Letters From Home

When I worked at the library and had to deal with people at the public computers, two of the most obnoxious groups of people who came in every day were adults looking at porn and kids typing away in chat rooms.  Both groups were likely to do their best to break the rules to get more time, and the fact that the library administration adamantly refused to have any kind of signup software installed, pretty much gave the rule-breakers carte blanche.

Did some mean nasty old staff member insist you get up and let somebody else have a turn?  Come back later when some other staff member is watching the signup sheet, scrawl some other illegible blot on the sheet and plop yourself right down again for another hour of jolly-time. Repeat as often as the staff shift changed.

Did some rotten other person try to actually, oh, use the time they signed up for when they obviously couldn’t see you were busy?  Raise a fuss.  Stand your ground.  Run and whine in the office.  Dollars to donuts you’d immediately be handed more time by some spineless supervisor who didn’t want anyone to think that there were actually rules in that space.

Well, the big bad government finally decreed that porn filters had to be put in place.  And even though the librarians fought that tooth and nail (including the folks where I used to work, who raised a fuss when the cops “invaded someone’s privacy” to the extent of arresting him for looking at child pornography on a public computer) it was upheld by the courts.  And you know what?  When the porn filters went in, some of the most obnoxious I’m-there-every-day users went away.  (Of course, there was, and is, a pretty simple way around the porn filters and it didn’t take very long for people to figure it out, but the most obnoxious droolers didn’t know about it.)

Now the government is trying to restrict access to “social networking” sites on public computers as well.  While they’re taking their usual ham-handed gnat-with-a-blunderbuss approach, I can’t help but think that it would not necessarily be a bad thing if kids using public computers were restricted to, oh, gosh, maybe actually doing their homework for a change.

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It got up to 113 in the back yard yesterday and 95 in the house.  I believe this is the hottest summer we’ve had in California in the 22 years we have lived here.  And I wish I could get my hands on the idiot who thought jalousie windows would be a dandy replacement for double-hung windows in this house 40 years ago or so.  Maybe he thought it was a good idea to prevent all future owners from putting in even a window a/c unit.  Maybe he was just flat-out insane.
It’s been too hot to write, too hot to cook, too hot to think.  Needless to say, we’ve been out of the house a lot.  Last night when we got home from a day of being-out, the house was an oven.  Of course, when we left it, it was a lot warmer outside than inside.  We just weren’t here when the tide turned, so to speak.  You have to move fast when that happens, open up the windows and turn on all the fans.

Last night I slept completely without covers, all night, and never got chilly even with the fan blowing straight at us all night.

And California gets hotter in September…..

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F’zer gave me a mat cutter for Christmas, something that I had asked for.  I was really happy to get it, but for one reason or another I didn’t actually get around to using it till today.

I found out a few things.  First of all, I remembered pretty well how to use a mat cutter, since it’s been about 20 years since I cut mats on a regular basis (when I was working in the camera store).  Second, when they say “use it on a level surface” they really mean it.  I think all the mistakes I made were due to my putting the mat cutter on the floor, on top of my cardboard fabric-cutting board.  Well, what can I say, there really is no flat surface in this house big enough to support a mat cutter and a large piece of mat board.  I’m going to have to see what I can do about clearing off the big work table in the garage.

Third, cutting mat board is easy.  Cutting mat board when you’ve got a 25-pound cat who absolutely, positively, will not get his butt off your work surface…  well, let’s just say I’m locking his ass in the bathroom before I ever get started on a mat cutting project again.

Which will likely be tomorrow.  I got out the cutter today for a specific project:  Putting a new mat in the frame that now holds the rubbing of my friend Bob Haney’s name, from the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.  The frame is the right size, but the mat that came with it (designed for panoramic photos) isn’t. But I could not find that frame anywhere today when I looked in all the places I thought I might have put it.

While I was looking for the frame, the cats had a major territorial dispute over who would get to flop out in the middle of that grand expanse of cardboard on the floor.  Before all was said and done, the cat tree had been knocked askew, pictures on the piano had been overturned, I’d been scared right out of my desk chair by a flying feline and the two of them had pretty well smacked each other silly.

Tybalt won.  And Calypso sat on the piano glaring at him and snarling softly to herself for a considerable time afterwards, as if there were not plenty of room on the cardboard for two cats.

I eventually decided to cut a double-opening mat for the Chinese prints that have been on the wall over my dresser since we moved in here, and that’s when I discovered the logistics of mat-cutting and utterly futile cat-removal.  Let’s just say that my first attempt was my practice mat.

F’zer found the missing frame tonight, because it was just visible from his chair.  I had indeed put it on top of the books in the living room bookshelves, but I’d shoved it so far back I couldn’t see it.  Sigh.  Well, at least I looked for it in the right place.

So, tomorrow I try again.  With every last cat in the house behind locked doors.

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The problem with really hot days is that it’s hard to get much done.  I don’t know how our ancestors managed.  Well, actually, yes I do.  They didn’t expect it to be cool, and they had no way of getting cool, so they just had to keep going.  Heck, I’m only Grandma years old, and I never went to an air-conditioned school in my life (including all those years in the armpit of central Virginia).  We didn’t expect it to be cool, so we managed.  This is not to say that we worked at anywhere near peak efficiency, but life did not deal us air conditioning, so we did the best we could.

A couple of the houses I lived in while I was growing up had window air conditioners.  My parents had a big brown Bakelite-fronted model in one of their bedroom windows in one house, and my brothers and I would go sit in their room as much as we were allowed to (those being the “For pity’s sake go outside and play!” years, even in the soggy center of the sticky hot Virginia summer).  One of the last years we lived in that house, my dad went out and bought a window unit to put in one of the living room windows.  My dad, however, knowing absolutely zip about such things, bought one that was simultaneously too small for the area he expected it to cool (the living room had two doorways but only one door) and too big for the circuit he plugged it into.  Thus, we were all introduced to the concept of the circuit breaker.  Which was a round thingie that was a bit larger than the fuse it replaced in the fuse box–but it had a button on the front that one pushed to reset it, rather than the time-tested method of removing the blown fuse, replacing it with another fuse, and waiting for the new one to blow.  I don’t know who sold my dad on that idea (probably some hardware store clerk who noticed my dad coming in two or three times a week to buy another box of fuses) but it did work.  In retrospect I’m amazed we didn’t burn the house down.

In the next house we lived in (in not-any-less-sticky southeastern Iowa) my parents had a tiny window unit in their room and my dad had a slightly bigger unit built into the wall in his study.  The back of it stuck out into the back porch, and my brother Sam the Eagle was fascinated by the fins on it.  Many of which he experimentally pounded flat with a baseball bat, until my dad caught him doing it and threatened to pound Sam the Eagle likewise.  My dad didn’t know that one could go to the hardware store and buy a little comb gizmo designed to straighten out air conditioner fins.  Not till the a/c repairman came out, used his comb, charged my dad an arm and a leg for labor and pointed him in the direction of the hardware store.

My dad was an award-winning teacher and a highly respected scholar, but a handyman he most emphatically was not.

The next house we moved to, in slightly-dryer-but-just-as-hot southeastern Nebraska, had central air conditioning.  Which we gleefully ran to our hearts’ content for just about as long as it took for the electric bill to arrive.  After that, it was a matter of a lot of open windows and waiting till the parents agreed that it was hot enough that the breeze wouldn’t cut it.  Lucky for us, the air circulation in the living room and my parents’ bedroom wasn’t the whippiest.

F’zer and I have lived in non-air-conditioned places for all but eight years of our nearly-34-year marriage.  One year in a shoebox apartment in Wichita, and seven years in an even smaller shoebox townhouse before we moved into this place.

One would think, with that amount of heated history, I would be able to sail right through hot days.  One would think.  But it ain’t working.

And the weatherbunny is predicting 107 for Saturday…………………………………….

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I think I’ve finally got the laptop almost back to normal.  It took me a couple hours to figure out how to get the wireless card working again (a combination of turning off the Windows firewall, reinstalling McAfee and reinstalling the wireless card drivers).  And now, since I regressed it to a point in time before I made a couple of significant changes such as having it log me in automatically, I’ll have to do that bit over again as well.

And then make a backup.  So hopefully I won’t have to go through this again.

Pontification:  You know, I’ve been using computers since 1969, when they filled whole rooms, ate punch cards and were so sacrosanct that one never actually touched the CPU oneself, but handed in one’s card stack to the Acolyte of the Machine and came back a day later to pick up whatever it spat out (if it did indeed spit).  In the beginning, and for the longest time, people who used computers, whether mainframe or home, were presumed to be intelligent and capable.  Some software was kinda cryptic and a lot of it was illogical, but the person using it was presumed to have enough brain cells to figure it out.

As time has progressed, the purveyors of software appear to have slid more and more into the mentality that all computer users are morons.  The same people who once were considered plenty smart enough to figure out WordPerfect and Procomm and 1-2-3 are now considered to be dullards who can barely point and click.  And the almighty software must needs take care of the poor loser user lest he or she drool upon his or her knuckles and lo, the keyboard she fryeth.

XP is the culmination of a long stretch of “You’re too stupid to live” programming, and the list of assumptions it makes…  well, don’t get me started.  Fixing it when it goes whoopsie involves steps that an intelligent person is perfectly capable of working through (including a lot of stuff typed in at that good old command line that we all aren’t supposed to ever need to know about in the point-and-click world, much less actually use), but which also involve using one’s intelligence to find the flippin’ information in the first place, in the labyrinth that is the MS Knowledgebase.  It’s precisely the people who are way smarter than the “You’re going to point and click and like it” propellerheads programmed for, who are the only ones who are going to be able to figure out how to whop the damn software with a 2 x 4 till it works again.  Everyone else has to call tech support.

But see, I don’t think people have actually gotten dumber over the years, or less capable.  They’ve just been conditioned to think that they are.  The people who use computers today are no different from the people who used computers 20 years ago.  People then could master all kinds of arcane commands in order to get their work done (and WordPerfect, with the world’s most non-mnemonic command structure, was King of the World in those days).  And why not?  They were treated like sentient beings and responded by thinking.  What a concept.  Nowadays, everyone whines that all software has to act alike and look alike because otherwise people won’t be able to get anything done because they’ll have to spend too much time thinking about how to do it.

In the immortal words of Nero Wolfe:  Pfui, say I.

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I’m one of those people who has to wear a MedicAlert emblem everywhere.  Even if I only had one health problem instead of several, one of the medications I take comes with a warning right on the bottle, to wear an emblem telling whoever picks you up off the sidewalk that you’re taking this stuff.

MedicAlert emblems are, on the whole, rather unappealing as jewelry.  Unless you want to shell out a LOT of money for the real gold or real silver ones.  It occurred to me that it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to take a plain old emblem and fancy it up a bit.  And so I sent off for yet another stretch bracelet, took the band off it, wire-wrapped the emblem and ended up with something that looked pretty good.

But the last time I browsed their web site I noticed that the stretch-band bracelets cost more than the standard ones, and the standard ones now come in an assortment of colors.  Plus, MedicAlert is now offering beaded bracelets, albeit in a smaller range of sizes than the plain ones.  But hey, why not buy a Real Cheap Emblem and make a beaded bracelet of my own?

Or, I thought, looking at the rather blah emblem that arrived yesterday, a chain mail bracelet.  That might be even cooler looking.  Of course, I’m a novice at that, so I’ll have to practice up a bit.  Fortunately, the Ring Lord web site offers neat little kits containing all the bright shiny aluminum rings and clasps one needs to make all the bracelets in the instructional DVD that I rented from Technical Video Rental, and for the bargain price of $20 plus shipping from Canada…  whoo, now THAT has possibilities.

Eventually I’m going to write up an instruction booklet for other medic-alerted do-it-yourselfers, but first I gotta figure out how to do it MY self.  I see many hours of fun with beads, wires, and rings in my future.  Yeah!

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