In one of the funniest movies ever made, W.C. Fields' short, The
Fatal Glass of Beer, he is sitting in a cabin in Alaska, the snow swirling around the
house, and blowing inside the house ('tain't a fit night out for man nor beast).
He's sitting there with the local constable, who asks him to play something on his
dulcimer.
Fields, asks, "You won't consider me rude if I play with my
mittens on, will you?"
I don't think anybody would consider me rude if I typed with my
mittens on, because first of all, I can't type with mittens on, and second, even
if I did, you wouldn't see it. But lord do I long for mittens today. We keep
our house on the cool side in winter and warm side in summer, but even with the air
conditioning or heater going to make the rest of the house comfortable, this office does
not benefit from most of the temperature control.
Not only does the air vent seem ineffectual for blowing in either
warm or cool air, in the winter especially, there is a dog door which opens about 4 feet
from my desk. It has a cover, of course, but it is not air tight and ... it's bloody
cold in here.
To write this entry, I am taking breaks every few paragraphs and
going out to the kitchen to stick my hands in the open oven, which is set at a low
temperature, to warm the fingers up so I can come back in here and type a bit more.
I've tried putting heaters in here, but there are too many horror
stories of heaters causing house fires and this office is just cluttered enough and I am
just careless enough that I fear I am ripe for that happening. But also, the ones
I've tried heat up just fine, but within a short period of time it's blazing hot in here,
so I'm constantly turning them off and on. So I just deal with the cold however I
have to.
(Why am I suddenly thinking of poor Bob Cratchit huddled over his
tiny candle, trying to warm his hands while Scrooge sits in his office hoarding the supply
of coal?)
With the arrival of winter and the cold weather, the time was right
for Walt to present me with my Christmas present!!! Some time ago, I added
an iPod to my Amazon wish list, never thinking in a million years that he would get one
for me, but by golly he started to think about it. Add to that a little
"encouragement" by Char, who has been telling me I need one for the past year,
ever since our Rhine trip, and he asked if I was busy today and if not, would I like to go
buy an iPad.
First, he had errands to run, and I had a nap to take, and we had our
Christmas oranges to put away...
(A small portion of our $40 box of oranges that we get each year)
By the time we finally left, it was nearly dark and raining, but we
went anyway. Instead of going all the way to Sacramento, in the rain, on the second
to last Saturday before Christmas to shop at the Apple store, we stopped at the local
Target, where they had one iPad 2 (the model I'd decided I wanted) in stock.
I now have an iPad!!!!!
The evening has been spent trying to get it set up, a both exciting
and frustrating task. I'm trying to get all the programs and games I use most on the
thing but first of all, you have to enter an ID for every. single. app. that you download
and mine is basykes@dcn.davis.ca.us
...which does not roll trippingly off the fingers, especially after you've done it a dozen
times. Secondly, everybody wants long passwords for security now. I have about
3 that I use for most places, each between 15-20 characters long. Sometimes I use
caps and sometimes I use punctuation and 99% of the time I can't remember which I've used.
Fortunately years ago, before I started losing my mind, I had the smarts to create
a file on which most of my passwords are stored, all coded so I can tell what they are,
but the criminals who are going to break into my house and steal my Flickr password will
never be able to decipher from "MT99" what the 15 word password is, or what
"the usual" means.
So I've been running in here to the office to check passwords and for
the sites where I never wrote down the password, setting up new ones. End result (so
far) is that I have most of the programs I want set up and all of the passwords are now
recorded on my backup file and I'm in good shape to go to sleep, once I thaw my fingers
once again and finish this entry.
I even downloaded a Kindle app for the iPad because you can read on
the iPad at night, but can't on the Kindle, so I can read in the car going and
coming from wherever we are driving, since I can have the same book on both machines.
I finished almost everything I needed to do to allow me to work on
the iPad instead of the desktop unless I need to use the printer or design a journal page,
which means my hands can stay WARM thru the winter!
For now I am using the box the iPad came in as a protective cover
because Char has bought me a wonderful cover/keyboard (the final straw in convincing Walt
to actually buy this...she told him he had to because she'd already purchased the keyboard
for me!). She is a pearl beyond price.
And...hey...guess what... I have an iPad!!!
2 comments:
I have a first generation iPad and love it! Although I have a hard time blogging with it. But it's awesome for magazines, FBook, and games.
Enjoy!
I love my iPad, too. But I no longer use my Kindle - in fact, I gave it to the only daughter who didn't have one. 8^). There are one or two things that I prefer to do on the laptop, and the photos are still there, but most everything else, I do on the iPad now. Enjoy!
(got your new diabetes chart on it, too?)
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