First of all, the flying monkeys worked. Enough people decided vote for someone other than the party of wealthy oilmongers and godbags. I’m not crazy enough to believe that the Bush-fed crisis is over, but as I watched the election results flow in, I felt something unfamiliar: hope. It’s just a glimmer, but it has potential.
Second — and I know this doesn’t have quite the global effect of a U.S. election — our Thanksgiving dinner turned out well. I feel good about this because of a little incident from a couple Thanksgivings ago that involved a backed-up sink, a plumber, a refrigerator that went AOL at the worst possible time, and a trip to the urgent care clinic. I’ll tell all about it another time. This year was peaceful. We brined the turkey. We made good gravy. We ate pie (my cousin made the best apple cranberry pie we’ve ever had, and it’s all gone, sorry) and we relaxed. We raised our glasses to toast Steve Jobs, who gave me (and all Apple employees) the entire week off, contributing in no small part to my ability to actually pull off a successful Thanksgiving dinner.
Third, I am a year older, and still kicking.
The only thing I didn’t like about November this year is my dear aunt couldn’t visit. She was recovering from eye surgery. Preparing for holiday festivities without the family matriarch is not easy. For one thing, she’s a trained nurse and stays calm in emergencies. We had to consult with her at one point to ask if covering the turkey with strips of bacon could substitute for basting it (it could not). Fortunately, she kept her cell phone handy.
What wonderful times we live in, when family matriarchs can be reached by cell phone! It makes me wonder what will come next. Perhaps an overthrow of the patriarchy and an end to the dominator model of human organization?
Please, allow me my dreams.
December 13, 2006 at 7:31 pm |
Did you really mean the fridge went AOL, or did you mean AWOL? The former is quite funny, but probably only to geeks.
December 13, 2006 at 9:28 pm |
Thank you for sharing! I am glad to hear you are happy and healthy.
In what would otherwise have been a quite November, we had an unprecedented snowing here in Victoria causing generally lots of chaos, but not much in our life. It lasted a week, a short enough time that the impact was not tragic.
December 14, 2006 at 6:59 pm |
Gordon, I was going to fix that typo, but now that you mention it I like it just the way it is.
April 10, 2007 at 3:03 am |
You might never find this. I couldn’t find a category, but “dominator” model seemed about right. I’ve got a couple computer questions. Is that ok?
18 months ago I got a new hard drive. It has about 80 GB of whatevers. At first I had no files for Norton to sift through, now I have nearly 200,000. Where did they come from? Why is my computer so slow, especially to start up? If you don’t know the answer, what kind of dominator do I ask?
My other question is: What is a text editor? Twisty suggests we the illiterate use one. Do you use one? Which one?
Thank you.
Pony
May 2, 2007 at 3:04 pm |
Hi Pony! I can’t answer your first question, about the 200,000 files, but I suspect many of them shouldn’t be there. I’m glad you’ve got Norton. Keep that antivirus utility turned on. Don’t open anything you don’t recognize.
Twisty tells us to use a text editor because many commenters have had the sad experience of writing a brilliant (and often long, as we know) comment, only to have it disappear forever into the Patriarchal Twilight Zone after hitting that Blame button. If you use a text editor, you can save the comment as a file on your computer, so it is kept forever or until the giant magnetic space aliens arrive to destroy the earth by erasing all of our hard drives, whichever comes first.
If you’ve got a Windows machine, which I suspect since you’ve got 200,000 files you don’t recognize, then your text editor is WordPad. I think you can find it in the Start menu. If you don’t, let me know and I’ll find it for you.
If you’ve got a Mac, your text editor is TextEdit. You’ll find it in the Dock at the bottom of your screen. If you can’t find it, let me know and I’ll fly up there because I’d love to have an excuse to visit you.
You can email me here: verahoriuchi@gmail.com
If I can find out more about all those unknown files, maybe I can help figure out why your computer is so slow.