We MUST Get Together Sometime

"Next time you're in the area, let me know and we'll get together." How many times have I heard that?

I'm thinking of one particular friend, whom I have not seen in more than 25 years, though she lives in the Bay Area. Periodically, I send her an e-mail and she always responds with delight, happy to hear from me, sad that it has been so long since we have seen each other, and telling me to let her know when I'm going to be in the area and we will get together.

I always have the same response...that when I'm in the area, it's usually for something specific, but I'm more than happy to make the drive down specifically for lunch with her and suggest that she let me know when she is free. Then I don't hear from her again until I write again.

I actually thought we might make it this year. We were honing in on specific dates and she said she would be house sitting, and would get back to me when she was home again. That was before we left for China.

I don't know if this is a common thing, but I'm beginning to get a complex about it, the number of people who say that they want to get together for lunch or dinner or whatever and that they will "get back to me" about it, and then never do, until the next time we talk, when they tell me again that they really want to get together with me. There is one friend who took 20 years before we finally did get together. We had so much fun, she said, that we needed to do it again, sooner this time. Whenever we talk, she reminds me that we are going to get together, either after the rain stops or when it's not so hot, or when their lives aren't all that busy.

Some tell me that I'm so busy that I should call them whenever I have free time. I always respond that really I'm not that busy and if they give me a couple of dates, I'm sure I can free up the time. But they never do.

I searched for a childhood friend for many years, unable to find her because she had married and I didn't know her married name. I finally connected with a mutual friend, who gave me my friend's contact information. We actually spoke on the phone. "When you're next in the area, call me," she said. I gave her my standard "I'd be happy to make a special trip to see you again, just let me know when you're free." She promised to get back to me, but never did.

One of our foreign students has been going to get together with us and mutual friends for about four years now. We actually do get together with this group occasionally, but it's never "soon," but more like three or four years between visits. There is a real posibility that someone in this group will die before we get together again. I last wrote to suggest that we do it soon. I was told that they would get back to me soon. I'm still waiting.

A former co-worker tells me every Christmas that we should get together for lunch after the holidays. I tell her I'm ready whenever she is. I haven't seen her in more than five years. She's never "ready."

"I'll talk to you after you return from China," said a friend before our trip. It's been nearly six months now and, despite attempts on my part to contact her, there has been no response.

You get a complex, you know? What did I do? What did I say? Why am I OK to talk to and to promise getting together, but why do so few people really want to make a date to get together after all?

(Or maybe I should just give up and try to live by this saying.)

It makes me understand why my father was such a hermit in the years before he died. It's easier to hide in the house and do my own thing -- writing, watching TV, reading, whatever -- than to face the rejection by friends you thought enjoyed your company, but who apparently don't really.

(That said, however, I am having lunch with Char and two friends I haven't seen in years this week. SOMEbody loves me!)

Voice Mail Hell

I know that in this day and age it's probably not possible for large corporations to exist without all those irritating voice mail menus that we have come, like sheep, to accept as part of everyday life.

I suppose I am fortunate that I live a relatively simple life that doesn't require me to spend a lot of time doing business on the telephone. The very minimal amount of business that I do can be done on line and it is rare when I have to get into voice mail hell.

After my experience today, I think that's a good thing because I suspect that a lot cases of people going postal, or jumping out of windows may be caused by one too many voice mail menu. Fortunately I live on the ground floor and there is too much junk between me and the window anyway.

It seemed a simple task. My mother has decided, after 15 years of almost never using Web-TV except maybe once or twice a month, that she no longer needs it. This is a great thing for me because I means that I can stop paying $20+ a month for a black box that she never turns on. So all I had to do was call Web-TV and cancel, right?

Riiigggghhhhhtttt.

The first time I called I only had to wait a short amount of time before I got a real person who asked me a question I hadn't expected: what color is the box? Well...black. Oh. That's the old box. You'll have to call back in half an hour. (There are specific hours for different colored boxes?) Apparently there was problem with the equipment of the people who answer the black box questions.

Like a good little sheep, I called back in half an hour and got put on hold with hold music.

Will someone please tell me (a) why we have to have hold music and (b) who makes the decisions about what kind of music you get? Actually, Web-TV's was kind of nice, almost an updated 40s style instrumental that wasn't grating on the ears. But later when I was on hold (more on that to come) I had some skreetchy rock band that made me was to shoot myself. The problem is that you can't turn the music off or opt out of it because if you do that, you won't hear when the real person comes on line. So I sat there with my head throbbing for about 15 minutes wanting to kill whoever decided that everyone wanted to listen to that crap. Even elevator music would have been a relief.

When I finally connected with the person, she demanded to know who Beverly Sykes is. This because I couldn't remember if the account name was my mother's or mine. She kept asking over and over again "who is Beverly Sykes" as I explained that the bill was paid by me. She would just ask again "Who is Beverly Sykes" until I finally screamed "I'M BEVERLY SYKES!!!" That seemed to satisfy her. Then she wanted to know the last four digits of my credit account, which I gave her. She told me it was the wrong number. I told her it was the only number I had. She said that she couldn't help me because I didn't have the right number. I mentioned that my card had been replaced recently and she said that she couldn't help me unless I called my bank and got my OLD number.

This seems very strange since they have been billing SOMEBODY and the old number supposedly has been canceled and I've had the new number for at least three months. But I also couldn't find a bill from Microsoft (who now owns Web TV) on my last three statements. Have I been paying for the service?

But I couldn't cancel it, apparently, without knowing my old billing number so that meant I had to call the bank. And that's where hell really began. Before that I was only in Purgatory.

As I said, I lead a simple life. I am blissfully unaware of the myriad choices when it comes to banking. I get a small check from The Davis Enterprise and deposit it. Social Security deposits money into my credit union account and it magically appears in that little ATM machine in the supermarket when I need to get money. Once a month I tell the credit union to pay the bank for the handful of charges I made during the month and that's about it. Walt handles all the big stuff, but we have no large outstanding bills and pay everything off each month, so even that isn't all that complicated.

Just trying to find the path to a real person was a nightmare. I was trying to find someone who could help me by letting me know what my last credit card number was, and since that isn't an option, I had to wade through menu after menu after menu after menu, each time choosing the option that I thought would take me to a real person, and each time being thrown into yet another set of menus.

I finally got to where it looked promising. They told me my call would be monitored for training purposes. That's a good sign, yes? And asked me to wait. And wait. And wait. While I waited (20 minutes) I got a lecture on how much easier it would be to do this on line. (No, actually it would not. This was not an on-line option! ) Then I got the awful music and then a honey-sweet voice telling me how I could get the car of my dreams with a special bank loan they could give me today. Then the awful music. It went on and and on and on. When I finally got a voice who was (a) pleasant, (b) American, and (c) apologetic for my long wait I started to feel less like jumping out of the window. I explained my situation and he said he would have to check my account and asked if he could put me on hold. I laughed. He did too. But he came back quickly with the information and told me he could not give it to me over the phone, which seemed reasonable. But he would mail it to me and I should have it in five days.

Then all I have to do is jump back into Web-TV's voice mail hell and hope that I get the right hour for canceling black boxes.

Whiling Away the Hours

The ride from Sacramento to San Rafael from midnight to 1:15 a.m. flew by because I had the last part of The Lincoln Lawyer to listen to. Great book. If you have to be on a long boring drive, or a drive when you might be sleepy, I highly recommend having a Michael Connelly audio book to keep you company!

My mother was in bed when I got here, so I opened the door, dropped my suitcase, turned off the lights and was asleep within a matter of minutes. Probably before 1:30.

I slept until 6:30 and then got up to have breakfast and get Momma to the hospital to check in. Her surgery was scheduled for 10 a.m., but we were to check in by 8. They took us to the Surgical admission office, they took my phone number and said she'd be ready to go home in about 5 hours, and led her off behind the door. I opted to come home (to her house) and work rather than hang around the uncomfortable "family waiting area."

I had several projects facing me and made the mistake of starting with the first one. I am doing a feature article on the 25th anniversary of the Davis Musical Theatre Company. I've interviewed several people, but didn't get much of a formal "history." However, those interviews did change and set what I want to be the tone of the article.

However, a company member, Ben Bruening, had told me, when I interviewed him, that he'd made a video of an interview with founders Jan and Steve Isaacson. I realized that the video could possibly be invaluable to this article, so I borrowed it from Bruening on the way to Sacramento before going to my mother's.

I made the mistake of starting to watch it before I started to write the review of the show we saw last night. I had to force myself to stop watching it because the review took precedence. But I was right--it's going to be invaluable.

PART 2 - F*** STARBUCKS

It was going to be so simple. There are two wifi hotspots listed near my mother. One is Starbucks and one is Kinko's. I decided to go for Starbucks. I hate how much it costs to get anything to eat or drink there, but I figured the cost would be to use their wifi (the iTouch told me it was always free at Starbucks).

So I ordered a coffee and a croissant and asked if I needed a password to use their wifi. The woman looked confused. "Well, you need to be a MEMBER first," she said. This apparently involved going somewhere ELSE to connect to Starbucks, buying a membership, then coming back to their location, buying a card for $5 which would give me an undetermined amount of time.

You know...if I had access to the internet somewhere else, I wouldn't need to be at their blinkety-blank cafe in the first place! I left her holding my coffee and croissant and went to Kinkos, next door.

Nobody at Kinkos seemed to have the slightest interest in helping me, but finally a guy who looked like he was about 110 years old, who shuffled along, with jaw drooping (probably some poor guy whose retirement was eaten up by Wall Street Executives and was forced to go back to work) came along and I asked how I could use their wifi. He directed me to a bank of computers and told me to insert my credit card. But I needed to use MY computer. How did I do that, since they were advertised as a wifi hot spot.

He didn't seem to know what wifi was, so he stopped some cute young thing, who told him that I would have to register with T-Mobile first.

"I'm going to need some help with that," I said.

The cute young thing refused to make eye contact, the 110 year old guy waved his arms helplessly and I finally remembered Walt talking about free access at all libraries. I asked the guy if he had a phone book I could use.

"Phone book" was a phrase he understood.

He gave me the phone book and I called the library.

But the library's phone system is only automated. There are NO live people to talk to. It did give a number if you needed to special order children's books, so in frustration I called that number. I reached a human being.

He told me that yes, there was free wifi at the public library. If I could find it. My first attempt was not successful, but I finally found it, and I am now seated here at the public library on my own computer, for free.

The hours of the library are 10 to 5 and so it is only noon, but I am going to post tomorrow's entry right now, while I have the chance.

I also, as of this writing, don't know how my mother's surgery went, but by the time I know, I won't be able to get back to the library, so I'll have to come over here tomorrow morning and post the next day's entry. This is crazy.

But at least I now know WHERE to find wifi and how to get to it. And I am never, ever setting foot inside a Starbucks again.

I'm also angry with myself. The library is at the San Rafael Civic Center, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It's a unique building with some beautiful grounds and today is a lovely day so it would be great to take photos, but I decided for the first time in forEVer to leave the camera at home. So I'm leaving the puppies as the Photo of the Day for one more day.

I Love Tom Sims

I don't often go public with statements like this, but midway through the day, I had to admit to myself that I am madly in love with Tom Sims.

Tom is a guy I "met" on line years and years ago, when my only interaction with the Internet was through CompuServe. Tom and I were both in the same discussion forum, run by Georgia Griffith. I met him once, a very long time ago, when Georgia came to San Francisco and hosted a dinner for all of her friends in the area. I don't remember that we spoke much, but he seemed like a very nice guy and we got along well.

I haven't thought about Tom in the intervening years. A few weeks ago, when I was searching for people I might know on Facebook, I came across Tom's name and added him as a Facebook friend. He confirmed my request to be friends and again, I haven't heard from him, nor have I contacted him.

As I wrote yesterday, I had terrible problems with Yahoo. I didn't worry about it until morning, because I assumed there was some horrendous glitch with the Yahoo servers, but when I got up in the morning and there was still no Yahoo--and what'smore there were no blaring headlines anywhere about it--I began to suspect that maybe it wasn't what I thought it was.

I posted messages to Facebook and to Twitter, and I asked whether or not people could access Yahoo. It was a big problem to me because Yahoo hosts this web site. I could get the stuff that has already been posted, but I couldn't get to the page I need in order to upload new stuff.

I also couldn't get ANY Yahoo site, not even http://www.yahoo.com. That meant no Yahoo maps, no Yahoo groups, no Yahoo mail. Nothing that had "yahoo" connected to it would come up for me.

I began getting notes from people that they could get Yahoo. Then I thought maybe it was a local problem of some sort, so I contacted my friend Joan, who lives just a couple of blocks away. She, too, could get Yahoo.

I decided to fire up the laptop and see if I could connect to Yahoo on that. I could. I was able to post my journal entry for yesterday, but that only confirmed that the problem was my desktop computer. And I didn't have a clue how to begin troubleshooting.

I sent off a message to my computer guru, who never responded.

The wonderful thing about the internet is how generous people are with advice and how they will bend over backwards to try to help you solve your problem. David Howell over on Twitter, suggested that I flush my DNS cache by going to a command window and typing in a command he gave me. (Problem was that I didn't know how to get to a command window, but I didn't want to admit that!)

Ron left a note in my guestbook letting me know how to get to the command line (thanks, Ron!)

Someone suggested it might be a virus and so I ran my virus checker again, the the machine came up clean.

Joan suggested using ctrl-alt-del to delete any programs that might be interfering, and said that happened to her occasionally. But there were no other programs running.

Paul Zawilsky, from the Lamplighters, gave me several useful suggestions, but they didn't work either.

Roy Spicer told me how to delete cookies and I did that, but when I did that, it knocked me out of Flickr and since Flickr is now owned by Yahoo, I couldn't get back in again because it wouldn't let me access its log-in screen.

Swell--the two websites I use most every single day and those are the two I couldn't get to.

I had forgotten that I could do a system restore in Windows XP, so I tried a system restore and set it back to November 1, certain that would cure the problem, since it almost always has in the past cured any oddball thing that is going on with the computer, but it didn't.

And then I got a note from Tom Sims. He directed me to a freeware program called CC Cleaner. which removes unused files from your system, and cleans up the registry.

I downloaded that, ran it, rebooted the computer, and, with fear and trepidation, tried to log onto Yahoo.

EUREKA! I'd done it! Well...Tom had done it. And so I'm sitting here feeling like I love Tom Sims and I'm not embarrassed to say it. Thank you, Tom, for your help. Thanks EVERYONE for their helpful suggestions. I should keep a list of all of them in case something odd happens again! But it sure feels good to be back in business again!

---

Another weird thing that happened happened on Facebook. I've been discovering a whole bunch of people I used to know lately, one of whom is Paul's old girlfriend Sue. She was the girl he turned to the night David died, but he married someone else, and so did she. Now here she was on Facebook and I added her as a friend. Then this morning, I get a note from Ned's godmother's daughter, expressing surprise at seeing Sue's name in my list of friends and asking how I knew Sue and explaining how she knew her. When Sue updated her status she said she was still amazed to discover that "her father-in-law's girlfriend's son's wife's mother is her ex-boyfriend's brother's godmother."

That is six degrees of separation, Facebook style!!!

Tower of Babel

If I were living in biblical times, I would have to say that I feel as though I'm working on the Tower of Babel. You remember the Tower of Babel, don't you? It was going to be the largest structure in the city of Babylon, however it became a source of pride for the people, and God wasn't happy...and you don't mess with God. He caused them all to speak different languages and "scattered the people throughout the earth."

It's not the "prideful" thing for me, but more of the "languages thing."

We can start with my orientation yesterday for STEAC, the Short Term Emergency Aid Committee, which is a non-profit volunteer organization whose purpose is to provide immediate, short-term emergency assistance with basic necessities (electricity bills, food, clothing, i.d. cards, etc.) to county families whose incomes are at or below the poverty level.

I volunteered for half a day in December, helping check in the holiday food baskets that were received and I learned they had a great need for volunteers to help with telephone calls, assessing the need and deciding who met the criteria to receive assistance. Yesterday, I met with a woman who has been volunteering at this job for years. And that's the problem. She knows the job so well, inside and out, backwards and forwards that as she explained what she was doing, and the agencies she was talking with and the forms she was filling out and the people who needed to have input on the decision, my eyes began to glaze over. She suddenly had started speaking a different language.

I am going to go back again in a couple of weeks and perhaps also visit the office in the interim.

Then this afternoon my desktop computer came back. My guru is a great guy and he's spent so much time getting this computer up to snuff, all at no cost. But he speaks faster than my 65 year old brain can comprehend and he tosses out terms and pops menus up on the screen and says "well, you go here and you do this and of course you never want to do that and if people play this game or that game this or that will happen and and and and and and....

I know he's talking. I know he's talking to me. I know that at least part of what he is explaining is important for me to know, but I can only understand about 1/4 of what he's saying at the speed he is rattling it off. And when he pops menus or screenshots up on the monitor and tells me that this and that and the other thing is important and here and there and the other place is where I look to do this, that or the other thing, I'm still back at "where is the plug" and my aging eyes can't focus on things that cycle across the screen so quickly.

So I just nod and pretend that I understand it all, when in reality I don't understand 1/10th of it, and I hope that when he leaves, I can figure it out.

But of course I can't.

I know that Front Page, which has been my bestest program for 7 years is no longer working and, unless I want to spend $300-400, will no longer work, so I have to find an alternative (at the moment, the alternative is to write this on the laptop and upload from the laptop, but I can't do that indefinitely). I know I have lost Microsoft Office, which I used only rarely, but did use from time to time.

I know that I have to reinstall all of my programs, which, after the last clean install of XP, I organized much better, so it's not as horrendous as it has been, but there are still disks I need to find (like Word Perfect). And when I get them installed, find the information that went with them...like my Outlook Express address book and all the e-mail that I had stored. I know that it's on here somewhere, but don't know how to find it, though the guru shows me how several times--with me standing across the room, when I can hardly see what's right in front of my face.

I cried a bit as I tried to reconfigure everything (it's going to take a long time) and Walt went out to the SPCA Thrift Store to pick up the new puppy, a Jack Russell terrier puppy (whose brother will join him tomorrow).

Then I went off to a board meeting for the Davis Community Network, where again I was in the midst of people who were speaking a language that sounded mostly like English but which included terminology and alphabet soup that I didn't have a CLUE about, so I just sat there and nodded my head and smiled and spoke only when I could contribute information about my area of expertise, which appears to be "social networking." I could at least enlighten people when they asked me what "Twitter" was (since nobody had heard of it) and I could give a somewhat intelligent-sounding definition!

It was nice to come home and watch something fairly mindless like "American Idol," though I don't know. Sometimes Randy Jackson sounds like he's working on the Tower of Babel too!!!

---

The number on the "blogodometer" (Tom's term) is now a whopping 2.11. I was going to put in 10 minutes several times a day, but only made it three times because that's when the guru showed up. So I hope to get over 1.11 miles tomorrow. They say that 10 minutes several times a day is just as good as 30 minutes at one stretch, so until my legs, hips and feet stop hurting, that's what I'll concentrate on.

Necessity is the Mother of...SPENDING!

What a day it has been! I ended this day feeling like a real reporter, lemme tell you.

At 1 p.m., I had made arrangements to meet a delightful man named Liam Creighton, who is the producer and director of a film called Julie, Julie, which is being entered into the French Film Festival in Sacramento in July. I am doing a feature story on him and on the film. I had already spent a lot of time on their blog, going over the production videos they had made and reading up on Liam and his wife Courtney and spent the morning watching the latest videos and getting up to speed with what I'd seen before.

(I've finally done it--I've found a way to make my internet obsession actually work for my job!)

At 1, I went back to good ol' Mishka's cafe (where, coincidentally, Liam had once worked) to meet with him. I was going to take the computer, but ended up no. I just brought my "trusty" tape recorder.

We had a delightful chat. He told me about his background, about how he came to make the film and all sorts of wonderful things. About 30 minutes into the interview, I went to check the tape, as I usually do, and that's when I discovered that the tape recorder was not working. The tape had just stopped about 30 seconds into the interview and because of the noise and clatter in the coffee house, I didn't hear the warning beep. I didn't have one single word on tape.

I pulled out a pad of paper and my pen to take notes, which I do badly (which is why I tape a recorder in the first place), and discovered my pen was out of ink. This was not looking good! Liam got a pen from behind the counter at Mishka's and I did what I could, but all the while I was groaning inwardly because at 3 p.m., I had an appointment to interview another guy--and this guy wasn't going to be anybody that I could just "wing it" with.

"The guy" was Rinde Eckert, who is the playwright / director / choreographer / performer and current Granada Artist in Residence at the University. He is about to present his Pulitzer Prize nominated (he was one of 3 finalists) Orpheus-X for one performance on February 16 and then he is directing a student cast in his Fate and Spinoza the following week. I've seen Rinde in performance before and knew that his interview was going to be more cerebral than just a couple of folks sitting around talking about movies and knew that if I was going to pull off a feature article over the weekend, I really needed a recorder I could rely on.

A-HA!

I remembered the last writing group meeting we had at Joan's house and how one of the women and Joan had been comparing their digital voice recorders. I didn't have a clue how much they cost, but since there was only 30 minutes before my meeting with Rinde, I decided to bite the bullet and buy one--at any cost. I went to Radio Shack.

To my delight, they were not only significantly cheaper than I feared they were going to be, but the clerk told me that they all pretty much did the same thing and the cheapest model was even on sale. It's amazing. It holds sixty-nine hours of dictation (for $20 more I could have gotten 114 worth of dictation, but I felt that was probably overkill!)

I told him to ring it up, add batteries, get it set up for me and show me how it worked. He did, I raced home, checked Rinde's address, went to the bathroom, and then showed up at Rinde's apartment, heart and digital recorder in hand. I plunked it down on the table, pressed the record button and hoped for the best.

[May I add, parenthetically, that I may have had my salary cut in half for stuff like this, but this is really the perk of the job. I just love meeting these fascinating people--and without exception, everyone has been just as delightful as they have been interesting, Rinde Eckert definitely no exception!]

As we spoke (well, he spoke and I listened), I was desperately hoping that the recorder was working because there was absolutely NO way I could ever remember 1/10th of what he was saying, much less quote him on it. Try, for example, remembering this:

He stands, in my estimation, kind of astride two worlds, one the world of the lyric, of the elevated, the high brain, essentially and this other world of the Dionysian, the animal, the inchoate, the natural. He’s able to talk to rocks; he knows the language of the rocks and therefore he’s trusted by the rocks. That requires a very different order of poetic imagination than the Apollonian high lyric. And so he stands as this pivotal figure between our more primitive and animal natures and this higher nature, the higher poetry.

Yeah. Right! Please, dear God, let the recorder be recording!

I was pretty sure I knew how to listen to the recording, but I didn't dare even try until I'd double checked the instructions at home and to my delight the 1 hr 21 minute interview had not only recorded, but in amazing clarity, the difference of night and day from a tape recording. AND, what was even better, I could transfer it from the recorder to my computer.

When I volunteered to work on the Morning Stories transcription project, the coordinator told me about a program called "ExpressScribe," which is a free download and which you can use to transcribe files on your computer. It even has keyboard controls to stop and start and speed or slow down the recording. I checked my Eckert interview that I transferred to the hard drive and there it was, playing through ExpressScribe.

I am an amazingly happy camper. Now I just have to transcribe it tonight and tomorrow and write the article on Sunday. I also have 3 more interviews to conduct, but they will be over the telephone, so I will type them as I talk to the subjects.