in which I attempt to draft a couple more pages, discover that I have left some important information at home and find that my computer doesn’t want to do audio. Since neither the speakers or headphones seem to respond to anything on a reliable basis, I am down to using my phone for both FaceTime and YouTube.
Oh, wah. Not. There are much worse fates than not having computer based connections.
Pat brought up a point in response to my post about friends around the world that I really think merits further thought. So many people have become dependent on social media for their relationships that we forget that social media is not always a bad thing, that it may not serve to isolate rather than bring together. It can be a way for those who are isolated, house-bound, disabled to be able to connect with others.
If you haven’t read Tom Standage’s “The Victorian Internet”* I might suggest you borrow it from your local public library and peruse it. He makes the point that our methods of written communication have changed, but Western Society as a whole had a long standing history of communicating in written format. For anyone who reads any fiction at all set in Edwardian, Georgian, or Victorian England, sending notes and letters was just as common a task as managing household accounts. Because of distance, most wrote letters. Your friend from school? You communicated by letter with them over holidays and vacation periods. Announcements? They went by post. Invitations? The same.
We seem to have a natural inclination to want to share thoughts, feelings, and knowledge with others. Mostly by the written word, as it isn’t time dependent on reaching the other person at the exact moment we have the thought. It will be there, waiting for them when they have time. But that element of time has changed as well. When communication was routinely by letter and post, unless you lived city center in a major metropolis (read NYC, London, Rome, Paris, Frankfurt) you did not expect a reply back the same day. If the distances were greater, you automatically added in round trip postal transport time for your letter.
Now? It seems like everyone wants an instant response to whatever method of communication is attempted. Rarely, anymore does anyone pick up the phone. Rather, send off a text or email. I am discounting snapchat, twitter, instagram and Facebook for the moment since those are “toss it out there and see if anyone responds” methods of attempting communication. Personally, I don’t view those as communication methods since they are not really targeted and an answer is optional.
All those years of radio and television which occupied the intervening years between the development of more instant methods of communication and the present did change everyone’s mind set. Rather than actively controlling one’s time, increasingly people became passive consumers of whatever was put out. Watching is not the same as reading. Seeing is not the same as creating character voices and actions in one’s own mind when reading Agatha Christie vs. watching a BBC production.
But those intervening years were hard on those home bound. Yes, entertainment came to them via radio and TV, but it did not come with human interaction. People would pick up a telephone rather than send a note or an invitation. At first this change could be viewed simply as an economic barrier, but it rapidly expanded to the point where, if you could not communicate on a phone, you were going to be excluded. Think of everyone with hearing or speaking impairment, those with mobility challenges such that reaching that phone in a reasonable time was not an achievable accomplishment.
Fast forward (see, a VCR term) to today. There are those who are unable to handle direct human interactions and might well have functioned much better in a society with strict structural behavior norms and codes. But I honestly believe that those individuals are a rarity. Rather, the modern, although occasionally annoyingly immediate forms of electronic communication, while perhaps bombarding us to the point of overload, also provide for some individuals in our society, their only window on the world. The only method by which they may become a productive and self-valued member of society. Amazon (Amazon, Audible) no matter some of their faults, provides a significant amount of customer service through individuals, who by working out of their homes, can have gainful employment. You don’t have to hear to be able to answer a chat, resolve a request for a return of an electronic book or audiobook.
So Pat’s point is well taken. The same methodologies which bombard us with trivia and may push people into superficial relationships also offer others a chance to have friends, to connect, and to live full lives even without the ability to leave home, drive a car, or travel the world.
*I referenced a book of his about this time last year when I went on a rant about lawyers, and the total misappropriation of words and misuse in the English Language. Should you be a native speaker of a different language, I am sure that you would be able to find parallels. Not sure why you would try, but there it is
For those of us who travel and are at all sociable, you collect friends around the world. If you don’t travel, but have professional interests–likely the same. For all the fiber fanatics, there is Ravelry, so again, communications with other people who share your interest around the world.
Thinking back, I first started “collecting” people who I knew only over the internet in about 1995 with the original Knitlist. Hosted on a university server somewhere, it wasn’t one of the alt.knit.whatever discussion groups. Rather, it was a traditional group list just slightly advanced from the original bulletin boards of Fidonet. It was how I got to know Pat in Michigan, Cat in Australia, Isobel in New Hampshire, and Mary who lived in upstate New York at the time. Not all that long after, the deployments to the Balkans started which added Kris from Washington State and Val from the reserves. Shamash, the Reconstructionist list added in Ira in Boston, Steven in Los Angeles, and Steve in Rochester.
My first serious, organized attempt at staying connected started in 1998 with my deployment to the Balkans. That email list has continued to the present day with additions and deletions as time and interest dictated. Some included are people who I have known since college, others are those who I have gotten to know in the last couple of years. Two are adults, but I first met when I delivered them back in the days when I was doing OB. I have added those with whom I have served, from both the German and UK military.
I mention this now as I think of one German reserve officer who I first met in 1999 while attached to the German Military. A very junior sergeant then, Christian was looking to attempt the US Army’s Expert Field Medical Badge. We are now 20 years down the line, he is a fire department Capt, works search and rescue and is an officer in the Reserves. Or one of the most brilliant medical corps officers I have ever met – Beverly is now retired from the UK and, after earning a PhD, continues serving by researching veteran’s health in Scotland.
There are those I know from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France, Israel – military, former military, families, friends, average people working to improve the lives of others. I would like at times to believe that I make a contribution, but perhaps the most important part is to simply stay connected and remember.
I really appreciate my new MacBook Pro. Except for two things. The latest software update has eliminated all support for 32-bit software. Now for most people, the response is Huh? What is a bit, as apposed to a byte, as apposed to wallaby? But for me, it turns out that the only difference it makes is significant and probably for the better. Big Fish Games (yes, those folks) don’t have 64-bit Mac games. All the games I have wasted time with over the years are 32-bit. I have emailed them, they say they are “working” on getting the games updated.
I don’t believe it for an instant. There is no money in updating old games. It is not likely to sell most of them. Far better to continue to produce new ones. The problem, of course, is that everything in the pipeline is 32-bit. It is saving me money, so that is probably a good thing. However it leaves me with only one game (free from the Apple store) with which to waste my time. Back to the iPad I guess.
The much more irritating change is Apple’s desire to require 2 step identification. On the surface it seems like a good idea, make your device more secure and less likely to be jacked, should it be lost or stolen. But, tell me please, exactly WHY I should have either my face or fingerprint on file with Apple? Especially the fingerprint.
I know that I have fingerprints on file, that is what you have when you spend 33 years in the US military. No sweat. I don’t care if those fingerprints are in law enforcement databases or the FBI because of contributing to the US military. But, I really, really don’t see why a commercial entity such as Apple needs to have my fingerprint. And if any of you really believe that Apple (altho better than FB, Twit, SnpCt, Instawhatever) is not going to use your information, I have beach front property in Scottsdale to sell you.
Ok, I thought I had the system beaten. It doe take sending out 2-3 emails rather than one, but it looks like I can possibly get group emails through the “new improvements” of Gmail. But then, things started bouncing today.
What was different? Oh, yes, photos. It looks like no attachments if it is a group email. Or rather, no included code. Ok, I can work around that – and can attempt to attach pictures? Or provide a link in the text which would go directly to the photo on my website. That might just work. But then I will have to figure out how many are allowed and if there are any special limits that gmail has placed without bothering to tell me.
I feel truly sorry for anyone who is trying to use GMAIL for business. No longer able to send out newsletters, for example. I have resisted switching back to yahoo.groups or google.groups because that would give them a permanent list of who I am sending to. That is just none of their business. The same for any of the emailing services. For me to do a group mail, I would have to upload a list of email addresses. Like I would do that?
All of which leave me with the question of a mailing list that has been running for 20 years. Since I am not on Facebook, nothing is there. Twitter? 140 characters. Not words, not paragraphs, characters. Enough said. Most days I actually want complete sentences maybe sprinkled with punctuation. I am not egotistical enough to think that everyone is going to wander over to my webpage every day just to see if I have come up with something new. That puts the burden on you, rather than having me reach out.
What I will also be watching over the next few days is whether there are some particular systems which are more likely to sputter when an email from me arrives. At least then I could place all those poor souls (pour soles – got to love spellcheck) onto one of the three groups that now exist.
Meanwhile, I survived another run to SF for class this morning, managed to forget my vest in one of the faculty offices, and BARTed to Berkeley where I will spend the next couple of hours immersed in Public Health. Now, I just need to figure out how to access the course materials on line…
there are certain words which have definite meanings to us children of the 60s. Those of us who grew up with mainframes, set vocabularies and a sense of humor about the Jaberwok. Not so these modern children who think nothing of co-opting a perfectly well defined term or phrase and standing it on its head.
Tom Standage, in his Writing on the Wall, 2000 Years of Social Media
————->-8 ——–
(did you see what just happened? Rather than just assert something, I went and found a reference that backs up my point in order to give in emphasis and decrease the chance that someone might question it. After all, if someone else said it, it must be true. Meanwhile, I have been totally and completely corrupted. Do NOT under ANY circumstances have anything to do with lawyers, how they think or how they write. You will find yourself totally ruined by the experience. Trust me.)
————->-8 ——–
discusses social opinion, commentary and how opinions change. It is a fun book. But what I am discussing is something slightly different. It is the total and complete stealing of a term of art and changing it beyond recognition.
My disgust and anger today revolve around the degeneration in the use of “HACK.” This is a word that we all know. Whether it is from sports or a glancing familiarity with with axes or hatchets. I understand “hack” and it means to break in, by unauthorized means, through a computer software code or into someone’s computer (mainframe in the era where I started).
Some fool in the 1990s decided to combine two otherwise useful words – HACK and MARATHON into Hackathon. This poor bastard of a word implies a session where a bunch of computer geeks race their bleeding fingers in the pursuit of a software solution against a time clock (and others). Right from the start, there are several problems with this analogy: the first is that a marathon is an INDIVIDUAL (caps intended) race, not a collaboration; the second is that a marathon is a sporting event with specific rules. Back to hacking: the only rules in hacking are that you don’t give away your tricks in cracking into places that your are not supposed to be and you don’t rat out your fellow hacker. Seriously, comparing a group of nerds (present party included) who traditionally fuel on caffeine and Cheetos with seriously physically fit athletes is ludicrous.
So now we have “hackathons” most of which should be much more properly named “brainstorming sessions.” It isn’t computer people any more, the term has become wide spread and used by just about any group that wants a catchy idea for its symposium. All of this leads to what set me off in the first place.
A group of lawyers. Seriously, a group of lawyers – the field isn’t relevant but it was NOT related to tech or software – had a Hackathon in the student lounge at Hastings. They are sitting there in rows listening to various speakers, nodding their heads (those that weren’t taking notes or busy with their smart phones). There is not work-group space in sight.
Brainstorming? Conference? Working group? (well if a group has over a hundred participants). And, I repeat LAWYERS! who normally are extremely precise about their word usage. But there they sit, happily holding a hackathon.
I rest my case.
For whatever reason, one of my browsers has decided to default to BING regardless of which engine is in change when I start the search.
I am neither amused or pleased. The list I have generated pops up, followed by a hijack of the page to the new search engine. It is only Chrome, not Safari which means, more than likely that I will be stuck completely the use of the native Apple browser. Blocking Bing hasn’t worked. Deleting it multiple times doesn’t work and I challenge any but the most game worth of opponents to be able to beat out the millisecond or so where my preferred page with link appears before blinking away.
Perhaps this is another one of those “another improvement for your safety and convenience” improvements? Kind of like the signs along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the mid-70s where the next sign would say “No Guard Rails for the next 25 miles?”
in other words, we think it will be better, somehow, some way and perhaps some day, but proceed at your own risk.
As it turns out this evening all my good efforts yesterday were rewarded by gmail. Not. At exactly 1947 I started receiving message after message stating that there were mail delays and that they would continue an attempt to deliver yesterday’s email for another 47 hours.
Oh really?
I can understand one or two emails bouncing. That happens all the time especially since I know a significant number of people who travel and might have a full mailbox. But think about it – it is really, really hard to fill a mailbox anymore. At least for anyone who doesn’t use AOL.
But anyway – everything bounced – to include the cc: to my own non-gmail accounts. Go figure. Any who – it wasn’t the highlight of my day. That was rounding up good friends at SFO Airport and bringing them home for a couple of nights.
We will not talk about the traffic on the way home. Bay Bridge construction during the day? Oh, please – thrill us all by closing a couple of lanes before the last SF exit. At least the traffic early in the morning when I drop off Dani and the dog isn’t anything at all.
And now to see what happens with this email…..
As I found out again, the WordPress App on my iPad just spins forever but doesn’t seem able to upload a post.
Happily humming along, I think I have been updating the blog.
Nope – the post is written and 30 minutes later it is still saying “Uploading” Thank goodness I can take a screenshot and save the post. Most of the words are visible and it isn’t extremely difficult to fill in the blanks covered by the box claiming it was working…. not that it was.
Otherwise it was a quiet day. George had board meetings, I worked on a couple of projects. We took Noah out to dinner at the end of the day before leaving him in New Haven and heading back to the hotel.
Did I mention that my phone had an accident that involved water on Saturday?
I initially thought it was going to be fine. There were a few quirks – like taking a dozen screen shots related to nothing when it wanted to and not taking screen shots when I attempted the same task. But I was hoping that all was recoverable. I thought it would be happy spending all day yesterday and part of today in a bag of rice.
Oh, not so as I sadly found out. Charging the phone was not an option and nothing was working quite right.
So….. after we spent a couple of hours with our architect redesigning the kitchen from your standard apartment ugly to something everyone could live with (and adding a bit of lighting while we were at it) I went to the Apple Store.
The bad news? Phone might make it, but probably not. I could wait and see, but that would leave me in New York this coming weekend potentially without a phone. The Good News? George had purchased the Apple Care plan for my phone. It didn’t cost me all that much to just replace it, get a new screen cover and load the backup. (It is here where I remind you once again that if you are not good about automatic backups, please, please, please set them up so that they happen with frequent regularity on auto-pilot).
And when I arrived home? My new phone cover had been delivered. I am back to the wrist strap in hopes that it will help…..
Ok – the good news up front – A’s 7: Cleveland 3. Getting back and forth on the BART worked.
the rest? Meh –
These are screen shots that my phone chose to take.
That is right – it just fired off on its own. Along with changing channels on the radio, deleting email and otherwise driving me up the wall.
It could be because it got wet yesterday, but that would make it my fault and I would never want to own that expensive little errors. It will spend another night with rice since I elected to go to the game today rather than to the Apple store….
what happened to my original post for today but have a feeling that the WordPress App needs some serious updating. At least my plan was to write in the app and upload it (in a few of my 60 free minutes that I get for my level of Latitudes membership). Thinking about all the complaints since Royal changed from the 1 or 2 or x hours free to the 1 day/2 day whatever free – I have decided that having a whole day free is much better than attempting to check in for a few minutes a day. In reality, it takes normally about five minutes to get logged in and then if you get dropped carrier, the minutes have been known to continue to run.
In any case, I wound up attempting to use the app. It didn’t work. Of course, my Tylenol isn’t working all that great either. There is a lovely cafe not that far from where the ship docked where Noah and I stopped and checked email. Then we stopped at Walmart. I picked up some more paracetamol, he found sun glasses. We spent almost nothing. This is perhaps the favorite stop on the run for the crew (chance to stock up for cheap and find internet for very little).
I headed back to the ship for my second (or was it third) nap of the day.
Honestly, If I start feeling a little more human and less like chopped liver I’ll try to do a better job of describing the ship, the eats, the crew and the trip.
last night I finally downloaded the 2007-2015 content from proseknitic.de in preparation for cancelling the site. Should I bother to tell you how many spam comments I had to kill. I found them, of course after I had done the import so I am hoping that most fell outside the import windows.
Then I took a look at comments from way back when and started following links from all the knitters.
Should I not have been surprised to find most of the blogs inactive for years or that I have lost track of a number of people? Part of it makes sense. The blog[s] drifted away from pretty solidly knitting content only to being more about travel with the occasional opinion rant more than fiber. In other cases, I think various people found that Ravelry was easier to use than posting on a blog where few people ever commented. Feedback is important unless your soul is basically that of a writer, in which case you just need to express yourself and the h* with anyone who can’t take a joke.
Thinking back – April 1998-March 2007 – email list. March 2007 (ten years – that is quite scary in some ways) to the present with more or less consistency running both the blog and an email list that varies in size depending on the subject, the year and the drop of those not interested. The last has been balanced by the gain of new friends.
My first mailing lists actually went out from my laptop but through a military server. Use of that server lasted till ~2000 when it finally quit tossing outside emails and implemented some security procedures. After that it was min.net for 10 years till the guys got bored and went out of business. Then there was YahooGroups which I think lasted almost until the UK. At some point the restriction on number of addresses was lifted and I went back to emailing straight. Now? Gmail doesn’t have a problem with a serious number of addressees and cross posting from the blog is pretty much cut and paste along with the occasional editing.
At the end of my session with the computer I verified that those pictures which were still on the old blog transferred to the new. Those which seem to have disappeared off that site won’t be found till I dig through my photo archives at home. I knew there was a reason that I backed up everything. I’ll finish PDFing the archives and pages just to have them before pulling the plug on the last three sites hosted in Germany.
I am making progress
15 March 2017
It had to happen. After all, I moved over from the German server to this one based in the US well over a year ago. There was the honeymoon period in which I was tweaking things, moving items and menus here and there before I hit the – oh, whatever and just left things as they were. But I had thought that perhaps I had left the spammers behind.
The last couple of days have proved me wrong. No, I don’t need shoes, computers or SEO software. I don’t care to read all the hashed up discussions which don’t come from real people and often aren’t in a language that I read at all. I just hit the delete key on a number of similar bits of garbage early this afternoon before heading off to watch the Cal Women’s Basketball team never quiet get it together. A couple of times they came within shouting distance, but overall – the Colorado Buffalos deserved their win.
Dinner was pizza from the Cheese Board and a quiet evening spent at home. And it is already Monday tomorrow. We are not expecting rain, but garbage trucks and more utility vehicles probably blocking the drive again.
In order to deal with this –
and yet another pile of floppies
It really helps to have caffeine. You can drink it fizzy, you can drink it in tea, coffee… or it can take over your life –
whimsy pieces
which came from Artifact Puzzles which is my other source of lovely wooden puzzles. Those fun little bits fit into this –
which totally works with the table cloth
and becomes the little fiend –
at the end
right about the time that I dropped the last diskette in here –
one full brown paper bag
Of course, now that I have had a volunteer (thank you SO MUCH Steve) who actually is willing to take a few diskettes off my hand (yes, there are other geeks than me out there) and can actually play some of these games which I still have on original diskette. Plus who doesn’t need their very own MS-DOs 3.1?
By the time I was through all of this I managed only a couple of boxes sorted from the garage, drank enough fluids for someone twice my size and rounded out the rest of the day with progress on that fractal –
4 Feb 2017
which with any luck I will be able to finish tomorrow. The purple is within six rows of the bottom which means it isn’t that much further for the greens or yellow. Of course, there is the slight issue of the Cal Basketball games which are a little higher on my priority list. But I can bring knitting to those….
At first, you could only find them in black. Then one company had the bright idea of making them available in color. After all, with the outside being plastic there was an opportunity beyond the label to be creative. Manufactures included 3M, Precision,Maxwell. These were the 3 1/2″ little hard floppies that replaced the larger 5 1/4″ softer floppies which in turn were the successor to the 8″ large floppies (see Wang System Dedicated Wordprocessors) .
borrowed from Wiki
The drives into which you inserted your removable media were labeled by capital alphabet letters. If you want all the details – Wiki (as usual) has a decent and moderately understandable explanation of the hows and whys. Lets just say that most of us never really got why the “micro diskettes” with their whopping 1.4 MEG (double sided high density) went into the A: drive while the older floppies that had been around for years more went into the drive which was now designated B: Once computers had a hard drive – it was normally C: It was quite a while later than D: appeared (CD drive) if there wasn’t more than one hard drive. That CD drive never did have a fixed, permanent letter.
In case you hadn’t recognized it, I am primarily discussing the CP/M, DOS, OS/2. WIN etc operating systems and their way of designating drives.
I still have a few hundred of these pesky things around. I have a number of MS-DOS programs in their original 1990’s decade of release. Having those diskettes and the original registration numbers has saved me $$$ on updates on several of the programs. Others? Not so much. But for how long was I planning on hanging on to all of these?
At one time, we had some external A: drives. But they needed either a serial or a parallel port. I forget but it really doesn’t matter since I haven’t had a laptop with either of those for a significant number of years. And then there was the move and I think they didn’t make the boat. So I finally broke down and spent a whomping $14US to purchase a USB A: drive. So far this evening I have made it through over 75 diskettes and found some real treasure. Old documents, War College papers, pictures.
Miriam – 2001
sock yarn stash 1999
1998
Noah 2001
2003 – Maus selfie…
So if anyone is suffering from overload and needs a return to the 80s and 90s – please let me know. I will gladly send you original MS-DOS programs. For that matter, if you happen to need a copy of MS Windows 3.1 , I have that as well…..
Mind you, this is not a whine. Nor is it a request for sympathy. But we all have those projects on our list at the beginning of the year which we plan to have completed by the end of the year.
I still have boxes – dozens and dozens of boxes in the garage. Some of them I can deal with (and will) over the next couple of months. Some are just too heavy for me to move by myself. I have items that need new homes but I have no idea where those homes are and I just don’t want to deal with eBay. None of this, of course, has anything to do with the boxes and boxes of books. So organizing the garage, sorting it out and evaluating which (of the kilos of supplies) I have are really going to be used and which need to go anywhere but here.
And then there are the computer files which are partly, but not completely backed up. Or rather, I have items backed up across a number of external hard drives and still way too much information on my laptop. Pictures need to be edited and pruned. More than a couple of dozen past posts are still waiting those photos in order to be released.
Then there are the knitting UFOs that started the year in bags and ended the year in exactly the same place. Most are stranded projects and I do actually want to complete them at some point so frogging them is not a good answer. I have actually done a decent job on the sewing projects in the last month, but still have to get the studio organized enough that it is functional.
There are the bookshelves in the house that I swore I was going to get organized. Right now, a lot of my puzzles are living on the top shelves. To be honest, the ones that I have completed really don’t need to be there in order to leave room for more books. We always need room for books.
Anyway, you get the idea.
Now, the real question that I have to face – is being home more this coming year secondary to needing health care going to result in me actually getting some of the long standing disorganization under control?
I’ll probably have an answer for you about this time next year.
Meanwhile – this is where I ended the cross stitch yesterday –
31 Dec 2016 – 1/2 complete
with another 11 rows completed. It was about that time that I realized that my numbers weren’t adding up. Turns out that the first sheet had more rows on it than the second which I started today. Adding in another 9 rows done – means that I have only 2332 stitches to go
1 Jan 2017
I’m not sure that I care for a couple of the color selections, so those may change before I get much further. In any case, I will be glad when I am done with the current “change colors practically every stitch area.’
Oh, the other thing from last year – 431 books read – 10% were audio, the rest primarily eBooks
can actually be going forward. Or making progress.
Wait – I’m not talking about what happens when you drive a car. I am referring to that process which involves hours of looking over files which have been placed on small portable hard drives “just in case.”
If the issue is one of photos – then it makes sense. For those of us who use cameras not imbedded in phones and travel a lot – the number of photos per month/year easily reaches into the thousands. It makes no sense to hang on to the poor quality photos, the blurred through the bus window and all manner of stupid shots.
But just in case one of them might turn out to be a treasure, a copy on an external drive would free up space on my hard drive. Or that was the theory until I realized that those [now] inexpensive drives have a tendency to multiple in the dark if you don’t watch them carefully. For a long time one has everything organized. Then off on a trip – OH! I don’t have a way of backing up all these photos. I guess I’ll just get another.
My collection of external drives goes back to the late 1990s. I have a couple of jump drives from that era as well. It would be nice to be down to few devices with an actual chance of me being able to find something. I’m hoping it is a possibility rather than a fantasy.
The audiobooks are easy – I can file them by author. The photos I file by year with subfolders for months and under that dates. The problem is when backups have been done at different times I don’t always have the same photos on the drive.
And so it goes: with embroidery files, knitting patterns, eBooks (those only date starting with FictionWise in 2002).
Otherwise it was another rainy day filled with errands, Candy Crush and audiobooks when I found myself behind the wheel of the car for the fourth time in less than three hours.
Last Wednesday I took my laptop along when we made a run up to the Sacramento VA so I know I had it then. For that matter I dropped a note to this list on Thanksgiving; again meaning I had the laptop. Now full possession of my brain is another matter.
Friday I wrote I post in my head and the same for Sat. Yesterday I thought it was about time to put fingers to keyboard. Besides, there are all the fleece pullovers I have been cranking out to show you. Tally here is now @ 2 x 4 people (Noah, Dani, Alex & myself) + one for Maus and 2 for Shana. Then there are the additional three to go in the mail tomorrow along with a batch of sock yarn.
Meanwhile I am wrangling appointments, searching for the stupid laptop, making soup and contemplating finishing the last small bit remaining on the Fractal cross-stitch in progress since ? This year certainly.
Which is the lovely little town in Greece that serves as the port and gateway to Olympia. I was here last year. It was where I had a chance to talk to a number of the shop keepers about Greece. Shop owners who were not at all reticent to explain that they were working, the government not so much. And certainly they had to pay taxes. And who did I think paid for all the improvements in the street, the sidewalks, the store fronts so as to make it attractive? Certainly not the government….
This is also the town with two small interesting, if not strange, small museums. The first alleges to be an historical museum of Greek Inventions. Doesn’t matter what it is, it was invented here first in Greece. Most likely decades to centuries before the rest of the world. It is small, fun and entertaining. Probably worth a few Euros the first time through, not a second. The other museum features musical instruments with much the same theme. If it is worth having, it was invented here….
I went for a stroll, I relaxed. Trying to balance out my frustration with the ship’s internet. That rogue wave that took out 12 windows in the Viking Crown lounge (Deck 11), soaked the carpet and trashed untold thousands of dollars of dishes and glassware apparently also did a number on the satellite antenna that handles comms. Internet stays up for a few minutes at a time, if it comes up. Frustrating to say the least.
Research not getting done. Email not being read or written, books not getting borrowed from various public libraries. Color me not a really happy bunny for the moment.