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Tuesday July 25, 2000 "We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.." La Rochefoucauld
modern times
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malaise I went to work a little earlier than usual. Where did all those cars come from. Later is better, traffic-wise. And otherwise. SuRu and I went to Chinatown for lunch. It wasn't all that great. I got this fortune:
SuRu got this fortune:
So here's an idea: package fortune cookies in little sets of two, three, four, etc. with segue fortunes. Open the pack and distribute to a table where the patrons will be amused. Who knows they don't do it? My dad never ceases to amaze me. Last evening we were hanging pictures at his house. We put the three paintings made by his non-aunt on one wall. We were telling SuRu the story. Dad said something about it being the paintings' provenance. He said the preacher had used the word in a bible study and only he, with his high school education, knew what it meant. Sometimes he gets confused about things, though. And technology frustrates him. Even cable TV. He really likes the Travel Channel, though. He used to have a Studebaker like that. Had it long after it was so artfully displayed on the cover of Popular Science. Years later. Like around '62. It barely hung together, but he drove it many miles. I went over there today to get some boxes and see that they knew how to use the portable phone and its answering machine. Dad noticed I'd plugged it into a plug which has a switch and it was getting switched. So, I looked in the drawer where I'm keeping stuff over there, fished out a power strip and fixed that, putting both the lamp and the phone on the all the time part of the plug. I hate switched plugs. We have them, too. The parents did errands again today. Including going downtown and finding the place to get a handicapped sticker. (How weird is that to make people who have trouble getting around go downtown and search for a parking meter and...oh, well, that's Austin for you.) Now they have it and they can really use it when Mom isn't doing well. Or Dad. Mom's new doctor wrote the script for it. They also opened another bank account and went by the storage building to get a few more things. They are really pretty settled in. I felt a malaise most of the day at work. I tried to just work anyway. I didn't work on one thing that was troubling me, but just did something else. Toward the end of the day I realized that I needed to: (1) clean up my office; (2) continue working on this secondary project until I complete it. Another thing Dad said today was: "I got rid of a lot of stuff. Stuff I liked, but just couldn't move." It was interesting to hear him say he liked some material thing. Or sure, he would get pleasure out of telling you the history of his branding iron or some piece of crude furniture that Mom's dad made. But he never seemed possessive about it. Every time I go over there and move or arrange of fix up their things, I'm struck with how much stuff they've kept for years and years. Stuff I would have thrown away. Or given away. Mom is using a clock radio that I bet I gave her twenty-five years ago. It's OK, though. It's their place, their stuff. And even if he did have to leave some things behind, my dad got to bring a lot of pretty weird stuff. FFP and I went to Fonda tonight and I had the rotisserie pork with enchiladas. Tasty. We got a rectangular four top and had plenty of room to spread out our magazines. But we were sandwiched between a table of rowdy, posturing men and a table of women with giggles and loud voices like junior high girls. Very noisy. Computers are SO frustrating. I was just trying to print some simple business cards. Avery offers a downloadable wizard for MS Word. How hard could it be? (I got some printed the other night just using Word with its built-in forms, but it was like doing hand-to-hand combat.) The Wizard, of course, after seducing me that it was formatting beautifully, would lock up every time. I wish things would work just *MOST* of the time. Anyway, I finally won. Well, I didn't beat the software, but just went back to using just Word and decided on a way of doing it that didn't make me crazy. You'd think it would be straightforward. That for 'repeating' things, they would just give you a small space to format and repeat it on the page before printing. You'd think. Why is everything always so hard? At least I finally have my procedures for building this page down so that I can spend some small amount of time actually enjoying the writing part. (Oh, yeah, that *WAS* the point.) |
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