Month: August 2003

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Here grandson Gavin has been recruited to powerwash the driveway.

Yes, it’s easier to do it myself, but this way I know what he’s doing while the work gets done.

Things have been hectic around here lately, and they probably won’t get much better for a few days.

My recent “vacation” from blogging was the result of having eighty percent of my house carpeted, which meant moving all the furniture from room to room as various parts of the house were carpeted. Since I didn’t do the moving, I still haven’t discovered where several things have gone to. It took me two days to just find various parts of my computer and reassemble it. (And, yes, I am typing this on my G-4 which is just back from having a new OS-X installed, and, yes, I’m supposed to re-install all my programs because they may have been corrupted when OS-X got corrupted. Right now I’m running on my back-up drive, rather than the main drive because I sure as hell don’t have time to re-install all my programs at the moment.)

Unfortunately, having my computer re-assembled isn’t the same as having time to finish reading Crane and writing intelligently about those poems. I’m still painting the house trim, retouching the inside painting where the carpet installers left smudges and dents, finishing the outside trim, trimming all the doors that now drag on the newly-installed card, and trying to spruce the yard up, since it is really the greatest selling point of this house.

To complicate matters, my grandson Gavin is spending the week with us. His mother and father are backpacking for the week and I promised them several months ago that I would babysit. While this turns out not to be the best time to do so, we are having a good time and I wouldn’t miss the opportuntiy to spend my week with him even if it meant not selling the house for another month or two.

As I get older I realize it really is impossible to ever make up for the time you miss spending with loved ones. Of course, that’s obviously true, and it’s hard to see how we could fail to recognize it, but somehow we do manage to put family and friends on the back burner while we attend to more important business. Luckily, I’m too old to fall for that again, and Gavin and I will be heading over to the toy store today to find a toy that we can play with when we’re not watching Peter Pan or the Fox and the Hound
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Admidst a sea of troubles, a small patch of blue.

Jonathon’s back; in fact he may have been back for a couple of days and I missed his return.

Unfortunately, that news doesn’t get these damned carpet installers out of my house, or even ensure that the shower will be repaired in the next few day.

But somehow a little good news can seem to outweigh the bad news, at least for a short while, can’t it?

I guess I’ll have to get my G-4 repaired so I can continue the conversation.

As if I wasn’t have enough problems at the moment, my MacIntosh G-4 seems to have chosen this moment to give up the ghost.

It slowed down so much that it was barely usable. When I restarted it, nothing happened and it just kept running, never even got to the question mark. After restarting it in darwin mode and trying to run fsck -y I got the message “load of sbin/mach_init, errno2.” So far I haven’t been able to find out what this means, but if it’s like the news I’ve been getting around here lately, it’s not going to be good news, and it’s probably going to be expensive news.

Naturally, what better time for bad news than when I’m just about to move and buy a new house that will almost invariably be more expensive than the house I’m in now. Do you think these machines actually conspire with each other ?

Right now I’m writing this, with great difficulty, I might add, on my iBook. I find it difficult to get used to the small screen, but, most of all, to the flat, chicklet type keyboard. I love this machine when I’m traveling, but have little patience for it when I’m at home.

I’ll try to get my G-4 into the dealer tomorrow and see what it will cost me to have it repaired. If it’s too expensive, I doubt that I’ll bother having it fixed even though it’s just a little over two years old. Nor will I be able to buy a new G5 at this time, if they’re even available yet.

I expect that this, combined with my need to get ready to move, is going to put a real crimp in my blogging efforts, though, as you can tell, I’m probably addicted to reporting my life’s joys and problems on the web.

At least I can get online with the iBook.