Boy, when I say summer's over, it's really over! Last week the temperatures were in the upper nineties. Today it's maybe 70. I felt like I almost needed a sweater. I'm sure it'll warm up, but it really felt strange to be cool outside. The new main resource library opened on Tuesday, so I went today to check it out. It's huge and beautiful, with lots of parking, unlike the old library. I checked out a few books and wandered around. They've stopped stamping due dates in the books--they give you a slip of paper like a cash register receipt listing the books you checked out and the due date. I'm not sure this is going to work. My intention was to come home and write the due dates in the fronts of the books, but I didn't do it. So probably the slip of paper will get lost and I won't have any idea when the books are due. It just seems like a bad idea. Unfortunately, they didn't ask me.
My friend Barb is visiting her family this weekend for her brother's birthday. Happy Birthday, David!! She sent me e-mail from her dad's computer, that was nice.
My page is lost. I got on the Web to check my links and I got an error message--"the requested URL is not on this server." I'm not enough of an expert to tell what this means. Of course, since it's Sunday, I can't get anybody on the phone and I guess they'll be gone tomorrow, too. On top of sort of a yucky day, this is depressing. It seemed like everywhere I went today something went wrong--the bagel shop was out of the bagels I wanted, the bakery was out of bread, Blockbuster didn't have anything I wanted to rent, etc., etc. So I tried to think of what would make me happy today. I ended up spending an hour at Best Buy wandering around the CD's and software. I found Solitaire Deluxe, which I have been looking for everywhere, and a sampler of Caribbean music. I installed the game, and there's apparently some kind of configuration conflict--I get a GPF if I try to access Help, and when I quit the game I lose the mouse and have to reboot. Yuck. So I made a cup of hot chocolate and watched The Money Pit, one of my favorite movies. I've seen it so many times I have it memorized. Just what I needed--something comfortable.
Well, my page is back, as I guess you know if you're reading this. I still don't know what happened. It wasn't exactly a stellar holiday weekend. I capped it off by cleaning the bird feeders Monday evening. A disgusting job. But on the bright side, they've been hanging over my head, so to speak, for a few weeks, so at least it's done and I can take it off my list.
I had lunch at one of my favorite places today. It's a little bagel place a few blocks from my office with plastic tables and chairs out on the sidewalk. For some reason, it's like I slip out of my real life when I'm there. I sit out there with a book and a bagel and space out for 45 minutes or so. I think the magic part is sitting outside. There's something wonderful about eating outdoors. It makes a regular day feel like a holiday.
I ate outside last night, too. My friends Tom, who teaches my yoga class, and Kay, a yoga classmate, and I went out to a Mexican restaurant after class. We sat out on the patio and had margaritas and chips and tortilla soup, and told stories and caught up with each others' lives. I tried to explain to them what I'm doing here on the Web, but this medium is awfully difficult to explain to someone who's never seen it. Oh, well, in a few years when everyone is online, I'll have a headstart!
I had another close encounter with a toad last night. I have gotten in the habit of leaving the outside lights on to attract bugs for them. Consequently, we now have to watch our step if we leave the house after dark. Bob went out last night to play in a 9:30 softball game and a toad hopped into the garage and went under my car. I hated to leave him in the garage all night and take a chance on running over him in the morning, so I had to crawl part way under the car and rescue him. I took him back outside and stuck him in the grass. It has cooled off incredibly the last few days. The high today is supposed to be 70 and when I left the house to go to work it was 55! Just a couple of days ago it was in the high 90's. The Fall is Bob's favorite time of year; it makes him very happy. He loves the fall and winter, while I tend to hibernate and wait for warmer weather in the spring and summer.
I got a letter from my friend Micki last night. She lives in California (why do my closest friends live on the other side of the continent??) and I hadn't heard from her for a couple of months. It was wonderful to hear from her, she sounded great. She's getting a new computer soon and hopes to get on the internet, so we should be able to talk a lot more often.
We had a really nice evening tonight. We rarely go out on Saturday nights, but Bob wanted to look for some CD's, so we braved it. We went by Chili's, but it was too crowded--people were waiting outside for tables. So we went to a Chinese restaurant and had a great meal. The waiter reminded me of an Oriental Wayne Newton (just his looks, he didn't sing or anything). He was great, very debonair. We enjoyed him immensely. Then we went next door to Comp USA and looked at software (only bought a magazine--.Net, the British internet magazine), then went to Best Buy and looked at CD's. Bob "needed" a Rolling Stones CD, and found two that he wanted. I found two CD's by David Knopfler (Mark Knopfler's brother) that I didn't even know existed. I had bought his CD "Lips Against the Steel" in 1988 after hearing one track on the radio. I loved it and listened to it a lot. As far as I knew from checking record stores occasionally, he never recorded anything else. But the two I found were recorded in 1993 and 1994 and after doing a little research, I found that there were a couple more. So now I'll have to look for those in the used CD stores, I guess. We stopped for ice cream on the way home. All in all a very satisfying evening.
There's something wrong with our computer. After you've been on it for a certain (varying) period of time, it crashes. It displays this scary screen that says it has detected a memory parity error and it is SHUTTING DOWN. So everytime I work on it I'm aware of the time limitation and rush through what I'm doing. The time period is getting shorter and shorter--from an hour and a half a couple of weeks ago to 20 minutes last night! Usually I can reboot it and get a few more minutes out of it, though. We have ordered a new computer, but there's some problem with a part, so I'm not sure when it'll come. We can't take this one in for service until we get the new one because we can't be without it--Bob needs it for his business.
Bob left at about 3:00 this morning on a twelve hour road trip to visit his 93 year old grandmother. He was supposed to leave tonight after work, but his brother, who is going to work for him, was mixed up about what day he was leaving and had already made child care arrangements, so Bob decided to go ahead and leave this morning. Of course, I thought we had another whole day to get ready, so last night was pretty hectic--grocery store, laundry, packing, checking his shaving kit, etc. He had to run over to his dad's house to pick up some bills that needed to be paid, so I recorded Star Trek (Voyager) for him. He came home with chocolate malts, that was a nice treat. He went to bed about 10:00 and I stayed up for a while on the computer. My provider's server must be down because I couldn't access their page or my own. I'm beginning to wonder if I need to change providers. My guess is, though, that they all have problems. It's not like any of them have been around longer than a year or so.
Later. . . I dialed up my provider to see if the server was back up and after I signed on, I got the message, "The system is going dow. . ." Fairly obvious, I would guess. Made me smile.
I've been lax about keeping up my journal entries--sorry! My pages have disappeared again, and I'm getting really tired of it. I called my provider and they said the server is down and they hope to have it back up by Monday. This is getting kind of old. So I haven't had a lot of motivation to work on my pages, since I'm just sending it out into the Twilight Zone.
I rented "Only You" last night--a really light romantic comedy. I liked it a lot. Bob's out of town and I didn't want to watch anything scary. I even thought about renting "The Goofy Movie," but decided not to. After I watched the tape I flipped channels on the television and "The Eiger Sanction" was on--one of my favorites. I watched for about fifteen minutes, then fell asleep on the couch, waking up an hour or so later with a stiff neck. While I was watching television I thought I saw a spider run down one of the pillows behind me. I jumped up and looked and shook my clothes, but didn't see anything, so I decided I had imagined it. After my "nap," I got up to go to bed and a spider fell out of my clothes. So then I felt all itchy and kept wondering if it had bitten me. There's an enormous spider that keeps building a web across our front door. I keep knocking her off and she keeps coming back. I don't want to kill her, but this is really a monster spider, about an inch across (including legs). It might be more appropriate around Halloween.
Bob came home last night around midnight. I wandered around the WWW for awhile, then watched old TV shows--Mary Tyler Moore, Dick Van Dyke, the Lucy Show. I knew if I started reading, which is really what I wanted to do, I'd go to sleep, and I really wanted to wait up for him. Of course, when he got home, he wanted to tell me all about his trip, and I wanted to hear about it. He had gone to visit relatives. Those trips are always mixed. It's nice to see people you haven't seen in awhile, but it's hard sometimes.
Bob was going to the Ohio State football game on Saturday and he thought he should have an Ohio State shirt, or at least a red one, to wear, so he went to the college gift shop and bought a nice golf shirt with the OSU logo. This shirt cost $50.00. Saturday night he called and told me that he had gotten mustard on the new shirt and it was so bad that he had had to go buy ANOTHER $50.00 shirt. I thought this was somewhat extravagant, but didn't give him too hard a time. I was mostly worried about getting the mustard out of the new shirt. Last night he pulled both shirts out of his bag to show me. I said, where was the mustard? He said, well, um, I know it was here someplace. . . Well, rather than being the mustard-squirting-out-of-the-back-of-the- hotdog catastrophe I had imagined, apparently one tiny, little string of saurkraut had escaped from the bun and landed on his shirt for a microsecond. If I looked really, really hard I could just barely see the faintest dot of yellow. Obviously, he just wanted the excuse to buy another new shirt, which is fine.
It's nice to have him home. It's kind of lonely and strange here without him.
I had lunch at my favorite bagel place today and ate outside, even though it's cool out (about 50 degrees)--but at least the sun's shining! It was just too noisy inside and nobody else was sitting outside, so it was peaceful. Then I went next door to a gift and card shop and found a great glow-in-the-dark bat. We already have a black one that we hang from the ceiling fan in the living room during the Halloween season, so I'm not sure where I'll put this one, but I couldn't resist it. I really love Halloween, it's my favorite holiday. It's just fun, with no pressure (compared to Christmas).
We talked to our friend who's building our new computer last night. He wanted to test the modem, so he called our computer from the new one and downloaded/uploaded some files and everything worked fine. So it should ship tomorrow and we'll have it next week. Bob's really anxious to get it. He bought the Panzer General game last night, but it's on CD, which we don't have now, so he can't play it 'til the new computer comes. Neither of us are particularly patient at the best of times, but this waiting is really difficult.
We bought a new bed yesterday--a queen size. We've been sleeping on a double bed, and it just isn't big enough for both of us and the cat. So the double bed has to go to the basement, where it will be available if one of us wants to sleep alone, or if Doña is in one of her moods and won't let us sleep. Consequently, I spent today cleaning the basement. It was really in awful shape--sometimes I'd just stand at the top of the stairs and throw things down. I threw away an incredible amount of trash. I'm sure the garbage men will curse our names in the morning. Bob was so stunned when he came home that he said he thought he might faint. I told him that that was the only thing that kept me going--knowing that he would be so happy. It does give me a feeling of accomplishment. Also a feeling of tiredness and a sore back.
I had to go to the doctor today and have a possibly cancerous spot taken off my forehead. It was sort of a shock because I didn't expect him to really do anything today, but I decided to get it over with. He gave me a shot to numb it, cut it out and put one stitch in my forehead. I felt a little faint, but basically I did pretty good. It's a little sore and it feels kind of weird, so I let Bob talk me into not going to yoga class tonight. I wouldn't want to do any inversions certainly.
He says he's going to take the old bed apart tonight (they're delivering the new one tomorrow). The delivery guys will take the mattress and box spring to the basement for us, but Bob is ashamed of the old bed frame and doesn't want them to see it. It's really old, it belonged to my grandmother. It's all wood and we had one side held up with bricks and clamps. It's collapsed under us a couple of times, so it's definitely time for a new one.
We got the new bed today--Bob stayed home to meet the delivery guys. We slept on the mattress on the floor last night. My back, not great at the best of times, hurt this morning. Doña liked it, though, I think--she didn't have to jump to get on the bed, she could just step on! It will be nice to have a big, new bed. It's long overdue.
We were supposed to meet Bob's parents, two of his brothers and their wives, and a builder that Bob works with for dinner last night. Bob was playing golf in the afternoon and was going to meet all of us at the restaurant. When I got home there was a message from his brother that the dinner had been canceled because the builder's girlfriend had the flu. So I left messages all over town for Bob to call me so he wouldn't go to the restaurant. As it turned out, he cut his golf game short and came home first, intending to pick me up so we could go together. He was really annoyed, so we decided to go to dinner by ourselves. He had his heart set on prime rib. I don't eat meat, and meat is all he's really interested in eating, so it's always difficult deciding where to go. We ended up going to a steakhouse where he got his prime rib and I had soup and a salad, which was fine.
The new bed is really high; higher than the old one, which I thought was higher than modern beds. I was worried about Doña being able to jump up on it, as she normally sleeps on the bed with us. She's quite elderly and although she still jumps pretty well, she's not always too steady on her feet. But she figured it out. Rather than jumping straight up to the bed from the floor (which she did at least once, so I know she can do it), she got on the rocking chair in the corner and jumped from there, after first having gotten my attention and made sure I was awake to comfort her when she arrived. Another time she got on the rocker, climbed up on the night stand, and used it as a bridge to walk to the bed, therefore not having to jump at all. As you can imagine, it was quite an active night.
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Copyright © 1995 Willa G. Cline
