The Desk Is All Sorted

I finished the Hat From The Blue Lagoon this afternoon, which was the only pressing project as it has to go into the mail when I go out tomorrow.  It was only about 2 o’clock so I bit the bullet and went after my cordless drill.  This is how my desktop was.  You can see how everything is all jammed together and there’s hardly any room on the left hand side for a plate or anything especially if my knitting bowl is over there.   A glass or cup obscured a portion of my monitor.  A salad plate would barely fit before.  Now I can get a dinner plate over there, even when my knitting bowl is over there. You can see at right how crowded everything is on the table top.  My phone was back behind the right-hand monitor between it and the tower.   In the picture at top, you can see something green to the right of the desk (my trash can — there was a time when I could not have an uncovered waste basket in my house because a certain white cat would tip it over, rummage through the contents, eat anything paper in it, and then refund it on the carpet.  Alas he went to that great cat tree in the sky last year at the ripe old age of 15).  The new desk extends all the way over that green trash can to the black filing cabinet.

Well, I disentangled and disconnected all the computer equipment and moved it off to the side out of harm’s way (and the fat(cat)boy’s — have I mentioned he’s a cord chewer?), dragged the old desk out into the hall and took the legs off it.  They are nice sturdy, heavy, metal legs with casters on as you can see below.  I got the shrink wrap off the new Ikea table top flipped it over and began marking it to predrill for the screws that attach the legs.  The second hole I predrilled, I realized that the solid area ended about six inches in from each end, and beyond that, the desktop material was not nearly as solid and was likely not going to hold the screws.  (It also explained why the table top was so light.) However, in each corner, holes had been predrilled so you could attach a set of Ikea legs to the table top, and that area was designed to hold screws in, so I had to position my metal legs where the screws would go into that area. However, that was no biggie. Did my predrilling, put the screws in, turned it back over and there it was.

I had some plastic shelf liner that looks like grass cloth which doesn’t completely cover the table top, but that’s OK.  It covers the bit where food or liquid might get spilt.  Then I put everything back on it and hooked it all up.  As you can see, there’s much more room on the left side for a glass or cup, my knitting bowl, and anything else I want to put there — All told, it took me about an hour and a half from start to finish, and cost $30 bucks.

When I bought the food for Thanksgiving dinner, I bought an extra container of dressing and froze it.  This last time I went grocery shopping, I bought some “Carving Board” turkey.  I thawed the dressing and put it in the oven about an hour ago, and I got my hammer and church key and opened a can of jellied cranberry sauce.  My timer just went off, which means the dressing is done — Dinner Time!

This Just In:  Yes, a dinner plate fits quite nicely to the right of my computer keyboard. I had brought home a share of the cheesy potatoes my mom made for Christmas dinner and I’m having them with my turkey, dressing and cranberry sauce.  Nums!

One more thing on the house sorting agenda is the sewing table still set up in my bedroom.  I still have that one more lap robe to do, and the table is starting to collect things — things that need to be dealt with — that I have parked there, intending to deal with them later.  Apparently, it’s not later yet.

I have a “preventive maintenance” dental appointment tomorrow, and I go see my PCP Friday who has been concerned about my blood pressure.  I have a cuff at home and I’ve been spot checking it, and I notice it is much improved now that I am over the stress of the move and have the house pretty well sorted.   Now that I have my new desktop in place, the reader’s table fixed, and the draft from the fireplace contained, I should be able to settle in and do some serious shawl knitting and binge TV watching starting tomorrow evening. That will be good, because the next knitting projects on the agenda are three shawls.

Flying The House

For a number of years now, my BFF has referred to my computer setup as “The Cockpit” and it’s a pretty accurate description.  Back when my sole source of income was medical transcription, I spent long periods of time at my computer with my headphones/earbuds on earning a living. Now that I’m more or less retired, I still spend a fair amount of time at the computer doing creative writing, reading blogs, listening to music, writing knitting patterns, playing games, watching videos. I have Winamp and Rhapsody/Napster and 1.5 TB of disk space when all I want is Music! Music! Music!.  I have an extension cord for my headphone jack taped to the underside of my desk with the plugin at the left edge of the desk, which enables the earbud cord to reach my ears without setting up an equipment disaster should I forget to take my earbuds out before I get up from my desk.   I’ve figured out a way to stream my favorite internet radio stations through Winamp.  I can settle in with a lap robe, a pot of tea, recline in my recliner and listen to music while I do whatever else I’m doing at the computer, like blogging.

My BFF refers to these computer sessions as “flying the house” — as though the house were a ship in interstellar space, and I’m in my pilot’s console at my controls off on a flight of fancy . . .

I’ve got a little timer on my desktop I’ve set to go off every 45 minutes, at which time I stop and use my facial steamer.  I’ve been doing modified Ujjayi breathing during the treatments, inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth.  It seems to be helping.

I set the HVAC on heat a while ago, and tonight we’re having our first hard frost.  At just on 4 a.m. it’s 27 F (-2.77 C).  I have the thermostat set at 68 F (20 C), and when the heat comes on, first the natural gas burner lights with a FWOOMP! and a soft roar.  Then the blower comes on, adding a rumble to the roar, and my rocket engines do a timed burn, pushing me a little faster, a little farther, heading toward warp . . .

 

Argles, Signal Boosting and Life Happening

I’m still slowly recovering from the out-of-the-blue leak. The world is still not all back together, though, and I’m debating about going on a cleaning bender and having it all to do again in three months when they put in the new windows. . . the thought makes me tired.  I’m about to decide I’m not going to bother because the major disruption that will be having new windows installed, all in one day no less, is going to be such a big, fat, major disruption, what with having to moving furniture and all, that the major cleaning can wait until all the furniture has to be moved anyway

This has been a very watery apartment: Root infested sewer lines that make toilet overflow, stuck float valve in the toilet of the apartment above that soaked both bathrooms and nearly soaked both bedrooms, and now this random act of the universe that put a leak in a pipe inside a wall and flooded the floors.

Signal boosting this comic.  There are still radio stations, of course, but it makes me think interesting things about somebody with a server full of music and an internet connection and internet radio. . .

We went on our trip and the trip part of it was good.  They were mostly people my mom knew, and there was the usual disconnect between the middle of the road 4/4 white bread drumbeat they marched to, and the world beat I’ve been dancing to a long time.  It was also a little like herding cats.  I went along for the ride and it was interesting.

We sat on the runway for an hour in Dallas because of a big lump of bad weather between us and Georgia and planes being routed around it and the need for maintaining flight intervals, but we finally got there.

Guess what?  The coast is HUMID!  Savannah was having the kind of weather where the air is too warm, too humid, and too motionless.  We rode trolleys and saw places where history happened, and there was that familiar surreality of trying to imagine what it must have been like to live in all those historic houses when they weren’t historic yet, or museums.

The steroid burst helped my mom’s leg, but she still did the stair-step two-step.  I always went up behind her as much for safety’s sake, as I did because it gave me a chance to rest between stair steps.  Needless to say, we here in the flatlands are not used to the kind of of humidity they have out there — when we get 50% humidity here, we’re smothering.  It was around 80% to 90% out there, and Savannah, particularly, was a like steam bath. Both Savannah and Charleston are not only on the coast but next to rivers.

I’ve got to make some decisions before I do my post on the trip, though.  I’m about to use up my free picture storage allotment on WordPress, so I’ve got to curtail my blog in some way in order to avoid having to pay for extra storage space. I think what I’ll do is make an archive blog in WordPress and move all the Blogger posts to it, and then delete them from this blog.

The Thursday after we got back, I was sitting at the computer, and all of a sudden, I had no internet. I reached for the phone to call Suddenlink, and had no dial tone.  I went to turn the TV on and had no cable.  I called Suddenlink on my cellphone and they could not find anything wrong at their end, so they sent a technician out bright and early Friday morning.  He went out to where the cable comes into the building, pootled about and discovered that I had been disconnected by mistake.  Turns out there was a disconnect notice for apartment 7, but whoever came out to do it disconnected mine by mistake.  It appears my cable connection was labeled with smeary ink, and whoever it was misread my “1” as a “7.”  My cable connection has now been relabeled.  I was remarkably civil about the whole thing, however, as no water was involved.

While we were on our trip, on the Sunday morning when we went out to Tybee Island, one of the ladies on the tour wore a square printed cotton scarf that had woven tape edge trim and tassels on each corner.  She folded it in half diagonally with the point in front, and crossed the ends behind her neck and dangled them to the front.  I liked the scarf and liked the look and immediately decided to work out how to knit a square scarf from the center out that could be worn in a similar fashion.

On my first attempt, I decided to knit a stockinette square 9 stitches x 9 rows, where you would pick up stitches down the side, across the bottom and up the other side for a total of 36 stitches (9 stitches on a side x 4 sides), and then continue knitting from there.  This part worked exactly how I thought it would.

Now, in order to knit a square from the center outward and have it lie flat, you must increase by 8 stitches every two rows.  Usually this works out to doing the increases all on the same row (two stitches at each corner) alternating with a row that has no increases.  However, if you do that, you’ve got to keep track of the rows.  My first attempt (above left) increased one stitch at every corner on every row.  It was an interesting effect, and will become Spinning Squares Scarf when I publish the pattern, but it was not the look I was shooting for.

On my second attempt (at right), I took the tack of beginning with a 4-stitch x 4 row square, and increasing 8 stitches (two at each corner) on a knit row, and then doing K1, p1, on the next row as a way of differentiating the rows so it would be obvious what row I was on.  This produced an interesting pebbly effect.  I tried to find out what this stitch is called but have not found anything that is an exact match.  I think it’s a variant of moss stitch, but the pattern is complicated by the fact that you’ve done a kfb at the beginning and end of each quarter on the knit row, and that shifts things on the k1, p1 row.

Whatever the stitch is called, I liked the effect, though, and I wrote a shawl pattern and a headscarf pattern based on it.  I’ve called them “Cobblestone Pie.”* I’ve been working on the head scarf for two days now and I have knitted 20 inches of the 22-inch width of the scarf.  I’m making the scarf on a set of US10 (6.0 mm) straight knitting needles.  I have several pairs of “long 10’s” as it happens, and just now, I noticed that the pair I’m using consists of a green needle and a blue needle.  Oddly enough, I have another pair just like them.

 

There is an A. A. Milne poem in one of the Pooh books called “Cottleston Pie.”  I chose the name “Cobblestone Pie” as a backhand allusion to the poem.

An Uphill Week

The tax program that I had used for free last year, even though I had 1099-MISC income then, too, has now decided to charge me $30 to use their program because I have 1099-MISC income and therefore my taxes are not “simple.”  However, they let me go far enough into the situation that they did all the figuring I needed to prepare a good, old-fashioned paper tax form, which means I cannot file electronically, and so have to pay the bank $2 for a money order to send in for the self employment tax I owe. This was because the only people hiring transcriptionists these days will only hire you as a consultant, meaning you are “self employed” and all they have to do is send you a 1099-MISC, thus dumping into your lap all the hassle with the FICA and withholding and quarterly payments, etc.  Which means I had to pay self-employment tax on the money I made transcribing for that jive outfit in New Mexico, and that if I make more than $400 working for that jive outfit in San Francisco, I will be in the same boat with them.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that starting last year, $1248/year is being subtracted from the already minuscule income I get from Social Security to pay for Medicare (which I don’t understand because they have been deducting from my income to pay Medicare all along, and now that I’m retired, they take MORE?).  So I ended up having to pay $166 in self employment taxes, instead of not having to pay anything and picking up an extra deduction for being 66, and having no cap on my earnings anymore.  (If you start drawing Social Security at age 62, you have a cap on your earnings, meaning that if you earn over $15,000 a year, they decrease your Social Security payments accordingly until you turn 66, at which point the cap is removed and you can earn as much as you want, now that you’re retired . . . . .)  I couldn’t live on the income I was getting from Social Security BEFORE they started taking out Medicare premiums.  I’m about to the point now that I’m going to go see if the Whataburger up the streetis hiring. . .

The garage sale last Saturday was a big success from my standpoint — I made $200, which leaves me with $34 after taxes (see above) to blow on groceries. I brought knitting (what a surprise!) and sat and knitted all day on the scarf below.   My dishes didn’t sell, though.  We’re going to have a second go Saturday week.

This week, I locked horns with Suddenlink, my ISP.  I got another notice that I had exceeded my allotted gigabites of data again.  Don’t know why.  I went round and round about it with them, and they suggested maybe somebody had hacked into my modem, was stealing my internet and was using up my gigs, so yesterday, I hung fire all afternoon waiting for the (short skinny Hispanic) Suddenlink guy to come by to switch out my modem, which he did (giving me a new password).  He also made changes on my computer — he had to ask me how to get to the control panel — which he said were necessary to make it work with the equipment.  Hardly had the dust of his passage settled before my computer started dropping the internet connection and giving me “cannot find DNS server” errors.  It took four phone calls and another wasted half a day hanging fire waiting for the (quite rotund and rather tattooed Anglo) Suddenlink guy to come change out the modem again, problem solved.  By yesterday evening, I was starting to feel like Cleese in the Dead Parrot sketch.  So now I have to go change the password on my two internet radios and my Kindle, for the second time in two days. . .   Stayin’ sane’s a full-time job. Welcome, hoss, to Babylon. . . . .

In the knitting news, yrs trly, the Queen of the Asymmetrical Scarves, came up with another asymmetrical scarf pattern, which I’m calling Rolanni‘s Necklet, which I’ll be posting shortly on my knitting blog.  I’m on the last (bind off) row of it.  There are things I like about it, and things I don’t like about it, and there will be another iteration/pattern coming out of it at some point changing the things I don’t like about it.  As with any scarf in this style, the tricky bit is getting the pattern established.  After that, it’s the same two rows over and over until the finishing bit.  The edging bit is formed by a little “motif” that begins the odd numbered line:  K3, (yo, K1)x3.  In the next iteration, the K3 band will be wider.  The body is largely stockinette, with a little edging formed by yo, ssk, k2tog which gives it a nice “eyelet” effect which I like.  I think in the next iteration it will have two repetitions of that little bit with about 6 stitches of garter stitch between them, because stockinette is notorious for wanting to curl, which this does.  The yarn is the last ball of the Red Heart Gumdrop color Grape, “Medium 4”, 4 oz/113 g, 240 yds/187 m.  I’ve got a ball of Deborah Norville Collection “Everyday” color Lagoon, “Medium 4” 3.5 oz/100 g, 180 yds/165 m yarn for the next iteration.  It’s the first Deborah Norville yarn I’ve used.  It’s a variegated yarn and I must say the color pattern of aquas and blues with white is lovely, and the hand is very nice.  Stay tuned.

The fat(cat)boy has been sunning his head in the window of late.  Now and again I will hear him chattering at the birds.  The weather has been warm enough that the kids have been playing out on the lawn, which gives him something interesting to watch when he isn’t blissed out in the sun.  I’m beginning to suspect that cats may be  hybrid vehicles that run partly on solar power. . .   Despite how uncomfortable the position looks, he lies like that for hours.  There’s about a 4 inch step-off between the sill and the top of the chest, and the sill is only about 4 inches wide, just wide enough for him to get his shoulders onto.  Inscrutable creatures, those cats.  Not scrutable at all.

It will be a year Sunday since I lost the white boy. He was my wingman for almost 16 years, and I miss him.

 

 

 

Knits, Purls and Sad News

I started not to go to knitting group last night.  I’ve kind of been in an antihistamine fog for the last couple of days due to the Attack of the Bradford Pear Trees — the other option being stuffed up sinuses, itchy eyes, and sneezing my head off.  As it was, I didn’t take my shower and wash my hair until nearly 5 o’clock.  I foofed my hair out so it would dry fast, but it was still damp wet when I left the house at 6:00.

I was glad I went, though.  I took the Trellis Path Scarf to work on — which is now finished (at left).  One of our breast cancer survivors’ daughter was there this time.  The daughter teaches computer science at university level. She has vestibular-induced balance problems, and she wears shoes with toes because being able to feel the floor with her toes helps her keep her balance better.  She’s knitting one of those big baggy sweaters that are so warm and comfortable.  The yarn she’s using is muted blues and greys, a very understated color combination.

Because of the way she knits, she twists the yarn tighter, which you wouldn’t think would be a problem — twisting yarn is what keeps the plies wound together — except that it becomes so over-twisted she has to pause periodically and let the yarn unwind.  She puts a rubber band around the ball to keep the yarn from unrolling from the ball, then dangles the ball and lets the yarn untwist until it equilibrates. I suggested she try using a hairpin instead of a rubber band to keep the ball from unrolling, which she thought was a good idea.

Our other breast cancer survivor is knitting a vest for her little grandson. One of the ladies who crochets was sitting across from me.  She’s doing a very colorful afghan.

I had been mentoring a black lady who was just learning to knit and I was helping her make a baby afghan.  I missed knitting group the week before last because I fell and hurt my left arm.  Last week, I went, but she wasn’t there.  She wasn’t there this time either.  Then, right about the time the group was breaking up to go home, one of the library ladies came in and said that someone had called to leave a message for the group to let us know one of the ladies in the group had passed away over the weekend. When she told us who it was, it was the black lady I had been mentoring.  It was a shock. She was only in her 40’s.  I knew she had chronic health problems (renal failure on dialysis, systemic lupus) but she seemed to be doing well.  Her service is going to be at 10 o’clock on Friday.  I’m planning to go.

 

 

Milestones and Stuff

Yesterday when I came home from knitting group, Beetil’s odometer read 5010 miles (8062.8 km) on it.  That mileage includes two trips to Pearland (approximately 2160 miles), two trips to Amarillo (approximately 500 miles), and a trip to Capitan, NM (approximately 490 miles) for a total of 3150 highway miles.  The remaining 1860 miles were driving around town. I bought the car new on 21 November, 2014, with 9 miles on it and I’ve had it 15 months.  That’s an average of 333.4 miles a month if you figure total miles as of last evening divided by 15 months, but a more realistic figure is to use the 1860 city miles, which works out to 124 miles (200 km) a month. Those trips were the exception rather than the rule.  I’ve already taken more road trips in Beetil than I did in all the 27 years I had the Crayola.

When we came back from our last trip to Pearland on 26 October, 2015, I filled my tank with gas at this gas station that’s right where you come off the highway onto Loop 289.  I didn’t get gas again until the 23rd of December.  I could have waited another week or more, but I knew we were going to have a snow storm over that weekend and I didn’t want to have to get out and drive in it. I’ve still got 2/3 of that tank of gas left. Daddy always told me just because I had a car didn’t mean I had to drive the wheels off of it. . . .

In the knitting news, I have the top portion of the red heart baby dress done to the beginning of the waistband, but I need to finish it by the end of January and get it to my little 1st cousin removed x2 so she’ll have it for Valentine’s.  The pattern is written kind of wonky.  The dress part of the pattern is written the typical way, but a row before you have to do a heart motif, they have you set markers on each side of the front chest area where the motif  is going to be located, and then go on with the pattern.  Then, when you knit up to the marker on the next row, you are supposed to skip over to another page and read the relevant line of the particular heart motif that’s being called for, then flip back and continue knitting from the regular part of the pattern. I had to undo the staple, and put the pages side by side and mark both parts with sticky notes.

I’ve got til April on the stuff for the friend’s grand baby.  At least one more dress (probably two), and matching booties and bonnet for each of the two dresses that have them.  Booties take no time at all; you do them two at a time.  A bonnet takes even less time.  What’s going to take the lion’s share of the time is the afghan. It’s a fiddly pattern.  No TV watching while I’m working on it!  I put my internet radio on and listen to ambient music.

I got my BFF’s Kindle sorted and all ready for her.  She should get her computer by next week.  When she gets her internet connected again, I’ll probably go over to get her computer and her Kindle set up so she can get onto her new WiFi network.  I’ve also promised to help her fill out some online applications.  I hope she can find a job that pays better than the one she currently has, and preferably where she can get all her time in during a couple of days and have a couple of whole days off.  Right now she’s working a couple of hours a day right in the middle of the day, five days a week.  If she could work five hours a day four days in a row, or three whole days in a row, and have the several days off at a time, that would be great.  We’ll keep our fingers crossed.  Now that she’s turned 66, though, she has no restrictions on how much money she can earn without them decreasing the amount of Social Security she gets, so she could work 40 hours a week now if she wanted to.   She’s been buying (artist) paint and colored pencils.  She may be working her way back into her art.  I’ve been quietly hopeful.

The weather is fixing to change.  It’s already starting to get blustery. A front is supposed to be coming through on Thursday and we’ll have really gusty winds and about a 10-degree F drop in temps. It was up in the 60’s F (15+ C) yesterday, and Sunday’s high is forecast to be 66F (18.8C).  Our lows have actually been above freezing for a couple of nights this week.  Me and the fat boy (cat) have been sneezing from all the dust that’s been kicked up.  I’d prefer a long spring and autumn and a short, not quite so hot summer, please, if any of the weather gods are listening. . .

And So It Goes

My new RAM chip came in and CK came over and we put it in and wiped my old computer drive (everything on it had already been cloned to the 1 TB drive), so I now have two hard disks which combined give me over 1 TB of free disk space.  That’s 1 terabyte of free disk space. I remember when I thought a 500 GB drive was all the hard drive I’d ever need.  Plus ça change . . .

I’ve already read eleven books this year and I’m knee deep in another that’s the first book in a trilogy, and I’m two-thirds of the way through another trilogy.  I’ve ordered the third book from Amazon, but it hasn’t gotten here yet.  I’m about to start my Foreigner reread (16 books) for the new book that comes out in April.  I’ve already finished my Sebastian St. Cyr reread for the new book that comes out in March. I should have started it in February, but I was desperate for something to read.  Plus ça change . . .

My mom and I are planning a trip to Savannah, GA and Charleston, SC in late spring.  It’s a tour, and we’ll be gone 10 days.  That’s the longest I’ve ever left the fat boy (cat) at the Pet Hotel.  Poor little guy.  At least they play with him, and he is very outgoing.

After talking with CK, I discovered that my BFF could not get her 17-inch screen size laptop replaced for what she could afford, and would be limited to a 15-inch screen.  So I got the model number of her computer and started looking for replacement screens, found out you can get one for around $80-$100(£50-70), called around to computer shops locally, and found a reputable place that would replace her screen for around $200(£140).  In the meantime, I hooked one of my monitors to her laptop and discovered that the computer otherwise is functional, so yesterday we took her laptop over to get it fixed.  Turns out fixing her laptop would be more cost effective than buying her a new computer after all, so there’s that.

My BFF has the same problem I have.  She can’t live on what she gets from Social Security, and she can’t find a part-time job that pays her enough to take up the slack.  As a cost-cutting measure, she wants to discontinue her land line which is costing her around $40(£28) a month, and get a cell phone, which would cost her $18(£13) a month – plus she’d have to buy a cellphone. The cheapest of their phones is around $40(£28).  She would then have to spend another $40(£28) a month for internet service, which she really needs to have — there’s no point in having a computer if you don’t have internet service and all the places where she’s applied for a job want you to have email, which you can’t have unless you have internet service, or access to it.  Of course, she could get a free G-mail email account and use the internet and/or computer at the public library, but that’s a PITA*.

What I think she should do is get one of those Magic Jack things.  You get the gizmo plus a year’s phone service for $59.95(£42).  The phone service is VOIP, (which is what she has now through Suddenlink) so she’d have to have internet service in order to use it, but the actual phone service is only $29.95(£21) a year compared to $216(£152) a year for cellphone service.    She’s coming over later today, and I’ll talk to her about it.

I’ve been listening a lot to Moonphase Radio while I do stuff on the ‘puter.  It has three different streams:  high bitrate and low bitrate feeds and a feed for android phones.  They say they play “ambient” but they evidently have a very wide interpretation of the genre.  They play very little “space music.” What they play is more structured, melodic, but unobtrusive instrumental music. Very easy listening.  They play a lot of Palancar, whose music I like.

I’ve discovered the Internet Archive, which has a lot of Darrell Burgan’s (AKA Palancar, et. al.) music on it.  I’m going to have to explore it and see what else I can find there.  It’s all free download stuff.  I may be “kid in the candy store”-ing on that site for a while now that I’ve got all this free space on my hard disks . . . .

In the knitting news, I’ve started a little red dress with “lacework” in the form of inset hearts.  It’s for my little 1st cousin removedx2 in Galveston. Perfect for Valentine’s day.  I’m trying to finish it before the beginning of February.

*acute neuralgia of the gluteus maximus.

 

Fetching Up Against a Fact of Life

You know how it is.  Change one thing and you end up having to rearrange everything.  You shift this thing to accommodate that new thing, and that messes up this other thing . . .

As I mentioned, the new computer is bigger than the old computer, so you have to shift the cable modem to the floor and switch out the plug strip for the battery backup thingie, and because the new computer is bigger, the left-hand screen has to be pushed forward to accommodate it, which cuts into the space where my plate goes when I’m dining at the ‘puter.  And if I could find two pieces of something that were both 3/4 of an inch tall, I could put them under the computer to raise it up high enough that I could slide the base of the left-hand screen back underneath it .

And then there’s the earbuds. I like to listen to Rhapsody or else use Winamp to listen to one of my internet radio stations while I’m at the computer.   The audio jack on the old computer was at the base of the tower. The audio jack on the new one is near the top, which means the cord of the ear buds I was using with the old computer is now too short. I’m pretty sure I’ve got a pair with a longer cord here somewhere.  But the ones I’m using are by Skullcandy and they’re good.  Grumble.

The apartment maintenance man fixed my garbage disposal, and what’s more, he gave me one of those Allen wrench thingies that comes with it that you use to fix the blade when it gets bound down, which is what the problem was.

I’m concerned about the fat (cat) boy.  He seems to have a cold.  He periodically gets these sneezing fits.  I’m applying a judicious amount of tincture of time* to see what happens.  It’s cheaper than hauling him over to the vet’s and having them tell me to do what I’m already doing, and a whole lot less traumatic.

Since I brought him home as a kitten (see left) almost 9 years ago, he has lost Jett — he was less than two when that happened — and then in April he lost the white cat, and then in May, he lost the grey cat and he became an only cat.  Then in July, I took him to a strange place and left him there for four days.  And then in October,  I took him back to that place and left him there for six days.

He’s a cat.  He has no way of knowing if I’m going to go off and leave him forever like his companion cats did.  (And I have no way to tell him that’s not going to happen if I have any say in the matter.) When I put him in the crate and take him to the car, he has no way of knowing what’s going to happen next, whether he’s about to be left somewhere for a long lonely time.  Yesterday I was gone from 10 o’clock in the morning to past 7 o’clock at night, and he was here by himself.  Understandably he’s gotten rather clingy and has separation anxiety.  Poor little guy.  If he’s just got a cold, those are self-limiting and he’ll get over it, but if he doesn’t get better in the next couple of days, we may be going to the vet.

It’s supposed to get cold again over the weekend, down into the 40’s F (4’s C) with nighttime temperatures down into the low 20’s F (-5 C).  Sigh.

*medical term for watchfully waiting to see if something will resolve on its own without the need for treatment.

 

Teething Problems

So, the “new” computer (a reconditioned Dell) came home tonight sort of set up like it will be eventually.  It came with a 250 GB hard drive which was replaced with a 1 TB hard drive, and came with a Read/Write DVD drive and two RAM slots containing one 4 MB RAM chip (the other one was empty).  We cannibalized the Read/Write DVD drive from the computer this one is replacing, as well as its 500 GB hard drive and put them in, so now the newbie has two R/W DVD drives and  technically has 1500 GB of hard drive, except we cloned my “old” 500GB drive onto the 1 TB drive and have temporarily turned the smaller drive off.   My old computer had two RAM slots with a 2 GB chip in each one, so we have had to order another 4 GB RAM chip to bring the new computer’s total RAM to 8 MB.  In the meantime, I’m “limping along” with the 4 GB I’ve had since I got the computer this one replaces.  The one whose graphics card is slowly but surely going gaga.

The new tower is half again bigger than the old one and in order to make everything fit on my desk, I had to move the internet modem and the other thingie that has to be attached to three or four different cables so that I get TiVo.  They used to be on my desk, too, but there’s now no room for them.   I stood on my head under my desk for half an hour putting the other UPS down behind the filing cabinet, plugging in plugs, untangling cords and otherwise sorting things out.  Then I connected everything to the tower and booted the computer up.  This kind of activity is known colloquially as “wrestling the octopus.”  (Sometimes the octopus wins. . .)

The tower booted up just like it was supposed to, but wasn’t communicating with the mouse. (What mouse?)  I finally got the mouse and computer engaged in dialogue, and tried the keyboard.  The keyboard and computer were not speaking either.  Switched out the USB plug of the keyboard with the USB plug of the foot pedal (which I haven’t tested yet), and they were talking again.  I plugged in my Western Digital Passport, which I use as a data backup and the computer was like, “Oh, Hai!”

I launched  Winamp to listen to some internet radio and discovered almost immediately that

THE SOUND VOLUME WAS SET ON “STUN.”

I was actually glad to have had to turn down the sound volume as much as I did in order for it not to rattle my root canals.

So far, so good.  Next week, the RAM chip should be coming in.  I’ll install it. We’ll know by then if the cloned drive is playing nicely with everything.  Stay tuned.

Hunkered Down and Braced for Goliath

Here in the rectangular bit at the top of TX, we were in the 60’s for the week of Christmas, but now on the tail end of Saturday, it’s 29F(-1.66C) and heading for an overnight low of 22F(-5.55C). Winds are from the NNE at 32 mph(51.49 kph), gusting to 45 (72). We were supposed to get a “wintry mix” of precip tonight — and as promised, I hear sleet pellets blowing against the window panes.  The low pressure swirly thing that’s driving “Winter Storm Goliath” is due east of us, straddling the AZ/NM border at the moment and heading straight for TX.

Our “high” tomorrow is forecast to soar all the way up to 27F(-2.7C) with snow predicted. In fact, we are under a “blizzard” warning with accumulations of 3-5 inches (I hear you snickering, you Northerners!).  Sunday night will be a balmy 18F(-7.77C). Monday will be sunny and warm with a high of 32F(0C), cooling down to a brisk 15F(-9.44C) Monday night. Highs/lows predicted for Tues of 36F/11F (2.22C/-11.66C) and Wed of 33F/6F (0.55C/-14.44C), at which point it will officially be colder than a wedge.

Whatever snow accumulation we get Sunday will probably be with us for the rest of the week. Since we are officially “semi-arid” in these parts, the local wet-weather driving skills leave much to be desired, so whenever we get snow or freezing precipitation, it is automatically a Demolition Derby Day. In view of the current weather forecast, I think I’ll stay off the streets for the rest of the week. I’ve got a full pantry, shawls, an electric kettle, lap robes, a cat, knitting to do, TV to watch and here directly I’ll go dribble the kitchen faucet. (My town is at the same latitude as Casablanca, Morocco (33.5667° N), so needless to say, we do not insulate houses or pipes with the same foresight as folks farther north.)

Not to put too fine a point on Winter Storm Goliath, today they had two tornadoes northeast of Dallas, between Dallas and Garland.  Apparently, one hit a major highway intersection, trashed cars and killed four of the cars’ occupants.  More tornadoes forecast in the east Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana area, and flooding in the southern and southeast US.  The weather is not being kind to us at the moment.

Here’s the baby stuff I’ve gotten finished so far.  I’ve got another baby dress about halfway through the skirt.  I’m going to do one more dress, plus the pair of booties and bonnet that match each dress, a baby afghan, and I think I’ll call it quits at that point.

I know it seems like a lot, but these little clothes are so small, and they’re fast to knit and just so much fun.

I hope my graphics card holds out til CK can get my new computer up and running.  Two of my programs had a weird fragmentation of the display tonight.

I have a pot of Earl Grey hot to hand, a lap robe on, I’m wearing fleece everything, I’ve got the recliner rared back and there’s a fat cat sleeping between my knees, which is just fine with both of us.  I’m good for the night.

Y’all stay safe and warm, now.  Hear?