Dither, Dither, Dither

Two weeks from today, I'll be going on a road trip. I'm flying to Toronto, where I will attend a good friend's wedding, and spend time with some other women I have come to know and love, first over the Internet, and then last year, in person.  I'm also going to meet a few new people, including one person I'm pretty sure doesn't like me, and another who I feel a lot of closeness to, even though we have never met. I'm hoping the one who doesn't like me on line, will find me a little less annoying in person.

RT will miss the wedding, but he'll fly in a few days later. He will rent a car, and we will drive through parts North in Ontario to visit folks, and then head back to Toronto before going across the border to visit my son, who has recently moved to Detroit.

It will be our first US Thanksgiving together since 2000, and rumour has it that my son and his roommate are planning on keeping me confined to the kitchen. I think he was joking when he said they were contemplating buying a freezer so I could cook enough to last them until my next visit, but mebbe not. RT is entirely satisfied with the notion that I will spend the five days we have there cooking, as it is his first trip to Detroit, and he is looking forward to doing a whole lot of car related activities with my son and his roommate, both of whom are car guys.

With the trip in mind, I am busy checking things off of my to-do list. A surprising number of these things are coffee related.

A few of these friends have become coffee connoisseurs, and one or two of them have had my homeroast. I'll be bringing beans for them, drinking my own brew when I am there, and roasting greens at least once, to further infect my friends with the good coffee bug.

And whilst some of my friends have great coffee making paraphernalia, not all of them do, so I need to bring a pot and a grinder along with me. And my heat gun. Fortunately, the bread maker part of the roasting apparatus is available in the kitchens of various friends.

I am, by the way, aware that there is a good chance no one I am going to visit really gives a damn about roasting coffee themselves, and that I am being indulged as this lovable, but slightly ditzy, friend. 

Getting ready for the trip would have been much easier if FireFox had not decided to release its new browser this week, and easier still if this wasn't happening on the heels of my having gotten a new computer.

A new browser release means that I have an excuse to rethink how I organize my on-line life. I'm trying a new (to me) RSS reader, adapting to the included spell checker (which doesn't have a Canadian dictionary yet), figuring out what to do about extensions that no longer work, and trying new ones.

At the moment, this version of the browser seems far more unstable, and is regularly freezing up. I have a feeling it is related to one or more of the extensions that are supposed to work well with it, but don't. I'm just not sure which one it is yet, so I am experimenting.

I better figure it out quickly, or I will get on the plane with my coffee stuff and nothing else. Packing is just not my thing.

 

posted by taming at 04:15 | link | comments |
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A Short Account of My Morning

The butcher did it.

I was minding my own business, jumping for joy (in a very discreet way) after discovering that the market had whole salmon for 49 cents a pound, when he came up to me and said, "Can I help you with that, cutie?"

Now, I love it when RT calls me cutie, or sweetie, or honey, but I'm not at all thrilled when strangers do it. And while I don't like any of those familiarities, the word cutie is especially hard to take. It wasn't easy when I was 16 and wanted to look sexy, and it isn't any easier at 54.

I guess I should be more appreciative. After all, when I was a big chunk of a woman, no one called me cutie. Heck, they didn't call me anything. Fat people are invisible you know, unless we are being laughed at or cruelly taunted.

I have now returned to semi-official cutie status.

I know I am never going to be seen as a beauty, or have a stranger come up to me and introduce herself as a scout for a modeling company. It wasn't going to happen 40 years ago, and it sure isn't going to happen now. At any age, that kind of experience is reserved for women who are a whole lot taller than 4'11" me.

There are a whole lot of things I love about being, urmmm, vertically challenged. I delight in feeling tiny when I snuggle up against my big strong husband. It's convenient to be able to crawl under our desks when we need to do something with the tangle of cords that reside there. I've never had to duck when I go down the stairs to someone's basement recreation room either.

I do have days though when I would really enjoy the experience of being tall and lithe. I'd like, at least briefly, to look glamorous or stunning or statuesque. It's just not in the cards. Truthfully, I pretty much want it in the same way I sometimes think I would like to experience the world through my cat Beanie's eyes, but still...

I was thinking about this (the tall and lithe part, not the Beanie part) when I was watching Project Runway, also know as my guilty pleasure, early this morning. Yay, TiVo.

The models were all lined up in their one piece black slips, waiting for the designers to choose who they would work with for the next challenge. Not all of the models were drop dead gorgeous, but all of them were thin and tall. In any case, I decided to look at the auction site where the clothing designed for the show is sold. I wasn't expecting to buy anything there. My most recent big clothing purchase was six pairs of socks at Payless. I was looking, well, just because.

What I saw was that all of the clothing the designers produce for the show is made to fit women who are between 5'10" and 6'2" tall and wear a size 0 or 2.

That is so not me.

It took me awhile to remember that it is not just so not me, it is also so not 99% of the women in the real world. In the real world, women wear socks from Payless and it's a good day when the butcher calls you cutie. 

 

posted by taming at 10:55 | link | comments |
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Welcome to winter

 

posted by taming at 07:22 | link | comments (3)|
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We Join TiVo Nation

RT is a network guy. By that I mean he is responsible for the health and welfare of a gazillion dollars worth of computer equipment running off of multiple servers and doing all sorts of complicated things. He is also an accountant, which I am telling you only so that you will understand that he is generally inclined to be a stickler for details.

All of this somehow becomes irrelevant the moment he walks through our front door.

This was made clear, once again, as we worked together to install a TiVo in our home. We purchased the TiVo shortly after RT ran up the stairs from our office/family room with a $39 VCR under each arm and threw them in the garbage. It is a measure of how disgusted he was that he did this strange thing just as the new fall season was getting underway. I should probably mention that he is addicted to TV and routinely tapes everything but Project Runway, Good Eats, and Dawg, the Bounty Hunter.

In any case, until recently, TiVo has not been available in Canada without some hacking of a system bought in the states. Even now, when you  activate a TiVo here you have to pretend to be from Leo, Wyoming during the first part of the set-up.

Did I mention that RT was nekkid when he ran up the stairs with the VCRs? Well, he was.

After he got dressed and went to work, I figured out that we could buy a TiVo, and pay for three years of programming, for less than our cable company charges to purchase their PVR. And after we bought it from Big Cable, we would have to pay an extra $20 a month to use the damn thing. Buying the TiVo somehow became a remarkably sane thing to do.

The TiVo arrived yesterday. I called RT at work, no doubt interrupting him as he was busily administering the gazillion dollars worth of computers, and asked him if he wanted me to set it up. He said something equivalent to "Don't bother your pretty little head." So, I didn't. I knew I should have, but I had errands to run and coffee to roast so I left it for the man of the house, the network guy, all the while knowing that we would have many of what in our house are called "Jesus Murphy" moments before the system was up and running.

I know a whole lot less than he does about setting up computer networks, and we were going to add the TiVo to the one in our house, so leaving it up to him was not a bad thing. I knew we needed CAT 5 cable, so I went out and got a bunch of it. I even checked to see that we had room in the router for another connection. I also read widely on the TiVo site, printed out various things I thought might be helpful, and underlined in red the things I was pretty sure Ron would skip right over—like the part about Leo, Wyoming.

All in all, he did fairly well. There were hardly any Jesus Murphy moments, and, at the end of the night, we could record TV shows. There were problems like the TiVo not really being on our network and the on-line scheduling thinking we really lived in Wyoming, but it's not like the machine didn't work.

I've been married to RT just long enough to know that I should either silently fix them later, or at least wait until I had figured out some possible solutions for him to take care of in his manly way. I'm pretty good at that last part.

After dinner, using my sweetest girlie voice, I asked him if he could tweak the system a bit for me, saying things like, "I'm not sure, honey, but would it help any if the IP address on the TiVo and the IP address on our router were the same?", followed by, "Is it possible the IP address wouldn't change when you refresh if you set a MAC address on the router, too?".

Seventeen Jesus Murphies later, we really are good to go. He now has set up season passes for a whole bunch of his shows, and I came downstairs in the middle of the night to set one up for Good Eats. I figure I'll deal with Project Runway and Dawg after the listing of recorded shows gets long enough for him to skip right over them like the insignificant details they really are. 

 

posted by taming at 22:48 | link | comments (1)|
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High Maintenenace

When I was younger, say in high school, and mebbe even through my twenties and thirties, I was a low maintenance kinda gal. The only frou-frou thing I owned was lemon scented cream rinse. My how times have changed.

At 54, it's not just that my body related maintenance needs have mysteriously multiplied, but other aspects of my life seem to need the constant fiddling and adjustment that I associate with high maintenance. The truth of this really hit home yesterday.

You see once every four weeks, I have my nails done. I'm not just talking polish here either, but the whole nine yards beginning with a drive to a shop inhabited by a gaggle of tiny women who speak just enough English to apply acrylic nails and wax eyebrows, but prefer speaking Vietnamese amongst  themselves, as if their customers didn't really exist. My appointment is always at noon on a Friday. I make it for noon because the shop owner turns the heat off overnight, and if you get there earlier in the day, during the winter, you risk having icicles form in your nose.

That's not the whole truth. Even if the shop owner believed in overnight heating, I wouldn't go in until noonish because I begin nail day by colouring my hair. I use henna to do this, and it is the messiest thing you can imagine. The henna I use comes in hard blocks, that must be broken apart with a hammer, and then grated into a bowl. You add boiling water to it, mix it up, place that bowl in another bowl of hot water to keep it warm, and then apply this slimy goo to your hair. It has to stay there for an hour. There are easier kinds of henna available, but, somehow, it's just not the same.

I am aware that it just might be that it takes the kind of person who roasts her own coffee to see the difference.

Half of the time I end up with green nails, which is why I do it right before my nail appointment. I end up with a huge mess in my kitchen all of the time, which is why nail day is not just henna day, but clean the kitchen really well day, too.

Yesterday, in addition to my every four week hair and nail maintenance tasks (we won't go into the moisturizing, showering, and examining my corporeal self for new wrinkles and brown spots that are part of the daily routine in my world these days), I had major computer maintenance things to deal with.

Yes, I admit it, I use Microsoft Windows. I tried Apple, really I did, back before IBM rolled out it's first PC. I had the most marvelous Apple II with a whole 16 k of memory. I even upgraded to a IIe, when it was released a couple of years later. My, how I loved that machine. I went over to the dark side when the first of the 386 processors were rolled out, and never really regretted it. I'm just not kewl enough for a MAC.

In any case, as the years went by, just as I somehow went from lemon scented cream rinse to an entire closet full of body maintenance  tools, I've incrementally added routines and processes to maintain my windows based computer. I have almost all of them automated, but as I just got a new machine, I had to start from scratch, and install all of the products that working "clean" within a Window's environment requires.

The need to clean, scrub, delete and adjust new machines starts within seconds of turning it on for the first time. After the joy of a truly fast boot-up passes, the first thing one must do is make sure you have working anti-virus and spyware tools, before you go online for the first time. The second thing you do is uninstall the crap that comes on mass market machines, like the HP I bought. And because you are uninstalling, this has to be followed by running a registry cleaner (and heaven forbid, not the one that comes with Windows) that gets out all the crappola that Window's uninstaller leaves behind. And let's not forget defragging (again, not with the one Mr. Gates provides).

By the time you get everything you need installed (including programs, settings from your old computer, rules for your mail, address book, cookies, yada yada) and everything you don't want uninstalled, all the joy of having a new machine is sucked right out of you.

It's just one more thing that you have to maintain.

 

posted by taming at 15:19 | link | comments (1)|
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