrote.  You hoped it wasn't that important.  Aruggh. 

What about undo? Ctrl+Z you ask?  Ah, yes, when undo first came about there was only one level of undo.  Ghastly to think about today.  At one point I remember discovering I could increase the total number of undos Word allowed   I think people thought I was crazy when I told them I'd set it to fifty.  But hey, I'm a girl and sometimes I change my mind; I needed those fifty levels.

I had forgotten all about overwrite mode until recently when I decided to try and find it.  It may be an option still; I didn't look very hard.  At some point hitting insert stopped toggling a logical switch that eradicated existing written content.  It's a change I never noticed.  A change I wasn't properly thankful for until I thought about overwrite the other day. 

The Big Boy Update:  Stick and Pail.  Some toys are just found items.  Today he entertained himself for almost an hour with a broom handle and a red pail.  He put the handle into the pail and swished it around.  With a helpful suggestion from Grandpa, he could sit on the pail and kick it to make sounds.  He drug it around and found some very messy mud.  Then he had a bath and a nap.


The Tiny Girl Chronicles.  Pretty pretty dress.  Nana and Grandpa brought her a little poofed skirt dress from their vacation.  Sitting up in the dress smiling made us all grinning fools as we were won over again by her sweet cuteness.

Right-size countdown:  2.8 pounds to go.  I had what I would say was my worst day in eleven weeks yesterday.  Know that there's no way I could have gained over two pounds in a day, but I do think I overate not only my caloric target for the day, but over my daily caloric needs.  It was a party.  It was Cinco de Mayo.  That wasn't the problem.  It was my husband's homemade sea salt caramel brownies!