Creeping crud
Was that one of the most miserable, dreary spring weekends in memory, or what? The weather, combined with a sickness known only as the creeping crud, and the sudden blossoming of my elder daughter into full-blown adolescent insanity, made it all kinda blah. Anytime a trip to the mall is one of the highlights of my weekend, you know I haven’t really had a great one.
The cause of the trip was a sudden need for a laptop. Spouse has taken on a new job that will involve travel, and in order to travel, she needs to be able to work on the road. That meant sudden need for a Powerbook. Not a lot of choices, and you get a LOT of computer for $2500 these days, including a hard drive bigger than the two that are on our main computer (which needs constant paring down). But the Powerbook came with the new Mac OS, Tiger – note came with, not came installed, an important and unsubtle difference. Without having done another single thing to the Powerbook, I tried to upgrade it to Tiger, and instantly got into a “blue screen of death” scenario. Ended up reloading all the original programming and starting over from scratch. In a bizarre twist of fate, the upgrade on my old G4 went perfectly – which has never ever happened before. So yesterday was pretty much spent drinking tea, blowing my nose, and installing software on two of our three computers. Hard to believe how much life has changed, that three computers are not just a good idea, but virtually necessary (okay, the kids’ now ancient iMac is pretty much just for fun, but it keeps them off the main machine.) We still have only one TV, though, which somehow seems important. Of course, the imminent need for a Powerbook put at least a temporary end to my dreams of an Apple Cinema display to replace our gigantic old CRT.
Otherwise, nothing was accomplished this weekend. We showed the kids a really enjoyably bad Roger Corman monster movie that was packaged with a bunch of others (never overlook the dollar bin at the Target). It had everything, including a singing part for the slightly long-in-the-tooth ingenue and a murderous sea captain who just happened to have little garden rakes along in his trunk (two of which were sharpened up to simulate the attack of a sea monster, two of which were kept as spares for a plot device later). Drive-in movies used to be a whole lot more fun in the old American International days.
As mentioned, daughter is going headlong into the teenage thing. It’s going to be a long few years, and there will be much stomping and storming and slamming of doors. How she’ll react is anyone’s guess.