I actually saw the eclipse on Saturday (today, in my mind, since I'm still awake, but technically it's Sunday). I was worried a bit, since it was cloudy and flurrying most of the day, but it cleared up about 4:00. The eclipse was mostly over by the time the moon was rising here, so what I saw was a moon with a bite out of one edge. Not as impressive as the total deal, but still pretty neat.
After we got back from the grocery shopping, I left DH and El Burrito inside while I went looking for a view of the moon. Luckily, I found a spot here at the condos with a decent view. From our mailbox, I could see a moon through some tree limbs. When I hustled out to the sidewalk next to the street (three buildings away), I could get a clear view. So I came back in to grab the New Camera, tripod, and my scarf, and hauled everything back out to the sidewalk.
Three little problems came up. One, it was very breezy out at the sidewalk. Apparently our buildings block most of the wind. My fingers were getting a bit numb, and the buttons on this camera are too tiny to work while wearing gloves. Two, having the neck strap around your neck while the camera is on the tripod isn't the best way to do things. Makes it hard to take a steady shot, since the strap is short enough that I had to hunch over. My scarf was tangled in the strap, so I just left it alone. And Three, I haven't figured out the focus on this camera yet. Even on full-automatic, most of the pictures are a little off. But there are a couple that may work out.
I took pictures with the new camera until I got too cold to stand it anymore. I tried most of the settings - full automatic, semi-automatic, full manual, Scene, and even took a short movie of the eclipse. Then I came back inside, grabbed the old camera, and took a few shots from the mailbox. The moon had risen enough to clear the trees that were in the way earlier, and the building blocked neogh of hte breeze that it wasn't too cold there.
If I've got any decent shots, I'll put one up here later. Until then, SpaceWeather.com has a gallery of photos for today's eclipse. Some of them (okay, all of them) are awesome. Since I don't have a telescope, anything I ever take will be more like this shot instead of some of the more close-up photos.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Friday, March 2, 2007
Eclipse this weekend !
In case you didn't know, there's a total lunar eclipse on Saturday evening. Here in the midwest, we'll unfortunately miss part of it, since it won't be dark yet. (We have to wait until August to see a full lunar eclipse.) But we'll get to see part of it, and how cool is that? This is the first one locally since 2004, I think. I've got about 24 hours to figure out enough of the New Camera to get a half-decent picture. I'll also have Old Camera ready to go, but it's flakiness lately means I won't be depending on it.
In other news:
El Burrito and I took DH out for lunch today. Then we stopped at the library, where we found a flyer with the dates for the next Big Sale (March 17 and 18th - wooo hooooo!), returned a few overdue books, and picked up a couple of holds.
We need to get back in this habit, now that the weather is hopefully no longer going to be hideous on a regular basis. Back in the Pre-Burrito days, I had lunch with DH every Thursday. I'd pick him up, we'd have lunch (usually Chevy's, sometimes Bandana's BBQ), drop him off back at work, and I'd go run errands and do the shopping. I also went to the library every Tuesday, to rotate the book stock and to hit the Friends' weekly sale in the lobby. Post-Burrito, especially this winter, that hasn't worked so well. It seems to take forever to get both of us ready to go, and timing it to coincide with a not-hungry period got tricky. He's finally going 4+ hours between bottles, which is good, but his schedule has changed lately. These days, the first nap hits sometime around noonish and lasts for about two hours. Given that DH tends to lunch around 11:30 and the book sale runs from noon until 3:00, there's a bit of a scheduling conflict. However, the mall tends to be best before noon (fewer people; no teenyboppers!) so I need to start doing mall runs in the morning.
And I just ordered some Breyers online. Blame Salem Saddlery's 50% off sale, and a person on my Breyer e-list who likes to find these sales and encourage everyone to shop. :) She told the list about a sale at American Livestock Supply a few months ago, and I think we may have bogged their server down, because they sold out of everything in just a few hours. Hopefully I'll have better luck this time. With the ALS sale, I ordered 6 or 8 things, and all but 1 sold out before my order shipped. :(
Yesterday, I finished reading The City of Ember - a "young adult" novel, but still pretty good. I'm wondering what the big Disaster was. And luckily, there's a sequel, The People of Sparks, which the library also has, and which I just put on hold through the wonders of their online catalog.
Just got some news about the Stargate SG-1 movies, which are meant to wrap up the series since the Unbelievable Twits at Sci-Fi decided to cancel the show. Gah. At least I have 9 seasons of DVDs to watch and re-watch.
One of the best episodes of Gilmore Girls is on right now on ABCFamily. Kirk running naked through the town. Luke & Lorelai finally kissing. Babette, Patty and Luke playing board games. What more could I ask for? The only downside is the whole Rory/Dean thing. What was the girl thinking? The last few episodes have been pretty good; I like reruns.
And I found the cutest summer hat for El Burrito in the Lands' End catalog last night. But get this. Sizes: XXS, XS, and S. That's it. Crazy, I tell you. And judging from their size charts, the S might fit him now. Maybe. But would be too small in three months when he'll need it. Back to the hunt.
In other news:
El Burrito and I took DH out for lunch today. Then we stopped at the library, where we found a flyer with the dates for the next Big Sale (March 17 and 18th - wooo hooooo!), returned a few overdue books, and picked up a couple of holds.
We need to get back in this habit, now that the weather is hopefully no longer going to be hideous on a regular basis. Back in the Pre-Burrito days, I had lunch with DH every Thursday. I'd pick him up, we'd have lunch (usually Chevy's, sometimes Bandana's BBQ), drop him off back at work, and I'd go run errands and do the shopping. I also went to the library every Tuesday, to rotate the book stock and to hit the Friends' weekly sale in the lobby. Post-Burrito, especially this winter, that hasn't worked so well. It seems to take forever to get both of us ready to go, and timing it to coincide with a not-hungry period got tricky. He's finally going 4+ hours between bottles, which is good, but his schedule has changed lately. These days, the first nap hits sometime around noonish and lasts for about two hours. Given that DH tends to lunch around 11:30 and the book sale runs from noon until 3:00, there's a bit of a scheduling conflict. However, the mall tends to be best before noon (fewer people; no teenyboppers!) so I need to start doing mall runs in the morning.
And I just ordered some Breyers online. Blame Salem Saddlery's 50% off sale, and a person on my Breyer e-list who likes to find these sales and encourage everyone to shop. :) She told the list about a sale at American Livestock Supply a few months ago, and I think we may have bogged their server down, because they sold out of everything in just a few hours. Hopefully I'll have better luck this time. With the ALS sale, I ordered 6 or 8 things, and all but 1 sold out before my order shipped. :(
Yesterday, I finished reading The City of Ember - a "young adult" novel, but still pretty good. I'm wondering what the big Disaster was. And luckily, there's a sequel, The People of Sparks, which the library also has, and which I just put on hold through the wonders of their online catalog.
Just got some news about the Stargate SG-1 movies, which are meant to wrap up the series since the Unbelievable Twits at Sci-Fi decided to cancel the show. Gah. At least I have 9 seasons of DVDs to watch and re-watch.
One of the best episodes of Gilmore Girls is on right now on ABCFamily. Kirk running naked through the town. Luke & Lorelai finally kissing. Babette, Patty and Luke playing board games. What more could I ask for? The only downside is the whole Rory/Dean thing. What was the girl thinking? The last few episodes have been pretty good; I like reruns.
And I found the cutest summer hat for El Burrito in the Lands' End catalog last night. But get this. Sizes: XXS, XS, and S. That's it. Crazy, I tell you. And judging from their size charts, the S might fit him now. Maybe. But would be too small in three months when he'll need it. Back to the hunt.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Horses, Houses, and Dreams
Warning: this will be long. And probably whiny.
I want a horse. I had a horse growing up, and until I was 24, I couldn't remember a time when there wasn't a horse around. That was just the way things were, and it felt right. Then, on April 15, 2003, my gelding died and things changed. I had another horse for about three years, but it didn't work out and I sold him. Since then, I've been on a horse for about 90 minutes, in Ireland, and spent most of my free time and pocket change on horse books, horse magazines, and a decent-sized collection of model horses (mostly from Breyer, but also cheezy Japanese china horses, metal horses, and one wooden horse with metal inlay). But it's not the same.
For the past fifteen years or so, I've been holding on to the dream that I'd have a horse again someday. The past couple of years, I thought it might be close to happening. DH and I have been married for six years, money's okay, and we've been looking, off and on, for a place. We've got the same goal in mind - 20 acres or so, enough room for a garden, some chickens, a horse, a couple of steers for the freezer. Trees. Lots of trees. The ability to look at the stars at night. We both grew up out in the country, and we'd like to get out of town now. I love my neighbors (most of them), but I feel crowded all the time.
I've been thinking lately about whether I should keep holding on to this horse-dream, or give up on it. Yes, I've been in a funk, but it really feels like this just isn't going to happen, at least while I'm young enough to be able to do it. I'm starting to think that it's all been a pipe dream, and that I should just stop deluding myself, suck it up, and get used to the idea that all we'll ever have is a boring cookie-cutter subdivision house with a yard the size of a shoebox. It just doesn't seem to be working out. I swore two years ago that I would sign up for the summer riding program at a local college, and surprise!, I ended up getting pregnant. The baby was due the month before the program started, so there went that. The rest of it seems to be similarly jinxed.
We started looking for a new place about 3 or 4 years ago, and we actually went out with a realtor and looked at a lot of houses. We've slacked off in the past two years, what with the being pregnant and all, and haven't been out realtoring in two years or so, although we keep looking at real estate ads and listings. We can't really take the baby house hunting with us, and while he does have grandparents who'd gladly keep him if they aren't busy, they're 20 minutes away (one way), and by the time we drive out, do the obligatory chit chat, and drive back, it takes an hour if not more. (They babysat while we went to a movie last month. Start to finish, it took 8 hours. Seriously.) Unless DH takes a day off work to go out realtoring, it has to be done on weekends, meaning Saturdays, which are already in short supply.
But, although we looked at a lot of places, we couldn't really find what we wanted at a price we could afford. More on that later. Now, with El Burrito working toward crawling, and this place being seriously not childproof or child friendly, we're running out of time. So, unless we get very lucky and find the Perfect Place soon, we're going to end up buying a house here in town, with the idea of living there for five years or so, and looking for Perfect in the meantime. The problem with that is that we tend to procrastinate. Hell, we've been living here for 6 years, and looking for a place for most of 5. We meant to be in the new place before I got pregnant. Then it was "before the baby's born," then "before he starts to crawl." You see the pattern here? I can easily see us staying in the interim house for 10 years, just out of inertia and apathy. And that alternately frustrates me and depresses me.
Part of the problem is that land prices around here are freaking insane, in my opinion. Land outside the city limits tends to start around $5,000 an acre, and go up from there. Much of it, even farmland 15 miles past the city edge, is priced so high that only a developer can even think of affording it. A few years ago, we looked at an empty lot about 25 miles away, about 7 acres, nothing special. $75,000. It had a creek along one edge, and was probably a flood plain. Not where I'd build a house, thanks very much. We've found two parcels of ground that had a lot of promise so far. One, while almost perfect, was expensive enough that we would have been pushing our limits just to buy it, never mind building a house on it. The other place turned into something of a joke. The guy who was trying to sell it gave us the impression that he'd owned it for 5 or 10 years. Come to find out, he didn't own it at all; he had an offer in to buy it from the current owner and the deal was supposed to have closed a few weeks before we looked at it. The deal hadn't gone through, so he wasn't the owner, and I don't know what the *&^% the realtor thought was going on.
And don't even get me started on the county's rule against selling land in chunks less than ten acres without special permission. You end up with a lot of houses with 9.5 acre lawns, and 90% of the ones I've seen don't even bother to plant a tree, much less do anything other than mow their huge lawn with a lawn tractor. It wouldn't bug me so much if the owners would just do something with the ground - a garden, a few flowers, a couple of trees, whatever. But 9.5 acres of wannabe-golf-course just gripes me unbelievably. Good grief, people, do something with it! A sundial, a hammock, bird house, even a couple of practice holes for the golf game. Go crazy, fence it in and buy a steer for dinner!
But, anyway, I've been wondering why I keep holding on to this dream. Because it'll never be the way I want it to be. My childhood is gone, and I can't get it back. I'll probably never find another horse like my old guy, and if I did, I couldn't afford him and I don't know that I deserve another horse like that anyway. It was different when I lived at home - Dad had a lot of land for his cattle, took care of the upkeep on fencing, raised his own hay. Having a horse on my own would be a whole different ball of wax, and I don't know if I'm capable of taking care of everything. Lord knows, I do a crappy enough job of housekeeping and everything right now, and that's without a full- or part-time job, just a little boy to take care of.
I want a horse. I had a horse growing up, and until I was 24, I couldn't remember a time when there wasn't a horse around. That was just the way things were, and it felt right. Then, on April 15, 2003, my gelding died and things changed. I had another horse for about three years, but it didn't work out and I sold him. Since then, I've been on a horse for about 90 minutes, in Ireland, and spent most of my free time and pocket change on horse books, horse magazines, and a decent-sized collection of model horses (mostly from Breyer, but also cheezy Japanese china horses, metal horses, and one wooden horse with metal inlay). But it's not the same.
For the past fifteen years or so, I've been holding on to the dream that I'd have a horse again someday. The past couple of years, I thought it might be close to happening. DH and I have been married for six years, money's okay, and we've been looking, off and on, for a place. We've got the same goal in mind - 20 acres or so, enough room for a garden, some chickens, a horse, a couple of steers for the freezer. Trees. Lots of trees. The ability to look at the stars at night. We both grew up out in the country, and we'd like to get out of town now. I love my neighbors (most of them), but I feel crowded all the time.
I've been thinking lately about whether I should keep holding on to this horse-dream, or give up on it. Yes, I've been in a funk, but it really feels like this just isn't going to happen, at least while I'm young enough to be able to do it. I'm starting to think that it's all been a pipe dream, and that I should just stop deluding myself, suck it up, and get used to the idea that all we'll ever have is a boring cookie-cutter subdivision house with a yard the size of a shoebox. It just doesn't seem to be working out. I swore two years ago that I would sign up for the summer riding program at a local college, and surprise!, I ended up getting pregnant. The baby was due the month before the program started, so there went that. The rest of it seems to be similarly jinxed.
We started looking for a new place about 3 or 4 years ago, and we actually went out with a realtor and looked at a lot of houses. We've slacked off in the past two years, what with the being pregnant and all, and haven't been out realtoring in two years or so, although we keep looking at real estate ads and listings. We can't really take the baby house hunting with us, and while he does have grandparents who'd gladly keep him if they aren't busy, they're 20 minutes away (one way), and by the time we drive out, do the obligatory chit chat, and drive back, it takes an hour if not more. (They babysat while we went to a movie last month. Start to finish, it took 8 hours. Seriously.) Unless DH takes a day off work to go out realtoring, it has to be done on weekends, meaning Saturdays, which are already in short supply.
But, although we looked at a lot of places, we couldn't really find what we wanted at a price we could afford. More on that later. Now, with El Burrito working toward crawling, and this place being seriously not childproof or child friendly, we're running out of time. So, unless we get very lucky and find the Perfect Place soon, we're going to end up buying a house here in town, with the idea of living there for five years or so, and looking for Perfect in the meantime. The problem with that is that we tend to procrastinate. Hell, we've been living here for 6 years, and looking for a place for most of 5. We meant to be in the new place before I got pregnant. Then it was "before the baby's born," then "before he starts to crawl." You see the pattern here? I can easily see us staying in the interim house for 10 years, just out of inertia and apathy. And that alternately frustrates me and depresses me.
Part of the problem is that land prices around here are freaking insane, in my opinion. Land outside the city limits tends to start around $5,000 an acre, and go up from there. Much of it, even farmland 15 miles past the city edge, is priced so high that only a developer can even think of affording it. A few years ago, we looked at an empty lot about 25 miles away, about 7 acres, nothing special. $75,000. It had a creek along one edge, and was probably a flood plain. Not where I'd build a house, thanks very much. We've found two parcels of ground that had a lot of promise so far. One, while almost perfect, was expensive enough that we would have been pushing our limits just to buy it, never mind building a house on it. The other place turned into something of a joke. The guy who was trying to sell it gave us the impression that he'd owned it for 5 or 10 years. Come to find out, he didn't own it at all; he had an offer in to buy it from the current owner and the deal was supposed to have closed a few weeks before we looked at it. The deal hadn't gone through, so he wasn't the owner, and I don't know what the *&^% the realtor thought was going on.
And don't even get me started on the county's rule against selling land in chunks less than ten acres without special permission. You end up with a lot of houses with 9.5 acre lawns, and 90% of the ones I've seen don't even bother to plant a tree, much less do anything other than mow their huge lawn with a lawn tractor. It wouldn't bug me so much if the owners would just do something with the ground - a garden, a few flowers, a couple of trees, whatever. But 9.5 acres of wannabe-golf-course just gripes me unbelievably. Good grief, people, do something with it! A sundial, a hammock, bird house, even a couple of practice holes for the golf game. Go crazy, fence it in and buy a steer for dinner!
But, anyway, I've been wondering why I keep holding on to this dream. Because it'll never be the way I want it to be. My childhood is gone, and I can't get it back. I'll probably never find another horse like my old guy, and if I did, I couldn't afford him and I don't know that I deserve another horse like that anyway. It was different when I lived at home - Dad had a lot of land for his cattle, took care of the upkeep on fencing, raised his own hay. Having a horse on my own would be a whole different ball of wax, and I don't know if I'm capable of taking care of everything. Lord knows, I do a crappy enough job of housekeeping and everything right now, and that's without a full- or part-time job, just a little boy to take care of.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
The New Camera
Wheee!! Mr. UPS (a nice guy) delivered the new camara today. And of course I've had about five minutes total to look at it so far. El Burrito's usual 2.5 hour lunchtime nap was only an hour today, and he'll be hungry again in an hour or so. In the meantime, I've got one big project to get done today - it's an actual deadline, not self-imposed. Plus ordering diapers from Amazon before the promo deal expires tonight, finding a hotel room for the Loreena concert, and finally ordering DH's Valentine gift. Yeah, it's going to be late.
I did get batteries in it and took a few pictures on total automatic mode. I took a few before I remembered the pop-up flash. The first thing to figure out is why the LCD gets a big orange/yellow blob in the middle when I hit the shutter button, and find out if it's supposed to do that or if it's a glitch. Because I've only got a 7-day (or 14, the website was vague) window for returning this thing if it's got a problem. Well, that or hit up the manufacturer on their one-year warranty. I can say right now that the menus are nothing like my old C-3020, and that the image quality on the LCD screen is pretty sucky.
More to come later.
I did get batteries in it and took a few pictures on total automatic mode. I took a few before I remembered the pop-up flash. The first thing to figure out is why the LCD gets a big orange/yellow blob in the middle when I hit the shutter button, and find out if it's supposed to do that or if it's a glitch. Because I've only got a 7-day (or 14, the website was vague) window for returning this thing if it's got a problem. Well, that or hit up the manufacturer on their one-year warranty. I can say right now that the menus are nothing like my old C-3020, and that the image quality on the LCD screen is pretty sucky.
More to come later.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Laundry Supervisor
Around here, Monday is laundry day, and El Burrito is the Laundry Supervisor. Burying him in a pile of clean laundry keeps him from trying to roll off the bed. He's not big enough to fold yet, but he's gotten a few lessons on sorting laundry.
Occasional flashes of Insight
Every now and then, my brain kicks in and I have one of those "AHA!!" moments. I had one last night, regarding the fight I had over the weekend with the new HP printer/scanner. The scanner software doesn't recognize the photo-editing software that I use (Paint Shop Pro), so there was no way to send a scan directly over to PSP for editing. Instead, HP suggested a convoluted process of saving the scan somewhere, then opening it from PSP by remembering where it was saved and what the file was named. That caused some hair pulling, and a brief desire to re-enact the fax machine scene from Office Space.
Last night, I remembered that PSP has, or had, the capability to pull something directly from the scanner. So I fired everything up and tried it out. And whaddaya know, it worked! No more mucking around with that odd HP interface.
Other random news: The new camera should be delivered tomorrow, and then I'll be hit with another whopper of a learning curve. Should be fun. First I need to make sure that everything works the way it should, and then it's off to shop for the lens adapter and remote control cable. And another camera bag. Two actually, since we need one for the camcorder, along with a Firewire card (probably) and cable, and some sort of software to get the video onto the PC. The video software that was so highly recommended in the "how to do everything" book turns out to have seriously lousy reviews at Amazon, so I need to do more research into that.
Last night, I remembered that PSP has, or had, the capability to pull something directly from the scanner. So I fired everything up and tried it out. And whaddaya know, it worked! No more mucking around with that odd HP interface.
Other random news: The new camera should be delivered tomorrow, and then I'll be hit with another whopper of a learning curve. Should be fun. First I need to make sure that everything works the way it should, and then it's off to shop for the lens adapter and remote control cable. And another camera bag. Two actually, since we need one for the camcorder, along with a Firewire card (probably) and cable, and some sort of software to get the video onto the PC. The video software that was so highly recommended in the "how to do everything" book turns out to have seriously lousy reviews at Amazon, so I need to do more research into that.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Weekends and Rants
I'm not sure if it was a good weekend or not. We used to get things done on the weekend, but now the best we can do is keep up. We get one or two things done, but it seems like they're things I used to do during the week back in the pre-Burrito days. Add the couple of things that get added to the To Do list every weekend, and we're maybe holding steady, or maybe falling behind.
The weekend also pointed out the loss of my brain and memory. We went out for lunch on Saturday, to our usual place (Chevy's Fresh Mex) and as usual had leftovers which I usually bring home for lunch during the week. We asked for a to-go box, packed it all up, and not five minutes later I walked off and left it on the table, like a twit. And kicked myself about it for two hours. Because seriously, I used to have a memory. But lately, it's gone. I get distracted in the middle of something, and forget to finish it. (This explains the trail of stuff I leave behind me during the day.) I was talking to DH on the phone one day, remembered something, and so help me, I forgot what it was before I could even open my mouth to tell DH whatever it was. I walk into the other room to do or get something, and forget halfway there what I'm doing. And people? I'm 34. I'm not old enough for my memory to be going like this. It bugs me, frustrates me, and royally *%$$#$ me off. It's right up there with Not Being Able to Find Anything in my book of things that irk me.
On Sunday, to further emphasize the Loss of my Brain, we hooked up the new printer/scanner/copier. A nice HP 2575 that we got super-cheap at Staples on Black Friday. Two things about this printer drove me up a wall. First, it requires a USB cable to hook up to the computer. HP didn't bother to include said USB cable, so that meant a trip to the store to find one. Honestly, if a piece of hardware requires some other doohickey in order to be functional, the company should provide said doohickey. Especially when it cost us $10, and the company could spend half that to put one in the box. Second, I can not, no matter how hard I look, find a way to scan something and send the scan directly to my image editing program of choice (Paint Shop Pro). The old HP scanner could do this. The new one? No dice, sorry. There's a nice long list of "scan destinations" consisting of HP and Microsoft programs, but absolutely no way to add a program. None. The help guide's advice was simple. Either copy the scan to the clipboard and paste it into the unsupported program, or re-install the program and hope that HP could find it then.
I'm sorry, but NOT GONNA HAPPEN. Don't get me wrong, I love Paint Shop Pro. Used it for 10 years, wouldn't trade it for anything. But last year, I upgraded from PSP 4.0 to PSP 9.0, and the adjustment was big (as expected). The new version can do a lot of things that I'd like to do, but getting the upgrade downloaded, installed, and set up was a headache. It probably took three days (on and off) to get the preferences set the way I wanted them. The big hurdle was figuring out which menu I had to go to in order to change the preferences, and remembering how I had things set up before. If I'd been installing the upgrade on the same PC, instead of setting things up on a new PC, it might have been quicker, but who knows. That's why I put off upgrading the PC for so long. But anyway, after that headache, Bermuda will freeze over before I voluntarily re-install PSP just because HP is too clueless to recognize it.
But taking all evening to hook up and install the new printer, and figure out the scanning issues, means that either I've lost most of the brain power I had in college, or that HP needs to work on their hardware interfaces.
That study I read about mothers having less stress and more patience? Obviously done in an alternate universe. Because the last 9 months have been nothing but stress, and that of course does not have a positive affect on my patience.
Now, we did get a few things done over the weekend. Grocery shopping, some work on the taxes (mainly tracking down the income I earned last year via Ebay, Half.com, etc.), looking at high chairs in a few stores. But it still seems like we got nowhere.
The weekend also pointed out the loss of my brain and memory. We went out for lunch on Saturday, to our usual place (Chevy's Fresh Mex) and as usual had leftovers which I usually bring home for lunch during the week. We asked for a to-go box, packed it all up, and not five minutes later I walked off and left it on the table, like a twit. And kicked myself about it for two hours. Because seriously, I used to have a memory. But lately, it's gone. I get distracted in the middle of something, and forget to finish it. (This explains the trail of stuff I leave behind me during the day.) I was talking to DH on the phone one day, remembered something, and so help me, I forgot what it was before I could even open my mouth to tell DH whatever it was. I walk into the other room to do or get something, and forget halfway there what I'm doing. And people? I'm 34. I'm not old enough for my memory to be going like this. It bugs me, frustrates me, and royally *%$$#$ me off. It's right up there with Not Being Able to Find Anything in my book of things that irk me.
On Sunday, to further emphasize the Loss of my Brain, we hooked up the new printer/scanner/copier. A nice HP 2575 that we got super-cheap at Staples on Black Friday. Two things about this printer drove me up a wall. First, it requires a USB cable to hook up to the computer. HP didn't bother to include said USB cable, so that meant a trip to the store to find one. Honestly, if a piece of hardware requires some other doohickey in order to be functional, the company should provide said doohickey. Especially when it cost us $10, and the company could spend half that to put one in the box. Second, I can not, no matter how hard I look, find a way to scan something and send the scan directly to my image editing program of choice (Paint Shop Pro). The old HP scanner could do this. The new one? No dice, sorry. There's a nice long list of "scan destinations" consisting of HP and Microsoft programs, but absolutely no way to add a program. None. The help guide's advice was simple. Either copy the scan to the clipboard and paste it into the unsupported program, or re-install the program and hope that HP could find it then.
I'm sorry, but NOT GONNA HAPPEN. Don't get me wrong, I love Paint Shop Pro. Used it for 10 years, wouldn't trade it for anything. But last year, I upgraded from PSP 4.0 to PSP 9.0, and the adjustment was big (as expected). The new version can do a lot of things that I'd like to do, but getting the upgrade downloaded, installed, and set up was a headache. It probably took three days (on and off) to get the preferences set the way I wanted them. The big hurdle was figuring out which menu I had to go to in order to change the preferences, and remembering how I had things set up before. If I'd been installing the upgrade on the same PC, instead of setting things up on a new PC, it might have been quicker, but who knows. That's why I put off upgrading the PC for so long. But anyway, after that headache, Bermuda will freeze over before I voluntarily re-install PSP just because HP is too clueless to recognize it.
But taking all evening to hook up and install the new printer, and figure out the scanning issues, means that either I've lost most of the brain power I had in college, or that HP needs to work on their hardware interfaces.
That study I read about mothers having less stress and more patience? Obviously done in an alternate universe. Because the last 9 months have been nothing but stress, and that of course does not have a positive affect on my patience.
Now, we did get a few things done over the weekend. Grocery shopping, some work on the taxes (mainly tracking down the income I earned last year via Ebay, Half.com, etc.), looking at high chairs in a few stores. But it still seems like we got nowhere.
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