One morning, my husband Jerry went back to the kitchen as he just finished loading his car. “I guess filling my thermos(保温瓶) is all that I have left to do, and then I'm off.” Down the drain went the hot water that had been warming his thermos.

    With a nostalgic(怀旧的) look on his face, he softly said: “Anytime I fill my thermos I think of your mom.” The tone in his voice was so tender as he spoke of my mother, who is sadly no longer with us.

    “Oh honey, I know she's watching and listening right now with a big smile on her face,” I responded, tears in my eyes.

    One morning years ago when we were leaving, mother watched as Jerry was to fill his thermos. Mom then casually said, ‘Jerry, if you filled your thermos with hot water and let it sit a while, your coffee would stay hot for longer then.” With her simple suggestion, his face showed that he was shocked by his own lack of common sense. Well, of course it would!

    He poured out the small amount of coffee already in the thermos and refilled it with boiling hot water. Then he poured the water and refilled it with hot coffee. Mom smiled as Jerry did so.

    Words of wisdom from a loving mother-in-law made an impact that will never be forgotten. She never dreamed her words would be a treasured and everlasting memory in the heart of her son-in-law.

    The lasting memories don't necessarily come from major moments in life. Memories are often made during those small, ordinary times. Life is about small moments we share with friends and loved ones.

    I used to believe courtesy(礼貌) was a thing of the past. Very seldom have I encountered a courteous human being in this modem era of the so called Generation X.

    Recently, I had to change my thinking, when I came face to face with just such a human being. I had gone to a happening coffee place, with two of my grown up daughters. The place was crowded with the usual loud crowd and we had to climb a sleep flight of stairs in order to find an empty table. After enjoying coffee and snacks, we were at the steep descent down the stairs, where the narrow space made climbing down only possible in a single file, with hardly any space for another person to either climb up or come down.

    Just as I was in the middle of my descent, a gentleman entered the main entrance of the restaurant which right in front of the staircase. I was sure I would be pushed roughly by this man who will want to go up in a hurry. I kept coming down as fast as I could, holding on to the banister (栏杆), instead of my advanced years. My agile daughters were already down, looking up at me worriedly, hoping I would reach them before the stranger strange started up the stairs, knowing I was a nervous sort.

    Nearly reaching them, I noticed the man still standing near the door. I reached my daughters and passed the stranger at the entrance door which he kept holding open. I looked back thinking he was still at the door, deciding whether to go in or find another less crowded place. I saw him going up the stairs, two at a time. I told my daughters about it and all three of us felt had that we did not even thank the courteous gentleman who was actually holding the door open for us ladies to pass through before going up.

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    My grandmother often said to me, “You can count the number of your true friends on the fingers of one hand.” For a long time I thought this was true. However, I've now discovered my grandmother was only half right. Maybe we do only make a few best friends in our lifetime, but those aren't the only people that we can call friends. There are many different types. Let me tell you about a few of them.

    One type of friends is the type I call the “football mom friend”. My neighbor Sally is a good example. We both have kids who play football in a football club, and someone has to take them to practice and pick them up. Sally and I and two other mothers take turns to do this. We meet sometimes and have tea and talk about what our kids are doing, but those are the only times that we meet each other. I enjoy being with these women, but we don't do anything else together.

    Another type is called the “hobby friend”. That's the person you share an interest or a hobby with. Michael and Cater, who are brothers, are a good example of this type. We're all in a bird watching club. Every few weekends the members of the club go on a trip to watch different kinds of birds. There's nothing romantic about my relationship with Michael and Cater, of course. We just share interest in birds.

    Then there's the “other half of the couple” type of friends. Jim is married to Rose, a friend that I've known since college. When Rose married Jim, I realized that I would have to be Jim's friend if I want to continue to be Rose's. Jim and I don't share so many interests, but we do have a friendly relationship.

    Almost every machine with moving parts has wheels, yet no one knows exactly when the first wheel was invented or what it was used for. We do know, however, that they existed over 5,500 years ago in ancient Asia.

    The oldest known transport wheel was discovered in 2002 in Slovenia. It is over 5,100 years old. Evidence suggests that wheels for transport didn't become popular for a while, though. This could be because animals did a perfectly good job of carrying farming tools and humans around.

    But it could also be because of a difficult situation. While wheels need to roll on smooth surfaces, roads with smooth surfaces weren't going to be constructed until there was plenty of demand for them. Eventually, road surfaces did become smoother, but this difficult situation appeared again a few centuries later. There had been no important changes in wheel and vehicle design before the arrival of modem road design.

    In the mid-1700s, a Frenchman came up with a new design of road—a base layer (层) of large stones covered with a thin layer of smaller stones. A Scotsman improved on this design in the 1820s and a strong, lasting road surface became a reality. At around the same time, metal hubs (the central part of a wheel) came into being, followed by the pneumatic tyre (充气轮胎) in 1846. Alloy wheels were invented in 1967, sixty years after the appearance of tarmacked roads (柏油路). As wheel design took off, vehicles got faster and faster.

    Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been making changes to my brain. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Involving myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. That's rarely the case any more.

    I think I know what's going on. For over a decade, I've been spending lots of time online. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes by a few Google searches. Even when I'm not working, I'm scanning headlines or just tripping from link to link.

The Net is becoming a universal medium where information flows through my eyes and ears and into mind. The perfect recall of silicon memory (硅制存储器) can be a blessing to thinking. But that comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall Mcluhan pointed out, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is weakening my ability for concentration. Once I was a driver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a flying swallow.

I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to acquaintances, Bruce Friedman, a blogger, also has described how the Internet has changed his mental habits. His thinking has taken on a "staccato (破碎)" quality. "I can't read War and Peace any more" he admitted, "I've lost the ability to do that."

A recently published study suggests that when reading online, we tend to become "more decoders (解码器) of information". We are not only what we read; we are how we read.

    A study involving 8, 500 teenagers from all social backgrounds found that most of them are ignorant when it comes to money. The findings, the first in a series of reports from NatWest that has started a five-year research project into teenagers and money, arc particularly worrying as this generation of young people is likely to be burdened with greater debts man any before.

    University tuition fees (学费) are currently capped at £3, 000 annually, but this will be reviewed next year and the Government is under enormous pressure to raise the ceiling.

    In the research, the teenagers were presented with die terms of four different loans but 76 per cent failed to identify the cheapest. The young people also predicted that they would be earning on average £ 31.000 by the age of 25, although the average salary for those aged 22 to 29 is just £ 17, 815. The teenagers expected to be in debt when they finished university or training, although half said that they assumed the debts would be less than £ 10.000. Average debts for graduates are £ 12, 363.

    Stephen Moir, head of community investment at the Royal Bank of Scotland Group which owns NatWest, said. "The more exposed young people are to financial issues, and the younger they become aware of them, the more likely they arc to become responsible, forward-planning adults who manage their finances confidently and effectively."

    Ministers are deeply concerned about the financial pressures on teenagers and young people because of student loans and rising housing costs. They have just introduced new lessons in how to manage debts. Nikki Fairweathcr, aged 15, from St Helens, said that she had benefited from lessons on personal finance, but admitted that she still had a lot to learn about money.