1 Down, 1 To Go

It's been a very Mac day.

Things have just been very quiet and relaxed around here. Around noon today, I called the Apple Store we had waited at on Friday and the guy told me they had "limited stock" and we should come right away. We didn't even get potty stops in before we left, we just took off. It's about a 20 minute ride. When we got there, they had ONE left, which went to K, because she's the one who's really been wanting it and waited on two lines on Friday. Anyway, my eye doctor's office is maybe a half mile from the store, so I'll stop in on after my appointment on Friday.

In the meantime, GO ME, because I added RAM to my laptop before, and I have never ever messed with the innards of a Mac til now. Years back, I thought nothing of tinkering with PC guts, setting jumper switches and upgrading CPU's, but my eyes aren't what they used to be, and I really really really didn't want to mess this up. But I forgot: it's a Mac. The directions are clear and the process was stupid easy, virtually impossible to get wrong. I was worried that I had possibly not gotten the right RAM, but I did. Now I can install that USB turntable thing, which I didn't want to do until I had the more memory.

Weird mail of the day: three letters from lawyers who found out about my ticket in the public record and are offering me free consultations and possible representation. Do I really need a lawyer for this? Well, the Hubs -- a lawyer -- will know, and if he says yes, it's probably a perfect job for Wonderful Niece. Especially since I can pay her with a Bare Escentuals gift certificate.

Oh, today is the anniversary of us, 31 years. I cannot believe that, but I know it's true. We're going out for dinner, but I can't think of where, and probably with the girls over the weekend.

In the meantime, I'm just being lazy. Otherwise feeling fine, for me.

WATCHING PROJECT RUNWAY MARATHON :: ENTRY #1805
SUMMER BOOK #3: The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

Happiness Runs

Tonight's title has no significance whatsoever except that it's the title of a random song I happened to hear yesterday. (By Donovan, very sixties.)

Again, a day. I finally got to grade those papers, most of which were not good. This was basically an exercise in following directions, which some of them simply did not do. I know not why.

It's a rainy icky one here today. April showers will henceforth come in May, I think.

No other news of note. I was looking forward to tomorrow's trip to the Apple store with the Sibs and Little K, but it seems she's not up to it for some reason, so we've switched to Tuesday evening. I want to look into more memory for my computer, so I have my own ulterior motive for going. I know it's nothing for them to put more RAM in -- I only have 512 mb, which is actually probably enough -- but I'd really like a bigger internal hard drive so I can upgrade to the new Mac operating system. Perhaps that is not to be.

Hmm. I put a wash in a little while ago and I have no idea at all when that was. I don't want to go down to the basement if it's not done yet. And this is the biggest crisis of my day, which is not such a bad think, I think.

Okay. I'm going to watch Stardust -- after I put the wash in the dryer -- and lie down flat on my sore back.


WATCHING THE SIMPSONS :: ENTRY #1755

WOLS

If this day were going any more slowly, it would be moving backwards.

I contacted another vendor, spoke to the Assistant Superintendent about some other money thing, called in several kids to try to shake their overdue books loose, went through everything on my Google Reader twice, had the coffee in my thermos, and then I looked at the clock: 10:04. Gah. That's only halfway through third period! Isn't it time to go home yet?

Now, this is going to sound crazy, but what I need are some papers to grade. This is because the Other Chai is giving my some projects one of her classes did that she and I taught together, and I'm grading the technical part, and I pretty much cleared my day today so I could get that done, but she hasn't given me the papers yet. I've got my little rubric all ready to go. (A rubric, for the uninformed and/or over a certain age, is like a scoresheet. This is the way we need to grade papers now. Each kid gets a copy of the rubric beforehand so s/he knows what we're looking for and what they're being graded on, and then they get the completed rubric, showing them what they did right and what they did wrong, when they get their papers back. Only I didn't give them my rubric at the beginning this time, but it doesn't matter; they're only getting a point for what they did -- what I told them to do -- and no points if they didn't do it. It's not complicated. My other recent project, the one where they write their autobiographies in historical context, has a hell of a rubric, because designing rubrics is The Perfect Job for an obsessive-compulsive list maker. Hey, maybe that's what I should do when I retire: become a professional rubric maker. Or not. There's only so many times in a day that you can stand to say or hear that word.)

I was also looking online at the Apple site to see what they're offering now so I know what to tell my sister to look for when we go shopping on Saturday. It's not hard; she doesn't need anything with the word "Pro" in it, and she certainly doesn't need a MacBook Air, because really, who does? It's a super-lightweight and thin computer, but is otherwise no big deal. Not a big hard drive, no internal CD/DVD drive, not enough ports. Not worth it to me. But now I'm wondering if I could get them to put more memory and a bigger hard drive in my computer, and what that would cost. I'll have to look into it.

Okay, that took five minutes. Now what?

Okay, a bell rang. Third period is over. I thought you'd want to know.

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It's fifth period, aka first lunch. I have second lunch. Will this day never end?

Oh, here's an amusing moment I had last night. The Hubs says that next Tuesday after work he's going to the optometrist. This must mean that his eyes are literally falling out of his face, because I gave him the doctor's card five years ago when his second to last pair of glasses broke. (He's now wearing wire-rim aviator glasses.) Maybe more than five years ago. I'm sure he has not gotten a new prescription or pair of glasses in 20, maybe 25 years. He is actually going to see a medical professional. Anyway, so I figured he'll have the exam and then order a new pair of glasses and refuse to get them when he finds out what glasses cost in the 21st century. So I warned him not to drop dead when they tell him how much the glasses will cost. He said, deadpan, "So what are they now, 20 or 30 bucks?" This was something my father always did; when you came home with something new, he would say "How much did you pay for that two-dollar dress?" when you had gotten it in a fabulous sale for $35 or something. So I answered the Hubs, "Yes, Jack, glasses are now up to 20 or 30 bucks, that should do it," and he laughed. Boy, is he in for a shock. I realize he won't need what I have -- maybe he will -- but my glasses run in the $400 to $500 range, and I get the cheapest frames I can find, or put new lenses in frames I already have. He'd better not re-use those awful aviator frames. He has one backup pair left, which I swear he wore in high school, which he wears when he's watching TV in bed. This is what he looks like in them (the one on the left, but taller):



Well, we'll see what he comes home with.

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6:15. So I went to the orthopedist, and I have rotator cuff tendonitis, and I got a cortisone shot in my shoulder, for which I rewarded myself with a pastrami sandwich for dinner.

I won't go into the stress I got in today's mail -- maybe tomorrow -- but I think I will put an icepack on my arm, which is a little sore from the shot, and then, I'll be back tomorrow with more fun.


WATCHING MASH :: ENTRY #1753

Easy Going Day

But first, this. Am I the only one who's read The Harrad Experiment?

Moving on. It was just, as the title says, an easy going day. I woke up about six -- horrors -- but managed to fall back to sleep, where I had an amusing dream. I dreamed I was Yvonne (whose link I can't get to at the moment). I mean, I was me, but I was somehow in Yvonne's body and life, and I assumed she was in mine, but I couldn't figure out what to do next. But I knew that I had two boys somewhere in the house, and I had a whole gang of friends waiting downstairs for me to get dressed and go out. I had fabulous clothes, and I couldn't decide what to wear, and I had -- let's be frank -- a great pair of bazooms on me. Anyway, one of the friends came up to see what was taking me so long, and to my surprise, it was my my-life friend The Other Chai, but when she looked at me, she saw Yvonne, who was apparently also her friend in dream-world. I kept asking her is she was really her, her name, her parents' names, and so on, and just as I was about to ask her to look up the real me and find out if it was actually Yvonne, I woke up.

I went out and got coffee, and then went out again to get wrapping paper for the FIL's gift for tomorrow as well as the Sibs', which is in two weeks, but the DVDs came in already, so I might as well wrap 'em up. Then K and I went for an 11.00 appointment at the Apple Store. They not only took us early, the guy said the computer was out of warranty (because no one told us I had to register the warranty when I bought it), but he replaced the power supply at no charge anyway because the cord was frayed and it was a fire hazard. Sweet. And I looked at the iPod Touches, and I think I will have to get that when my Palm dies. Right now, it doesn't do everything I need, like read and write Office documents or have an ebook reader, but I think it will soon. And it's very pretty and thin and looks like magic.

Then R and K and I went out for lunch, and afterwards, they went to a movie. So here's what I did all afternoon: I listened to Harry and the Hallows on the computer while I moved everything over from my Palm calendar and contacts programs into the Mac equivalents, and then I figured out how to sync the Palm with the Mac apps instead. It took two or three hours, but I was happy as a little clam, listening to Harry and doing mindless computer work. The addresses were easy; I just had to delete ones I don't really need anymore, add some categories, and make a few minor corrections. The calendar was the big deal, because the transfer created a lot of duplicate items, and I had to assign everything to a new category. I had to go back through the end of 2005, since I figure one of the reason to have a computer-based calendar is to keep a record of when you did things, or when things happened to you. (August 5, 2005: Appendectomy.) But it's all nice and tidy now, and even though I read warnings on the Palm website that the sync might not work, it went smoothly, not a single glitch.

And that's my day in not so small a nutshell. Tomorrow it's down the shore for the bitg gala. (Just kidding; it's the regular ten of us -- the ILs, the SIL, her hubs and two kids, and the four of us -- plus the FIL's sister and her husband.) Nothing fancy, just at the ILs' house.

Okay. All I still need to do is get the Sibs on the phone and get her kids' spouses' birthdays for my obsessive calendar.

WATCHING VH1 :: ENTRY #1745

Progress

So they told me where to find it at the Apple Store and now I can type è and ç and ñ and all kinds of stuff. But thanks, Harriet V, for that webpage, because I was looking for that, too, and now I've bookmarked it and I have it. I only hope this looks normal once I post it!

So there's an article in today's Newsweek about the 25 hottest colleges and universities, and when I saw it on the cover, all I could think was "Don't let the college Little K wants to go to be there!" because once a school gets mentioned in an article like this, they get flooded with applications. Well, it wasn't, but surprisingly, the college R went to was. So that was unexpected, and cool.

I may have to write more later, because I know there was something I was going to write about and I had it in my head all damn day and know I have no idea. So, maybe later.

WATCHING LAW & ORDER :: ENTRY #1552

First Time for Everything

The MIL called a few minutes ago, and after talking about the weather for a few minutes, she asked how we were coping with the loss of the cat. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I believe that this is the first time in the 30+ years that I have known her that she has ever initiated a conversation about something sad. I was almost too surprised to answer, but I did, and we shared the experience of being catless for several minutes. (She lost her last one maybe five years ago, after a lifetime of always having a cat, and made what I think was a sound decision not to get another one. She's got a full-time job on her hands looking after her husband.)

Slight change of reading plans, not that anyone cares, but this is a diary, after all. I'm reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon, which apparently won a Pulitzer Prize -- it's got a gold medallion thingy on the cover that says "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize", so there you go -- and I really don't know how I missed this one until now. It's a novel, but it's essentially the story of two Jewish boys in the 1930s, one of them a refugee from Nazi Europe, who create a comic-book superhero. Hmmm, where have I heard that before? You know, I could make a list of the things that have obsessed me in my life, like Star Trek and Harry Potter and the Beatles, but Superman would have to be at the top of my list, either chronologically or in order of importance. Superman occupied my consciousness from the ages of 7 to 17, and I have long known the story of Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel and their creation of the prototype of the superhero. Anyway, the book looks good so far; I'll let you know how it turns out.

I have my few errands set for tomorrow morning, and my list of questions for the genius at the Apple Store. One of the things I've never quite found on the Mac is the little application that was called Character Map in Windows. I read a tantalizing little article the other day that tells me where to find something comparable in Office and other programs, but that it doesn't exist as a standalone app. What I want to know is, how can I put an accented character here, in Blogger? That's just one question; another funny thing is that I was told when I bought the machine that I never need to defrag, that they'll take care of that at the yearly tune-up. Cute, but I don't want to leave the machine there for 24 hours for the yearly tune-up, so they need to show me how to do what maintenance I need to do. And a few more things here and there.

I've got me a bit of a headache now, so I'm going to take something and go read some.

WATCHING NEWS :: ENTRY #1551