May 2005
Friday, May 27
It's a stunningly beautiful day, and I'm told I have bronchitis.
Or maybe, bryanchitis.
I'm amused by the staff at the Doc-in-the-box. A small, stout man, who appeared to be of Vietnamese lineage, checked me over. Very good English, and very thorough. The visit cost thirty dollars, and the prescription meds cost seventy-six. Hell, the last time I was over there, they handed me a bag full of samples and said goodnight. Oh well. I guess bryanchitis is serious enough for costly drugs.
It's a heart-rendingly gorgeous afternoon. My college-bound son is at an outdoor celebration with his friends. My high school-bound daughter is getting prettied up to go skating all evening. I am, admittedly, quite envious. I'll have to settle for a beer on the deck, to chase my meds. Maybe I'll sleep through tonight without coughing my lungs out.
Friday, May 20
I spent a solitary late afternoon at our old house, making some headway in the residence transition. Put differently, I spent time trying to get our shit moved.
I got all my clothes out of the closet, and am running them all through the laundry to get the musty smell out. And I cleaned out my dresser drawers. That was a trip through the past. I have things that have seen the last two, three and four moves - stuff that doesn't need immediate accessibility, but are classified as Special and Personal.
The top drawer contained a few more socks that I didn't scoop up back in February when my mom went into the hospital, along with a few photographs that have lived in that drawer for many years. Photos of a backpacking trip, not any secret pervy stuff.
Second and third drawers contained clothes. Fourth drawer has been, for some fourteen years, a depository for various formats of audio tape: cassettes, DATs, quarter-inch analog reel-to-reel tape (stored tail out, thank you), and a three-quarter inch U-Matic videotape, the type coupled with the old two-channel digital PCM converter boxes that reigned supreme through the mid and late eighties.
I kept some things, and discarded others. It wasn't hard.
Some things I discarded:
- Screws that look like they might go into a cycling implement. Maybe.
- The receipt for my road bike headlight system, back in 2000. The store has since closed.
- Small drumset hardware, stand position collars.
- An old Home Depot credit card. I sliced it up.
- Three or four unidentifiable keys.
- T shirts from bygone eras. Move on.
- A carbon copy of a 1984 bank loan agreement, when I borrowed a frighteningly large amount of money for new music equipment. (Why in the world did I still have that?)
- A little packet of tiny cleaning implements for a carbide-burning caver's headlamp, circa 1979. I don't think they've made those lamps for years.
Some things I kept:
- A few photos my children might like after I die, when they're cleaning out my drawers.
- Letters and cards from my wife, before we were married.
- Father's Day cards and little drawings from my children when they were little.
- A handful of tapes that I will set about loading into file format.
As you can see, the discard list is much longer. This is good. Now I need to get all this laundry done, folded, and put away - hopefully for the last time.
Tuesday, May 3
It is indeed paradoxical, if not downright ironic, that one of the telecommunications giants of this world has one of the most annoyingly useless websites known to modern technology. I refer, of course, to Bellsouth.
Now, I'm not always the sharpest tool in the shed. But I shouldn't ever have to analyze visual cues and conjure up multiple ways to interpret them.
Take a look at this screenshot:
See the tiny little letters to its left, "Click to set up additional mailboxes"? And then, on the right, in bold, insistent letters that indicate something very important, I'm encouraged to add a mailbox at three dollars a month extra. Sorry Bellsouth, but this immediately tells me that, in order to take advantage of the additional seven email accounts that come with my service, it's going to cost me.
There's absolutely no clarification or delineation to separate the two functions - no "OR, CLICK HERE TO...", no "CLICK HERE TO SET UP YOUR ADDITIONAL INCLUDED (AND THEREFORE FREE OF CHARGE) EMAIL ACCOUNTS", absolutely nothing to indicate what I'm really supposed to do.
Look, I'm not stupid. This very website is not the most sophisticated or dazzlingly designed, but it works, it stores and displays user-entered information, and I built it by myself. If I can't grasp what I'm supposed to do on Bellsouth's website, how in the hell could somebody's grandmother, who went to Best Buy and said "I just need a computer for email?"
This is absolutely inexcusable, and just cost me nearly a half hour of telephone time, with a very nice and patient (really) person who probably figured that I was the helpless grandmother. Honest to god, people - do you not have the money to spend on making sure your website isn't a hopelessly sprawling, misleading, cryptic, cluttered, redundant piece of SHIT???
Sunday, May 1
Life is new and different on this bright Sunday morning...
Here we are in a new home, all four peoples and Judy dog, along with my late mother's Corgi dog and two American Tabby cats. At one o'clock last night, I was playing Manhunt, a fantastically sick video game, with guidance from my son and three of his friends, along with my daughter and one of her friends, through my late father's office stereo system, in my childhood bedroom.
Later, I would sleep on a sleeper sofa in the rec room, where I've not slept in some thirty-two years. And this morning, my fantastic wife has gone on a food run, to make breakfast for the young troops, who are awake and playing a video game (in my old bedroom) involving spectacular, wall-shaking car crashes.
It's enough to make one's head spin, if you think about it hard enough. Which is hard to do right now, because I'm still trying to wake up...
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