Paper – Pixels – People
I couldn’t hold off. By Saturday afternoon at 4:00, I was the proud owner of five new roses. It would have been six, but I forgot about the Jens Munk. Plus I picked up a Winnipeg Parks.
They are waiting for me to dig some big holes. But that won’t happen until I get all the papers and final grades submitted later this week. But they sure look good!
It’s that time of year when my sinuses clog, my nose twitches incessantly, and I stock up on Puffs Plus. Spring is here, and my thoughts turn to my roses. My wonderfully fragrant roses. Which cause my clogging and twitching. But that’s why God made allergy meds.
Last year was a very bad year for a bunch of my roses in my oldest rose bed. I don’t know exactly what happened, but by mid-July, it was clear my favorite of the bunch, Cuthbert Grant, was dying. Maybe it was old age. Cuthbert was 15 years in my garden when he died. Even the tomatoes I planted nearby didn’t perk him up.
My William Baffin, which is only supposed to get to 10 ft at the max, is way above 15 feet and is now draped over a portion of the deck. He’s getting sparse at the bottom, and old, too. Queen Elizabeth never did get the hang of her environment, and she barely hangs in each year.
I think the soil is warm enough to be dug out. It’s time for me to go rose shopping.
My rose criteria is very simple: must thrive on neglect and be smelly. High maintenance, looks-good-no-smell roses need not apply.
Here’s my shopping list:
That should set me back a hundred or two. But they’re worth it. There’s nothing like sitting on our back deck, with the scent of roses in the air. Pure bliss.
There was a reminiscing thread on my tech writers list this morning, recalling the days of DOS and old word processing programs of the past.
I realized that it was 22 years ago, April 1987, when I first became really interested in computers.
I was writing procedure manuals and training materials using the department IBM Selectric. I would sit at it for days at a time, because I was creating the first training materials for the branch loan processors. When a procedure would change, I’d have to retype the whole page from scratch.
About 3 months before, a new manager had gotten an IBM PC/AT for our department. Another area had an original IBM PC with dual floppy disk drives they used for customer form letters.
After watching someone use the computers, I got curious, and asked if I could use it for my manuals. So, I learned Word 2.0 for DOS, learned how to tear a computer apart to change/upgrade components, and the rest is history.
That AT opened doors that I had nailed shut. By college, I had decided I was never going to work with computers. I had no need to learn about computers, they had no relevance to my life.
Now, I feel lost if I don’t have some kind of keyboard and software to push around.
It’s been wild, living on the near cutting edge of technology. While I’m not an early adopter, I am close to the front of the pack. The things my kids take for granted, like Firefox and the web, I remember what it was like before they existed. I even used Gopher and BBS for a short while at home, before the web became more mainstream.
The biggest lesson I learned from all of this was to never say “never”. That’s like an invitation to have my mind changed. It’s been more interesting to say “well, maybe” and see what happens.
I was watching Olbermann last night, and noticed Barney the Scottie in the background of some old shots at the Bush ranch. And then I noticed he (Barney, not fmr Pres. Bush) was taking a dump. I think the cameraman noticed too, because the camera starts zooming in on Barney.
I laughed my ass off. You can always count on a Scottie to do something obnoxious in the background during a serious moment.
If you want to see, go here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#30395233
Go to the #5 story “Cheney preparing his defense?”, and move the video to about 4:49 and watch. Also note that the video scene changes and Barney is no longer in the background, but Bush and Friends are in the same positions they were in during the dump (Barney’s, not theirs).
I love the Interwebs!!
It was 87 degrees today. The hottest day yet. We’ve had all our deck furnishings out for about a week now. I am writing this from the deck right now, as the light slowly fades on this April day.
OOH Shiny! Moment — A Great Blue Heron just flew overhead. Way cool.
Today was the day to practice for tornado season. The kids had drills at school today. I was in a meeting when the sirens blew downtown for the business/school day drills. Everyone in the room started when the sirens blew. Then the word went out: just a siren test.
More OOH Shiny! A big, red cardinal is sitting in the bushes, chirping his heart out.
This evening, we had the family drill. When the sirens blew, the girls ran over from the neighbors, grabbed the dogs, and hit the basement. It took me much longer to get my computer crap off the deck and get downstairs. It’s clear I’m the weak link in this chain.
A rabbit just ran through the yard.
There’s just so much going on outside. Critters, sun rays, tornado sirens. I love this time of year.
After the warm weather comes another cold streak.
As I was coming out of work just now, a big gust came up, turned a gal’s umbrella inside out, which made her drop her phone. The umbrella got the worst of it.
I had to step around part of what I think was a woodpecker. The only recognizable part was a wing. It had the white and black markings of the woodpeckers in my neighborhood.
Lastly, a guy was running a to catch the bus. Except he really couldn’t run because his pants were half pulled down.
The mama in me wants to yell, “Pull up your pants!!” The 12-year-old inside hoped he’d do a face-plant.
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I took today off to get somethings in order. My workroom is an absolute pig sty since the kids moved in with their laptop. But I thought I’d mess with my blogs for a bit before doing the heavy-duty cleaning and lifting.
And I found the sporatic posts I’ve thought I’ve sent to this blog, have been posted instead on my craft blog. So actually, I have written some stuff since November 4th. It just never got here.
So, all the blogs are straightened out now, and everything is in its proper place. Amen.
And now the ranting can begin.
Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X +
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte *
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X +
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X + (Read it 23 times — so far)
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy X
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams *
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia
34 Emma – Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden *
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – X+
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac *
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – X
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce X
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X+
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X+
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare –
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
29 book read on the list. Not too bad. But most of them were read pre-kids. Right now I have 10 books started, several of them started several years ago.
I walked into my usual Saturday pre-Chinese class study area to find this:
I didn’t think Selectrics existed anymore. This one looks like the typewriter that Snookie’s mom kept in her kitchen.
On the whiteboard were other reminders of my past — chemical equations.
I don’t know what these mean anymore, but I remember trying to understand what they meant 25+ years ago.
It also seems that chemistry students named “Pete G.” are still out of favor. There’s a none-too-flattering definition of this generation’s “Pete G.” on the whiteboard as well. Which I didn’t photograph. I try to keep this blog clean, unless I’m talking politics.
We had a “Pete G.” in our chemistry classes, too. Very smart, but a dweeb. We picked on him so much in Chem Lab. I’m sure he’s rich, famous and living a fabulous life in spite of the folks in A-Chem and P-Chem at SJU.
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As I left work this afternoon, I noticed a different scent in the air. It was very subtle. The smell of Spring approaching. Even though we have another month (or two or three) of cold weather ahead, the atmosphere is changing.
The family has a bad case of cabin fever, right down to the dogs. We’re ready for a change.
