Mittens

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!!!