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Sep. 5th, 2008 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckIs there something weird about me that I enjoy listening to step dancing but don't much care about watching it?
I have a new laptop. This is wonderful. Everything runs faster and better except for MSWord which has slowed down more than I thought possible. Opening it actually reminds me a bit of loading files off a tape drive (which is what we used when I first used a word processor back in the early 80s).
We concluded that my old laptop was probably more damaged than we'd suspected. We had a lot of trouble getting files off of it due to it not even seeing some of its own ports (and thus the new laptop not seeing them either). We also got some error messages from the new laptop claiming that the old one was not running any version of OS X (the OS X installation CD also thought the old laptop wasn't running OS X), this in spite of the fact that the old laptop maintained equally adamantly that it was running OS X and that we remembered installing OS X. Very annoying all around and, with the other problems, making us doubt whether the old machine is worth trying to give away. It seems unfair to give someone a machine with the caveat that it might simply stop working entirely or have the screen fall off at any moment and so shouldn't be trusted to store important files. Oh, and shouldn't be moved around much as it only lasts about half an hour before the battery goes and doesn't restart reliably and so should never be completely shut down.
I've been reveling in the power to have music on this laptop. My old one didn't have enough memory to allow me to keep much of anything in that way on it. In fact, all I kept was a couple of things for Cordelia for when we traveled. With no music, I had 8.5 gb free. Now, with music, I have more than 70 still free. As an added and unexpected benefit, Cordelia doesn't object when I play music on my laptop the way she's always objected when I play it in the DVD player. (I'd never remove anything once I started it, but after a few times of shrieking child throughout a CD, I was reluctant to put them in. Go figure.) I'm not sure how much is a difference in her age and how much is due to her feeling that my computer isn't hers to command.
Probably a lot more age than anything else, I suppose.
Cordelia has discovered chat. We limit her to the local network, so she can only talk with me and Scott. She has a few words that she knows how to spell. Otherwise, she types randomly, copies words out of books or asks one of us to help her spell words. We've been helping her sound out words. Mostly, I provide the vowels because I'm not sure how to teach her to sound those out. I also don't try to ask her to sound out difficult words like 'know' or anything with a combination of letters that doesn't break down-- 'th' or 'ch' or 'sh' or 'ght,' that sort of thing. Doubled letters are hard, too.
Cordelia's kindergarten teacher gave each child a stuffed animal, a dog. Cordelia adores hers and has been playing 'Super Puppy!' with it. I'm a little appalled by the amount of money that was probably involved, even if she got a discount for buying twenty at once. The gift established her in the kids' eyes as a good grown up, but teachers don't make all that much money. Ah, well. Her choice, I suppose.
Cordelia had gym yesterday but didn't pull her sneakers out of her backpack (she has insisted on wearing her crocs every day). I don't know if she didn't want to, if the teachers didn't expect gym shoes the first day for kindergarteners or if crocs are actually acceptable on gym floors. With luck, there'll be a flier explaining all of this for confused parents. I'm also hoping for a schedule of some sort to tell me when she has special classes.
There's supposed to be an all school picnic tonight. I don't know if there's a rain date, but one may be needed. We need the rain desperately, so I'm not sorry we've got it. It just makes outdoor activities awkward. Even if it isn't raining tonight, I'm not sure it'll be dry enough for spreading blankets on the grass.
I need to start getting myself to bed earlier. I can get up at seven if I turn out the light at 11. I'm just bad at doing that. I like to settle into bed and spend ten to twenty minutes reading or doing a word puzzle while my body figures out that, yes, it actually is in bed (this also lets my evening meds kick in. Sometimes, they help me sleep, and sometimes, they don't. When they're going to help, it's nice if I give them some time to work).
I also need to play with my alarm clock to find the radio settings. Right now, it beeps. I've had the clock since before Cordelia, and I needed the beeps when I wore ear plugs regularly. The radio often couldn't get through. (I miss earplugs. They helped me not notice Scott's CPAP or its absence after he got up. I just don't want to wear earplugs while I'm still needing to listen for Cordelia at night. I'm not sure how old she'll have to be for me to feel comfortable wearing earplugs again. Maybe after she moves out...) The beeps, however, wake Cordelia. I set my alarm for half an hour before I need to get her up so that I have time to make coffee, take my morning meds and so on.
Cordelia's been awful at bedtime this week. We can tell that she's tired, but she's wild and pushes things. Right now, I'm having trouble because she's going in for face grabbing, face licking and face sucking. These are all things that half make me laugh, and I have to suppress that because I need her to stop doing them. My suspicion that one component of the behavior is that she knows that I can't ignore her or do anything else if she's coming at me aggressively like that.
Scott called in yesterday. He wasn't feeling well, probably a virus according to the clinician he saw at UHS, and he was so stressed out about work. He also knew that the odds were already high that he'd have to work both days this weekend anyway. Calling in made working those days pretty much guaranteed, but at least he got one day off to recover. He only gets two or three call in days every six months, so calling in is a big deal. I hope that work slows down soon. No days off is a recipe for disaster. (Management has also ruled that temps can't be used to make up numbers on weekend shifts. That makes things worse for regular employees.)
I made it to the farmers' market on Wednesday.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cherydactyl and I met up downtown and walked over. We'd planned to take the link bus back to near where she'd parked, but we couldn't find the stop (neither of us had thought to look it up before we went). Both of us bought enough that we were unhappy about walking back to her car, but the other options were less good. We might well have ended up walking a lot farther while searching for the bus than we walked to get back to the car. The raspberries I bought got a bit crushed but were tasty anyway. Cordelia was thrilled to get to eat them right away and ate most of a quart before dinner.
We took Cordelia out to dinner at Applebee's on Wednesday to celebrate her starting school. We'd wanted to go on Tuesday, but Scott ended up having to work late and not getting home until 7:50. Fortunately, we hadn't told Cordelia about our intention, so putting it off an extra day wasn't a big deal. We considered going to Joe's Crab Shack because of its outdoor play area, but it was raining, and we don't like the food (or the prices) well enough to go there without using the play area. Cordelia suggested a 'McDonald's with a slide,' and Scott and I had actually talked about that. We decided against it due to not wanting to eat the food and due to there not being one on this side of town. Scott didn't want to drive that far in the rain.
I haven't done much reading or any writing this week. I'm giving myself a pass on that due to the stress of adjusting to school and all that. Next week, however, I need to buckle down a bit and get to writing. I have two deadlines and a bunch of other fragmentary projects that I want to work on. I also have other tasks that I want to accomplish. I'm going to list them here, mostly for my own reference
Work on shelving and weeding books in the basement.
Get my hair trimmed.
Call to schedule a physical.
Call and schedule to see the psychiatrist. I definitely want to try that anti-fatigue medicine.
Finish the lap blanket for Jenn.
Finish the blanket for Cordelia.
Make a new hat and scarf for Cordelia.
One trip out a week for the post office (if it's Wednesday so that I can go to the farmers' market, too, that would be great. That part, however, depends on which day Cordelia's class has library).
I'm not sure that I can manage the haircut in the time window I have. There's one place that I can easily get to by bus, but I don't know when it opens or how long the usual wait is there. It's fifteen minutes away by bus (with a ten minute walk after I get off the bus coming home), and there's a bus home every fifteen minutes if I'm willing to climb the big hill or every half hour if I'm not. I think I'd need timing to work exactly right.
I'm getting near to done with Jenn's lap blanket. I have two skeins that I haven't touched yet, but I'm working on the border. I'm getting close. I'm sure I can be done, even with the weaving in of ends and such, in another week.
I'm tempted to wait on all the appointments until I find out about my schedule at the school library except that I don't know when I'll find out. If I don't find out until next week and there are appointments available next week, then I'll have wasted time. On the other hand, calling to reschedule uses spoons I can't spare.
The book stuff is going to take a lot of time. I haven't shelved down there in about three years, possibly longer. I have bags and boxes of books that need to be shelved. I also have to decide which books are worth keeping and why. My reasons for keeping books get complicated. Some of it is that I simply feel happier when I have books around. Some of it is wanting to be able to reread or lend books. Some of it is that I want there to be a lot of books of different types around for Cordelia when she gets old enough to start browsing.
I consider the books that I found by browsing my parents' shelves to have been fairly important in my own reading. The library was great, but it wasn't always accessible. It wasn't a source of books that I could just pick up and try. We didn't have a lot of books when I was in elementary school, but I got lucky in that a friend of my parents asked them to 'store' some books for him. He never reclaimed them.
I do need to weed collection. I bought a lot of the reference works pre-Google. Do I now need a dictionary of eponyms or a dictionary of saints? How many thesaurus-like books do I need? The mythology, folk and fairy tale collections stay, but do I want the encyclopedia of Christian heresies? Should I keep my (incomplete but largish) collection of Doonesbury paperbacks? What about the manga series that the library has?
My estimate of how many books we currently have varies depending on my mood, but our Delicious Library catalog got up to 2500, and I didn't have even half of the books done. I don't think we have more than 8000 books, but I wouldn't really be hugely surprised to pass 7000. We have boxes of kids' books and role playing books that I never touched, and I'd only gotten through about half of the paperback fiction.
I have a new laptop. This is wonderful. Everything runs faster and better except for MSWord which has slowed down more than I thought possible. Opening it actually reminds me a bit of loading files off a tape drive (which is what we used when I first used a word processor back in the early 80s).
We concluded that my old laptop was probably more damaged than we'd suspected. We had a lot of trouble getting files off of it due to it not even seeing some of its own ports (and thus the new laptop not seeing them either). We also got some error messages from the new laptop claiming that the old one was not running any version of OS X (the OS X installation CD also thought the old laptop wasn't running OS X), this in spite of the fact that the old laptop maintained equally adamantly that it was running OS X and that we remembered installing OS X. Very annoying all around and, with the other problems, making us doubt whether the old machine is worth trying to give away. It seems unfair to give someone a machine with the caveat that it might simply stop working entirely or have the screen fall off at any moment and so shouldn't be trusted to store important files. Oh, and shouldn't be moved around much as it only lasts about half an hour before the battery goes and doesn't restart reliably and so should never be completely shut down.
I've been reveling in the power to have music on this laptop. My old one didn't have enough memory to allow me to keep much of anything in that way on it. In fact, all I kept was a couple of things for Cordelia for when we traveled. With no music, I had 8.5 gb free. Now, with music, I have more than 70 still free. As an added and unexpected benefit, Cordelia doesn't object when I play music on my laptop the way she's always objected when I play it in the DVD player. (I'd never remove anything once I started it, but after a few times of shrieking child throughout a CD, I was reluctant to put them in. Go figure.) I'm not sure how much is a difference in her age and how much is due to her feeling that my computer isn't hers to command.
Probably a lot more age than anything else, I suppose.
Cordelia has discovered chat. We limit her to the local network, so she can only talk with me and Scott. She has a few words that she knows how to spell. Otherwise, she types randomly, copies words out of books or asks one of us to help her spell words. We've been helping her sound out words. Mostly, I provide the vowels because I'm not sure how to teach her to sound those out. I also don't try to ask her to sound out difficult words like 'know' or anything with a combination of letters that doesn't break down-- 'th' or 'ch' or 'sh' or 'ght,' that sort of thing. Doubled letters are hard, too.
Cordelia's kindergarten teacher gave each child a stuffed animal, a dog. Cordelia adores hers and has been playing 'Super Puppy!' with it. I'm a little appalled by the amount of money that was probably involved, even if she got a discount for buying twenty at once. The gift established her in the kids' eyes as a good grown up, but teachers don't make all that much money. Ah, well. Her choice, I suppose.
Cordelia had gym yesterday but didn't pull her sneakers out of her backpack (she has insisted on wearing her crocs every day). I don't know if she didn't want to, if the teachers didn't expect gym shoes the first day for kindergarteners or if crocs are actually acceptable on gym floors. With luck, there'll be a flier explaining all of this for confused parents. I'm also hoping for a schedule of some sort to tell me when she has special classes.
There's supposed to be an all school picnic tonight. I don't know if there's a rain date, but one may be needed. We need the rain desperately, so I'm not sorry we've got it. It just makes outdoor activities awkward. Even if it isn't raining tonight, I'm not sure it'll be dry enough for spreading blankets on the grass.
I need to start getting myself to bed earlier. I can get up at seven if I turn out the light at 11. I'm just bad at doing that. I like to settle into bed and spend ten to twenty minutes reading or doing a word puzzle while my body figures out that, yes, it actually is in bed (this also lets my evening meds kick in. Sometimes, they help me sleep, and sometimes, they don't. When they're going to help, it's nice if I give them some time to work).
I also need to play with my alarm clock to find the radio settings. Right now, it beeps. I've had the clock since before Cordelia, and I needed the beeps when I wore ear plugs regularly. The radio often couldn't get through. (I miss earplugs. They helped me not notice Scott's CPAP or its absence after he got up. I just don't want to wear earplugs while I'm still needing to listen for Cordelia at night. I'm not sure how old she'll have to be for me to feel comfortable wearing earplugs again. Maybe after she moves out...) The beeps, however, wake Cordelia. I set my alarm for half an hour before I need to get her up so that I have time to make coffee, take my morning meds and so on.
Cordelia's been awful at bedtime this week. We can tell that she's tired, but she's wild and pushes things. Right now, I'm having trouble because she's going in for face grabbing, face licking and face sucking. These are all things that half make me laugh, and I have to suppress that because I need her to stop doing them. My suspicion that one component of the behavior is that she knows that I can't ignore her or do anything else if she's coming at me aggressively like that.
Scott called in yesterday. He wasn't feeling well, probably a virus according to the clinician he saw at UHS, and he was so stressed out about work. He also knew that the odds were already high that he'd have to work both days this weekend anyway. Calling in made working those days pretty much guaranteed, but at least he got one day off to recover. He only gets two or three call in days every six months, so calling in is a big deal. I hope that work slows down soon. No days off is a recipe for disaster. (Management has also ruled that temps can't be used to make up numbers on weekend shifts. That makes things worse for regular employees.)
I made it to the farmers' market on Wednesday.
cherydactyl and I met up downtown and walked over. We'd planned to take the link bus back to near where she'd parked, but we couldn't find the stop (neither of us had thought to look it up before we went). Both of us bought enough that we were unhappy about walking back to her car, but the other options were less good. We might well have ended up walking a lot farther while searching for the bus than we walked to get back to the car. The raspberries I bought got a bit crushed but were tasty anyway. Cordelia was thrilled to get to eat them right away and ate most of a quart before dinner.We took Cordelia out to dinner at Applebee's on Wednesday to celebrate her starting school. We'd wanted to go on Tuesday, but Scott ended up having to work late and not getting home until 7:50. Fortunately, we hadn't told Cordelia about our intention, so putting it off an extra day wasn't a big deal. We considered going to Joe's Crab Shack because of its outdoor play area, but it was raining, and we don't like the food (or the prices) well enough to go there without using the play area. Cordelia suggested a 'McDonald's with a slide,' and Scott and I had actually talked about that. We decided against it due to not wanting to eat the food and due to there not being one on this side of town. Scott didn't want to drive that far in the rain.
I haven't done much reading or any writing this week. I'm giving myself a pass on that due to the stress of adjusting to school and all that. Next week, however, I need to buckle down a bit and get to writing. I have two deadlines and a bunch of other fragmentary projects that I want to work on. I also have other tasks that I want to accomplish. I'm going to list them here, mostly for my own reference
Work on shelving and weeding books in the basement.
Get my hair trimmed.
Call to schedule a physical.
Call and schedule to see the psychiatrist. I definitely want to try that anti-fatigue medicine.
Finish the lap blanket for Jenn.
Finish the blanket for Cordelia.
Make a new hat and scarf for Cordelia.
One trip out a week for the post office (if it's Wednesday so that I can go to the farmers' market, too, that would be great. That part, however, depends on which day Cordelia's class has library).
I'm not sure that I can manage the haircut in the time window I have. There's one place that I can easily get to by bus, but I don't know when it opens or how long the usual wait is there. It's fifteen minutes away by bus (with a ten minute walk after I get off the bus coming home), and there's a bus home every fifteen minutes if I'm willing to climb the big hill or every half hour if I'm not. I think I'd need timing to work exactly right.
I'm getting near to done with Jenn's lap blanket. I have two skeins that I haven't touched yet, but I'm working on the border. I'm getting close. I'm sure I can be done, even with the weaving in of ends and such, in another week.
I'm tempted to wait on all the appointments until I find out about my schedule at the school library except that I don't know when I'll find out. If I don't find out until next week and there are appointments available next week, then I'll have wasted time. On the other hand, calling to reschedule uses spoons I can't spare.
The book stuff is going to take a lot of time. I haven't shelved down there in about three years, possibly longer. I have bags and boxes of books that need to be shelved. I also have to decide which books are worth keeping and why. My reasons for keeping books get complicated. Some of it is that I simply feel happier when I have books around. Some of it is wanting to be able to reread or lend books. Some of it is that I want there to be a lot of books of different types around for Cordelia when she gets old enough to start browsing.
I consider the books that I found by browsing my parents' shelves to have been fairly important in my own reading. The library was great, but it wasn't always accessible. It wasn't a source of books that I could just pick up and try. We didn't have a lot of books when I was in elementary school, but I got lucky in that a friend of my parents asked them to 'store' some books for him. He never reclaimed them.
I do need to weed collection. I bought a lot of the reference works pre-Google. Do I now need a dictionary of eponyms or a dictionary of saints? How many thesaurus-like books do I need? The mythology, folk and fairy tale collections stay, but do I want the encyclopedia of Christian heresies? Should I keep my (incomplete but largish) collection of Doonesbury paperbacks? What about the manga series that the library has?
My estimate of how many books we currently have varies depending on my mood, but our Delicious Library catalog got up to 2500, and I didn't have even half of the books done. I don't think we have more than 8000 books, but I wouldn't really be hugely surprised to pass 7000. We have boxes of kids' books and role playing books that I never touched, and I'd only gotten through about half of the paperback fiction.
