April 24
[Taken March 10, 2006 | Tracy | Centerville, OH]
My computer has been a bit… off… lately... random restarts, blue screen of death, locking up a lot, severe and mysterious errors... a bit off. Off enough that I finally gave in to John’s insistence that the C drive needed to be wiped clean and everything reinstalled. So I made a list of the software that needed to be reinstalled (and in some cases downloaded and reinstalled), backed up all of my documents and photo files to external drives, and told him to have at it.
My computer operates much more smoothly these days, and without all of those annoying little fits and ticks that I had gotten used to working around.
All settings are back where they ought to be and everything is more or less back to normal.
Of course, when I was backing up everything, it was inevitable that I would forget something, and this time what I forgot to back up was my address book. Oops. Mea culpa. In the short term this is not so much of a problem, since everyone that I call with any frequency is already programmed into my cellphone, and all major card-sending holidays are months away. Still… eventually I will need to rebuild my address book. So, if sometime in the near future you get an email from me asking for your mailing address, please send it to me that I may continue to shower you with holiday cards.
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News of the house:
There used to be a wooden walkway that went from the garage, around the side of the house, and to the back deck. I say ‘used to be’ because John and I ripped out about a week ago, due to the fact that it was rotting completely through in several places. We decided against replacing it with brick or fieldstone (too expensive!) and opted to put down topsoil and grass seed instead. At the time, we simply tossed the pieces of walkway into a pile behind the shed. Sunday we chopped the all of the pieces into smaller, more convenient sizes – the better to burn them in the fireplace (if they are not chemically treated in such as way that burning them would release poison gasses) or to slowly put the pieces out for the garbage men (who might not protest hauling away what is technically construction debris if we only give them a little bit at a time) to haul away – and then restacked them.
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News of the news:
Yesterday there were two major pieces of news. The first, which I got from reading the New York Times, was that Boris Yeltsin had died. The second, which I heard about while I was listening to NPR on my drive home, was that the world record for the largest coconut orchestra had been broken, and a new record was set… the new record was set by the 4000+ people who gathered in Trafalgar Square to sing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” while banging coconut halves together (a la Monty Python). Yes, it is cool and geeky, and it appeals to the geek and Monty Python fan in me, but I also have to wonder, “Why? Why is this news?”
Honestly, I forget where the following quote is from, but I remember it being in the context of the internet and our current state of constantly being plugged in to all news (and all everything else) from all corners of the globe.
“The insignificant is now significant.”
They sure got that right.
April 1
[Taken March 10, 2006 | Bellyqueen | Centerville, OH]
Well.
I have been to St. Louis a couple of times. (Work)
I have been to DC. (Work) It snowed the day I got there… a glorious snowfall that the natives of DC had no idea how to deal with and that muffled the National Mall, as I wandered around, virtually alone, to see some of the monuments.
I have another trip to St. Louis coming up. (More work)
I shot a couple of shows at the dance studio, and have another show coming up.
There was a population explosion in the fish tank. The male mollys that we got to breed with the female mollys did their job with a little too much enthusiasm. There are now 40+ (it is hard to count them since they are so little and move so fast) baby mollys in the tank. About half of them are black and gold speckled (mostly black) and the other half are silver white. Yes, we have a 55 gallon tank, but this is a bit too much of a good thing. Does anyone want any fish? Free to a good home. They are oh-so-cute.
Now that it is warming up for spring here, I am resuming my vague gardening efforts and my ongoing war against weeds. As usual some things died over the winter and the bare spots needed to be filled in. As usual I wanted to go for something that would both look nice (flowers are a plus) and would require minimal effort on my part to keep it alive. I went with some ivy that will hopefully grow into a nice ground cover, a white bleeding heart bush (I would also like to get a pink one) and a bunch of sprouted bulbs (a mix of tulips, hyacinths, crocuses, and daffodils). There are still some bare spots that need to be touched, but I think that I will wait a week or so to make sure that what I just planted doesn't die off and need replacing.
When John and I went to Home Depot the other day to get some home-repair stuff, we saw that they were having a sale on compressed bamboo flooring, or the exact same type that we are planning on installing in the family room. So even though we are in no way ready to start ripping out the carpet, we ran home, measured the family room, and then went back to Home Depot and bought 8 cases of flooring. Which was, conveniently enough, their entire stock.
Yesterday John and I went on the Miami River bike trail for the first time this year. It may be quite a while before we give it another go, as all of the heavy rains and flooding that we have been having here lately washed out impressive stretches of the trail where it dips close to the river. We didn't get nearly as far as we usually do before we had to admit defeat and turn back.
In short, I have been busy. I felt guilty about not saying anything here for so long… but not so guilty that I actually sat down and figured out what to say.
Mea culpa.
I could promise to do better in the future, but since I know that it is inevitable that I will hit another writing dry spell, why bother?