Technically happy

Lilacs. In macro.

Awhile back, a family at church was getting rid of their old DSLR camera and they gave it, well, to ME. I was thrilled because it's much nicer than my point-and-shoot, and I've spent the last couple of months trying to get it up and running. It takes an XD card, which used to be more common than it is now, but it didn't come with an XD card, so I actually had to order one.

Today it came! Oh joy of joys! I put Kate down for her afternoon nap and played with my new toy. It's pretty cool. :-)

The last piece still missing is the USB download cable for the camera. Considering just how many cables we have in the house, I was thinking we might have a spare. I dug through the boxes in the basement, and none of them were quite the right size - it's one of the mid-sized USB ends, smaller than a normal USB plug but not the teensy one, and also not the one with stepped sides. (We have lots of that kind.) It's the one with angled-in sides. I know we used to have one like this because I remember the drama about angled vs. stepped before, but we must have gotten rid of it when we got rid of that tech -- you know, probably it was for one of my old cameras that took an XD card, too, which I thriftily recycled because I refuse to keep deceased cameras lying around. Just NO.

(Meg, yesterday: "What does deceased mean?"
Me: "Dead. Where did you hear that word?"
Meg: "Dad used it to describe an insect outside.")

I found something much better in the basement than a USB cable. I found a multi-card reader.

It reads XD, SD, and micro-SD cards, and a couple of other types, too. I didn't even know we had a multi-card reader. This is super fabulous because my DSLR uses XD, my point-and-shoot uses SD, and my cell phone camera uses micro-SD. I can leave the multi-adapter plugged in to my computer all the time, and download whatever camera I happened to use, and not have to hunt for cords at all. I feel like God sent me such a great present.

But I did get a phone for Christmas, early

The rice didn't really help my poor phone much. I don't know if it could have saved the display from shorting out if I'd tried the rice solution earlier, but the display never did come back on and the phone started developing... quirks. It beeped randomly during calls, and when it wasn't making calls, and it sent a ghost text message to a friend.

My mother-in-law, bless her, stepped in and told me she was getting me a new phone for Christmas, so go pick it out already. So I did. :-)

I chose a Samsung Intensity III, which has been out a couple months. It's got a "ruggedized" cover, though not a waterproof one, and it definitely looks like the best non-smartphone available for Verizon right now. I'm pretty excited.

Verizon, I'm convinced, truly believes you should feel honored to pay them another thirty, fifty, or seventy dollars for services that (in some possible worlds) would be considered standard, or else unnecessary. And if you don't want to pay extra for them, you're weird and probably un-American. But today I exercised my awesome mommy negotiating skills and listened to the sales rep's entire effort to sell me lots of things, anything actually - monthly-payment, one-time, discounted, or bundled! - to go with the phone, and I said no to all of them. I win. As long as I don't drop the new phone in apple juice... in which case I will lose. But that's just a chance I'll have to take.

The great apple juice flood

Sometimes a sippy cup's lid gets a little warped. Sometimes a mom in a hurry will stuff a sippy cup into her purse, in her rush to get down the stairs with a girl and all their paraphernalia. And sometimes, a warped lid comes off.

I had a pretty good flood of apple juice yesterday. My checkbook and calendar and all wiped off just fine, but the phone went insane, turning on and off cyclically, and then it sang its musical little beep until I took out the battery, discovering more apple juice. Today it found itself able to take and send calls, but couldn't display anything. It's all dark. No texting for me.

I went to the Verizon store, hoping they might be able to fix it, but they don't fix things there without insurance. They also weren't quite able to let me have a new phone, though apparently it's time, but I was welcome to buy a new phone if I wanted. Not, of course, that they had any phones in stock, exactly, but they had lots of snazzy little internet devices that you can also talk on. I think technology has evolved beyond my mere voice-texting-and-photos. That's so 2010.

Upon that note, I went to Target to buy more apple juice. Floods or no floods, the Meg needs her juice. I ran into some friends there, who recommended setting the wet phone in a bowl of uncooked rice for the night, to see if it would suck the moisture out and get it working. It worked for her brother's Ipod. I bought my juice and came home and tried that very thing. I'll let you know if it works.

I also learned, the friends got to see an advance showing of Les Mis! They say it's fabulous and we should definitely see it on the big screen. There you have it.

Technology and the new generation, and seagulls

This morning, Meg found my laptop, removed the pile of stuff off it, opened it up, turned it on, and was busily hacking my password before I caught her.

As a mother, I'm incredibly proud of her enterprising skills. As the owner of the computer, I panic.

In other news, for the last two days there have been seagulls flying around Richmond. Meg likes them, but this is not normal. Maybe they're migrating or something? Is anybody wise in the ways of seagulls?

In which I am forced to defend Olwen by beating off a Chick-fil-A employee with a stick

So this evening I was driving through Chick-fil-A for my little sandwich. I get up to the window, and a guy leans past the lady trying to serve me.

"I'll give you $700 cash for your car," he says.

I shake my head. "I love my car."

"A thousand. Cash!" He shook his money clip encouragingly.

"I love my car!"

"I love my car too!"

"Why do you want my car?" I ask, genuinely curious. I mean, I love her because she's reliable and very well-behaved and good-looking and generally a ladylike vehicle, and also because Daddy and Grandad helped me pick her out. But she's not new and snazzy, and furthermore she hasn't been washed in months. People don't usually fall all over themselves to get their paws on her.

"Because your car doesn't need a new transmission!"

Dragonishness

Olwen has quite recovered from her run-in with the magician or old age or Entropy, whichever it was; a battery transplant cured her ailments, and she's been her amiable self ever since.

However, ::deep sigh:: my computer Chrysophylax (the silver-loving Dragon of Turion) has been exhibiting signs of bewitchment. I tried to wake him up Sunday morning to do Sunday school, and he went into one of those endless loops. Daddy was able to joggle him into Safe Prompt Mode or some such, so I could do my word processing, but the network was completely off and Chrysophylax refused to acknowledge such mundane allies as CD drives or printers.

He did, however, work grudgingly with jump drives, so we were able to do a spot of memory-sharing and I made it to church all right.

I left him up all night, because I wasn't at all sure he'd ever awake again if I let him sleep, which perhaps explains his dragonish behavior today. Daddy got him into Last Good Configuration Mode, which was...not very good, actually. He's been temperamental. He burned one good CD backup and then started snarling error messages. Further, he won't let the kitchen computer burn backups of his data. You'd think I was trying to snitch his hoard or something.

I guess I am, come to think of it.

But it's my hoard, and he's supposed to be caretaker. Stewards are supposed to give their trust back to its owner...

I hope to coax him next with a really big jump drive.

Olwen gets enchanted

I named my good car Olwen because she came from the Summer Court; her paperwork said so. I picked "Olwen" rather than any other standard Arthurian name because Olwen, poor girl, seems to have been nearly the only lady in the entire legendarium who was neither wicked nor witchy. She merely had an unreasonable giant for a father and got rescued by some knight.


So I suppose, given her heritage as a Muggle among dangerous folk, it was only a matter of time before the dear girl ran afoul of someone or other. It happened tonight while Daddy and I were having a dinner date between work and the Awana awards ceremony.


I parked Olwen back behind El Parasol (the haven of taco goodness), and when I came back to her, all the little display needles went nuts and then died. Whoops.


Personally, my theory is that an evil magician came along and cursed her battery. Daddy did something mysterious to her innards with a red ice scraper and was able to make her regain consciousness in brief gasps, but we think the whole battery ought to be switched out. ("Bring me her heart in this jeweled box.") She spends tonight alone. Perhaps tomorrow we can awaken her.

Espresso maker

I got a new espresso maker for Christmas, but as I had first a cold and then company for the next couple weeks, I didn't break it out of the packaging until last Friday. That was fun--opening it felt like Christmas all over again.

I was very good and read all the instructions before I used it. It's one of those fancy ones where you put water in the boiler and it uses part of it for the espresso, and then you turn a knob and it turns the rest of it into steam for foaming your milk. Yummy!

So I made espresso, switched the knob, foamed my milk, and had steam left. So I figured I'd just make more espresso. I turned back the knob, turned away...

...and it exploded. Coffee grounds went everywhere. Milk, froth, and steam went everywhere. The grounds-basket, I believe, had actually come unscrewed, and spewed its contents.

Whoops.

I made coffee Saturday, and even foamed my milk, but left the espresso strictly alone.

But then Sunday afternoon rolled around, and I felt the need to conquer. It's just too humiliating to fear your own espresso maker. So I attempted the mystery, but waited too long and wound up with too much espresso and hardly any foam at all. Sigh. I tried a third time, and then it worked. No explosion, and enough and to spare of the steam. Yay!

The Alginator and the nature and naming of microwaves

We got a new office toy.

It's an Alginator: a mixer for alginate, which, as I have learned, is "goop for impressions." When the dentist gives you a mouthful of goop to find out what your teeth look like, the odds are, it's alginate.

Alginate starts life as a powdery substance, which gets mixed with water until it reaches a suitable state of goopiness. This new toy holds a little bowl and spins it round, and if you put a spatula in... well, it's a lot like turning a Kitchen-Aid on high. It gets pink goop everywhere!

We decided that The Alginator is a sufficient title. It doesn't need a name. It's like The Terminator.

In other news, it occurred to me to wonder why microwaves measure their power output in watts rather than calories. A calorie is defined by the amount of energy it takes to heat up a certain amount of water, yes? And microwaves do this all the time, yes? The good doctor says there is in fact a conversion factor, which leaves the question why microwave manufacturers prefer watts.

We decided it was a ploy. People would never buy their products if they realized they were adding calories to their food. ;-)

To Narnia and the north

I'm sitting at my computer, back to a window, and I can see in my monitor a reflection. It's of a sunlit wooden pillar, and the shadow of a pine branch is waving on it, blown by the same wind as its parent tree. I love watching the reflection of a shadow.

It reminds me a bit of Narnia. When Digory planted the golden apple in his front yard in England, you remember, often the daughter tree would sway on calm nights, out of friendliness for its home garden where there was a high wind.

Last night at church a little boy was watching a big yellow backhoe dig a trench. He and his dad and I looked out the kitchen window and saw it scoop, dump, back up, and scoop again. We got to talking: what if the trench went to Narnia? And what if we could follow it, swim along it, or even float down it?

There's something glorious about a little boy and a construction site. He watched the machine dig with the intensity ordinarily reserved for Deep Magic. They really are fascinating, though I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been with him. So I suppose it makes sense to think of it digging to Narnia--or the Northern Frontier, which was the other possibility. Why not?

"Mashinha mordand"

I rather like power outages.

Oh, I know they're a great inconvenience, not good for the electronics, they mess up the schedule and trap little old ladies' cars in their garages and require all kinds of explanations and promises to call back.

But the office gets so quiet. The music and machines and buzzing and whirring go silent.

The artificial lights all go out, but we have lots of windows, and can see well enough.

I can't be expected to confirm any more appointments if I can't see the appointment book on the computer, so I do what I can do and then stop.

I like being reminded that we can, in fact, survive without electricity. It's like camping, like a Sabbath, like a strange holiday.

I was talking to Angelina over lunch, and we decided the best translation for this phenomenon was "mashinha mordand": the machines died. Well, I decided that anyhow, and she laughed at my way with words. That's very standard. :-) This, too, is a nice reminder that the universe will go on perfectly happily when technology and knowledge fail. People are forever.

Merry Christmas!

So I have a sword now. And a dagger. And chapstick. And a book about Robin Hood and another about C.S. Lewis. And a teddy bear in a red-flowered hat. I could take over the world. Especially because of the chapstick.

We had a thoroughly traditional Christmas at my house, which is as much as to say, nothing worked quite like it was supposed to. Mom got sick, so Grandma and Granddad didn't come and the sister and I made Christmas dinner. Sort of.

I stayed up late Christmas Eve baking pies--a terrifying thought in itself, actually. But they turned out. We got up and cooked. I discovered that I'd forgotten to put celery on the shopping list for the stuffing, and somehow it didn't seem the done thing to substitute cabbage, so I just made it with onion alone.

The sister got the turkey all ready and put it in the oven--and sometime between midnight and nine am, the oven had died. Kaput. Dad took it apart and fiddled with it and it was just dead. So she put the turkey in one crock pot and I put the celery-less dressing in the other.

That left the rolls, which I've never heard of anyone putting in a crock pot. Ah--but we have a bread machine, sitting on the counter! I'd never actually used this bread machine; it was a replacement for the one that died, that I did know how to work; and also I couldn't find any bread flour. I rummaged through the freezer and found Hungarian High-Altitude Whole Wheat Flour. That looked promising. After unsuccessfully searching the entire recipe book shelf for the bread machine manual, I did what I ought to have done immediately and asked Mom. She, of course, found it for me. Water, between 80 and 100 degrees....butter...Hungarian High-Altitude Whole Wheat Flour...salt...honey...put the kneading bowl in the machine....choose all the settings...splendid.

We went and opened presents. My dagger was good for flinging tissue paper in the air and opening taped boxes, and I screamed quite a lot when I opened the sword.

Of course, crock pots take longer to cook than ovens, so we had macaroni and cheese for lunch, and had the turkey for dinner. The kneading bowl thing didn't catch in the bottom of the bread machine, so it came out a nasty unkneaded and inedible lump instead. But the turkey, dressing, cranberries, and whatnot were all very good.

It was a merry Christmas. Not so much because of the presents (even the sword and books), but because Jesus came to earth, and lived as a man, and died and was raised on the third day. And for that reason, Christmas is, and always will be, merry. :-)

The longest day

Happy summer, y'all! I meant to post this the other day, but this is as soon as I could get to it. June 21st, as you are probably aware, was the longest day of the year. There were points when it felt like it, too. I had quite the series of adventures.

The day got off to a complicated start when, just as Dad and I were heading out the door, Dad got a splinter and we lost the truck key. So we both got there late.

A man came in to have his teeth done. That was fine, but then he wanted to pay with a credit card he didn't actually have with him. He called his wife to ask for the number, but she wasn't available either. He finally decided to pay with a different credit card and the credit card printer ran out of paper. I couldn't find the refills. I went and got Rebecca (dental assistant, same-church-goer, and homeschool friend of mine). She couldn't find the refills either. I went and got Dr. Matthews. He found the refills, and then the phone rang. So I answered the phone and the dentist refilled the credit card machine, and I finished the phone conversation and consulted the instructions on how to reprint the receipt. It worked! So I got the poor man out of the office and happily it was almost lunchtime. So I escaped too and Dad came and got me and we went to the bank and then the picnic table outside the library to eat.

Rebecca discovered that we (mostly me, but I had help) had submitted her insurance claim wrong for the previous day and then done something to that day's procedure, which was also entered wrong, so that I couldn't even delete it and start over.

Mrs. Matthews came in to do financial stuff and showed us a package that had just arrived. It was full of flashing light-up toothbrushes that she'd ordered at the convention a week or two ago.

The entire afternoon was full of random things like that. We lost a chart—how we could lose it, I couldn't fathom, because we're very careful about not losing them and the man had just been in to see us, and furthermore it's a tiny office and there's really nowhere it could go. It finally turned up. I'd filed it by putting “Ma” before “Mc,” when it turned out that the rest of the Ma's were after the Mc's. Apparently this is accepted dental filing procedure. Mrs. Mathews said we didn't have to follow accepted dental filing procedure because it caused problems. Yes!

The phone kept ringing. The waiting room was much fuller than usual, because all the patients brought friends and relations. The to-be-filed pile of files piled frighteningly.

That was also the day the entire office went to Santa Fe for a good-bye dinner for Lori, whom I'm replacing. Reservations at Olive Garden were for six. So the entire office congregated around five, just as all craziness had about spilled loose. A fire truck sirened past in the middle of this, but I didn't think anything of it; I was busy enough. Lori solved three or four tangles, Mrs. Matthews did some of the end-of-day stuff that I couldn't get right (it went perfectly smoothly Tuesday and Thursday), and we discovered Angelina (the other dental assistant) had told her husband to meet her in Los Alamos at six. Whoops. So we piled into the Matthews' suburban and went out on the town.

We got as far as DP road and discovered a traffic jam, the likes of which are but rarely found in Los Alamos. We suspected the fire truck was probably headed to the scene of the accident, which explained the traffic jam. We were running late. So the dentist did some exciting driving and we turned ourselves around and tried to go down the truck route instead. We got caught in more traffic. We didn't have a cell number for the lady whom we were going to collect at the Y, either, so we couldn't even let her know why we were late.

The left turn signal at Diamond and the truck route, for some odd reason, was set so that only about three cars could get through per cycle. So we waited, and advanced three car-lengths, and waited, and advanced three car-lengths, and finally we were second in line. Yes! The signal finally turned, and the car in front of us—didn't. So we honked. And honked. And the car behind us honked. They sat there! It finally got going just as the light turned yellow, and we saw a bicyclist laughing.

We finally got to the White Rock Y at about ten to six and picked up the other hygenist. Angelina and her husband made it to Olive Garden before us.

Angelina, I would like to state, has an evil sense of humor. She's Iranian, and while her English is fluent, her first language is definitely Farsi. We had a very good dinner, and then it was time for dessert. Rebecca and I split a berry thing, and Angelina tried to say she didn't want dessert. Her husband got them a big chocolate and cream cake thing. Angelina took one look at it and started trying to give part of it away. “I'll take a bite,” said I. Little did I know. Angelina sliced off a third of her cake and tried to give it to me. “That's not a bite, that's a hunk!” I said. Somebody laughed and told me to define my terms, and Angelina grinned and went, “I do not speak the English well.” Yeah, whatever! But it was really good cake.

On the drive home Rebecca told a story about back when she started working and didn't realize Angelina was a patient. In thoroughly Derridean fashion, Angelina's real name is not Angelina. Her nickname is Ferishte, which is at least pronounceable, but both her first and last names legally are these long jawbreakers, and her jawbreaker names are what got into the computer. So Angelina made Rebecca go out and try to call this patient who turned out to be her. Well, I guess when you're in a foreign country you might as well get some fun out of it!

I finally made it home at about nine o'clock. It was just about dusk on the longest day.