With the exception of a trip to the grocery store and some brief helping with dinner, I spent pretty much the whole day trying to get my computer to boot Windows when Windows is selected from the boot menu.
I have not yet succeeded in doing so, and I don't have anything nice to say about the process.
The end.
I had never had a margarita, so when Bob and I went to the beach a few months ago, I ordered me one.
I quite enjoyed it.
So when we went to Grenada last week, I ordered another one.
And I enjoyed it even more.
However, when I had another one the next night, and a third one on the third night, they deteriorated steadily.
And we just went out for dinner with Dad here in town, and I ordered one, and all I can say is, it's a good thing it wasn't my first, else none of this would have happened.
I can only conclude that I need to hook up with someone who has experience tending bar, and learn to make my own.
Dad and the girls made Christmas cookies while I was at work today, and this evening we all (who live here) get presents (from those who sent them) (Thanks!).
Aaaaaand, 12 hours of travel. We left the hotel at 10:15 this morning, walked maybe 15 minutes to the bus stop, waited another 15 or so, and got the bus. Hour and a half to the border, an hour of waiting while everyone on the bus was processed out of Nicaragua, then three hours (mostly standing in line, much of that in the direct sun) being processed into Costa Rica, then about another week and a half on the bus.
Eight of us live in the Heredia area, so we got a (van) cab all together that got us home in good time and for a good price. Walked in here right about at 10:15 this evening.
The kitty survived, didn't wreak havoc, and now has some special canned food and clean litter. I scooped, unpacked and straightened our bed while Bob took Dan & Jan home, and now it's time for a snack, then bed, then work, then picking up the girls at 3:00 tomorrow and then cleaning up because Dad gets in about this time tomorrow night.
Good thing it's almost the weekend.
Don´t worry, there´s not supposed to be any audio. My camera doesn´t roll that way.
And here´s the same thing on the west side of the tower:
Or, you know, maybe tomorrow.
We no longer have a car port.
We'd been planning to screen it in for ages, but the plastic netting we bought for another project once upon a time was no longer available at the hardware store, so it kept getting put off. Yesterday I picked up a slightly different kind and today while Bob was at work I put it all up with about 150 zip ties.
No more car port. Now it's a cat porch.
I have stuff I could post about tonight - sending 645 faxes at work (really), meeting a very charming (and tiny) little gecko, the video game I've been playing lately. But I didn't feel like writing about any of that, and when I walked into the bedroom the cat was all spread-eagledy on the bed and I took her picture and was going to post that.
Today I got my NC Driver's License Out of State Renewal by Mail packet and it all looks doable. Mostly just forms to fill out, and I have to get a local vision test.
I had an excellent day today.
I keep talking about how we found this Big-Ass Spider, and then the cat killed Big-Ass Spiders numbers two and three (okay, #3 was smaller). Well, this is what I mean by that:
Well, the girls are up the hill till after the Nicaragua trip, we have our bus tickets, my passport is not expired (there was a brief scare caused by an out-of-date photocopy), and the hotel likes to get paid in person, so I don't have to figure out how to get them my credit card number beforehand (I can call the US for free, but the next country over is more complicated). The only thing left to do for the trip is pack for it and coordinate getting to the pick-up point.
I spoke to the phone company this afternoon and they confirmed that whatever tech is sent over to install the DSL will have modems in the truck - you can rent the modem from the phone company for a dollar a month, but after we'd applied, I realized they hadn't asked if we wanted to do that, so I worried that the guy might show up and not be able to do anything. I still hope they don't come while we're out of the country, but there's not much we can do about that. If they haven't come before we go, I can call the phone company when we get back to see if they have a "not home" note on the work order, and if so we can set up a new time.
I finished the quilting I was doing for my friend in time for her to add the binding and bring it back in to work this morning; it looks great and she's pleased, and the proceeds will be almost exactly what the Nicaragua tickets cost, so that works out well.
And I moved a new family into the neighborhood so my Sims can make new friends. All's right with the world.
We made cinnamon apple scone roll-ups, watched Underdog and I cleaned out all the long hair (and a little yarn) that had rolled up into the five wheels of the newest office chair.
The girls rode bikes (Well, bike. We only have one so far, and it's too small for either of them, but it does get a workout!) and played "chess" with the neighbor kid outside for a good part of the afternoon. It looked like the board was set up right, and the one move I saw (a knight) was correctly executed, but I'm not real sure how far beyond that it adhered to standard rules.
In other news, the parrot seems to be entering That Time of the Year, when she pines for company (it's actually quite a good time to get to know her) and, this year anyway, shreds everything she can get her beak on, presumably for nesting fodder. I can't exactly provide her with what she really wants, but I figured I could at least give her a box in which to deposit her newspaper shreds, and maybe even sit in for a while. Well, she loved that. Shredded it into tinier pieces than the newspaper. Twenty-four hours later, I can't even see where it was.
And now we have a Mystery Leak in -- well, under -- the toilet.
See? Scintillating.
I never used to call in to the radio when they gave stuff away, because with the cell phone chances were good the call would drop, never go through, or be inaudible if I did.
This is the 1500th post on this here blog, how about that.
We tried the 900 number for dialup last night, but neither computer could communicate with its modem. They've both been formatted since either was last asked to do anything modem-y, so we're figuring they probably lack drivers. I've downloaded some at work here, and we'll have another go later on.
I have posted at least once every single day since ... well, I'll go back and look it up eventually, but it was sometime before November 2007, and it was officially so as of January 4, 2008.
So I went down to the phone company just now to tell them I wanted DSL on my brand spankin´ new phone line.
My phone company branch of choice is in a grocery store, in a mall. Suffice to say, there was a line.
But it was moving. I seemed to advance about three feet every 10 minutes, and that´s progress. People kept leaving the line and rejoining others in the line in front of me though, and somehow after half an hour I still calculated that I was about 7th in line.
Anyway, it was eventually my turn, and I went up to the window trepidatiously (it is TOO), well aware that they could ask me for documents I didn´t have on me, or even things that I can´t necessarily access without some significant effort.
Like, for instance, a valid ID card, but that´s another story.
So, she didn´t ask me for anything I couldn´t produce (although I did meekly accept a warning about the ID card - what´s the point of Immigration issuing automatic extensions and extra years on the card, and renewal appointments a year in the future, if nobody thinks the document that Immigration faxes me to that effect in fact means anything at all?) But I´m not here to talk about Immigration.
Ahem.
She didn´t ask me for anything I couldn´t produce, but she did say that she can´t actually put in an application for DSL on that line because the work order is still open. Something about coming in less than a week after the thing was physically installed.
But she had a solution: She took my application and kept it to the side (in, I couldn´t help but notice, an otherwise empty folder that she then placed at the very bottom of the stack on the bottom tray of her three-tiered Inbox), and as soon as the work order is closed (within a week), she´ll process the DSL application. She even gave me a blank work order for when the application goes through, and said she´d call me with the number when she had one, and I´ll write the new work order number on the blank work order and post it in my window.
And then proceed to wait A MONTH.
*Sigh*
Coming to you live from my second-favorite booth at our favorite Internet café....
A quarter
Five dozen
Bicentennial
Tiny little record album
That´s our new, fully installed and operational, very own, eight-digit PHONE NUMBER!!
And we didn´t even have to bribe anybody.
Very much.
On the to-do list for today:
-- Now with 100% more late-afternoon progress reports!
Thought I'd take a few minutes to post before leaving work today, in case I don't feel like going back out to the café in the evening.
These are the photos I took of Julia's bag under construction. It's not completely done yet, so there's no actual "After" picture.
These are the pants with the inseam removed, basically converting them into (slightly funky) yardage (but with a waistband in the middle, even though it's not real obvious in this photo):
Not that I made any resolutions, much less a list of them.
So, I´ve known all year that vehicle taxes and registration are paid in December. You can even pay it online, and pick the sticker and registration up at your local branch of the bank.
Only thing is, once I got off work on the 23rd, I went into vacation and moving mode, and just completely forgot. Never crossed my mind, not even once.
I didn´t even remember when I was pulled over on my way to work this morning. There are always cops at that particular intersection, pulling random people over, and today they waved me over.
I gave the cop my license and it wasn´t until he looked at it to get my name, then asked me by name if I´d paid my registration fee, that I realized I hadn´t.
I told him no, that I´d totally forgotten, but could do it as soon as I got to work a mile down the road. He sighed and looked sorrowful, and said he was so sorry, but he had to confiscate my license plates. I asked him what I was supposed to do, and he kept turning around asking me, ¨what CAN we do?¨
Now, I was more than willing to slip him something if that would help, but I have to say I´m really not that well versed in the whole cop-bribing protocol, so I wasn´t sure how to go about it. I did toss in a, ¨what can we do?¨ of my own, and asked him, wide eyed, what options I might have.
He went off for a few minutes, I guess to let me stew about it and get real desperate, and then came back again and asked me what he should do. I asked if there was anything I COULD do and, again, what options I had and I guess he finally realized he was going to have to walk me through it, because he asked if I would give him a little something (the phrase he used is essentially, ¨would you buy me a drink,¨ but without mentioning drinks), so I asked how much was normal and of course he wasn´t going to set a limit on it.
I checked my wallet, hoping I had a ø5000 bill, because less would surely be insufficient and I didn´t really want to offer ø10,000 right off the bat. Fortunately, I did have one, and I asked him if five would do, and he said yes. So I pulled it out and he actually had to point out to me that I should slip it into his hand on the door frame, rather than passing it out the window to him.
Apparently this is truly not one of my skills.
So, that was that and I went to work and logged into my bank account and paid the silly thing, and after work went to the bank to pick up the sticker and Oh My Goodness.
You really don´t want to go to the bank on the first business day of the year.
I waited 15 minutes (in the very hot sun) to even get in the door, and another five minutes in the vestibule, waiting for my turn to go through the security door thing.
Once inside, though, I told the guard I was there to pick up my registration, and instead of sending me to the standing-up line (for the regular tellers) or the sitting-down line (for specialized services), he actually directed me to a desk at the back where there was no line at all.
So that was nice, and now I´m legal. Well, legalER.
I´m just glad that cop was working so hard at teaching me how to bribe him that he didn´t notice the license he´d been holding that whole time expired in 2007.
I made Julia´s bag today, almost. The bag part is done, and the strap is made and half topstitched. I took some pictures, but I worked right up until I really really didn´t want to work anymore, and now we´re at the Internet café, briefly, and next we´re taking ourselves out for dinner for having had such a productive day (we installed the second light fixture first thing in the morning, and Bob made TWO of his projects while I worked on the bag), and uploading and editing photos just isn´t in the cards. To say nothing of deciding whether to expose my memory stick (or camera card) to whatever Contagion might be lurking in either this computer or this copy of Internet Explorer. (Three days at the café and I have yet to get a machine with anything but Explorer. BOB, on the other hand, had Firefox the first day and currently has his pick between Firefox and Chrome. Some PEOPLE.)
We´ll see about this not having Internet at home thing. I almost passed up coming in to the café today because I didn´t feel like going out in the afternoon, and by the time we finished diner and a movie (¨Star Trek: First Contact¨ - sorry, Spanish keyboard and it´s too much trouble to find the codes for italics), it was 8:30 pm and I didn´t really feel like going out again. But what with the Blog365 thing and everything, I decided to go ahead and do it. We´ll see if that sentiment wins out every time.
No word on the phone thing (prerequisite for the Internet thing), but assuming there´s no actual technical problem like there was in the other neighborhood, it should happen within a couple of weeks.
So we didn´t do all that shopping I said we were going to do yesterday; turns out New Year´s Day is a pretty serious holiday and all the stores were closed. Well, except for the ice cream shop. That was open :)
Today we did a lot of the hardware store shopping, including actual light fixtures to replace the bare bulbs in our four rooms, a shower caddy for our shelfless, towel barless, toilet paper holderless bathroom, and some wood for the first two projects: shelving over the toilet and a base for the birdcage.
By the time we got home, however, we were both worn out and spent most of the rest of the day hanging out and playing computer games (although we did install the first light fixture, which went well and works fine, despite Costa Rica´s approach to household wiring. [By which I mean, we made an educated guess as to which of the two white wires was the ¨black¨wire and got it right on the first try.])
So tomorrow will be the big Getting Things Done day - Bob building and me sewing - and today is...well, pretty much over.
We cleaned out the upstairs apartment and dismantled our personal Internet café yesterday, so in a sense the last night of 2009 was our first night fully moved.
I dropped the girls off up the hill after lunch, and we had a quiet evening at home. We watched The Sixth Sense, which I had never seen, and tried to play a couple of computer games together, but one wouldn´t work right, and one was too complimicated for me to learn it all in one night. We played around with The Sims for a while, then had some cookies and eggnog and went to bed around 11:30, secure in the knowledge that we wouldn´t miss the new year.
And we didn´t. Fireworks are legal here, and our little cul de sac didn´t hold back. They went on for a solid half hour, by my count, but maybe more because we did eventually fall back asleep.
This morning we took down the Christmas tree and decorations, so the living room is ready for whatever ends up being its first semi-permanent furniture arrangement.
We´re at the [public] Internet café now, and then heading over to the hardware store to get some minor construction supplies, some screening to see if we can´t fashion a cat-proof carport area, and maybe price some paint, because the landlord had the main walls painted, but they didn´t finish the edging, and they didn´t touch the bathroom or the aquamarine doors (and not the good kind of aquamarine), and there´s no molding around the ceiling, so there are roller marks all around the edges. We may need to tweak it all a bit.
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