Sunday, November 24, 2002

poodle in the city (no, these are not my knickknacks)

"Guilt is the price we pay willingly for doing what we are going to do anyway."

Isabelle Holland

Forrest is up early. I'm in a fog, though, and then when I do get up there is a literal fog hanging around. I drink a couple of cups of coffee from the Capresso machine. FFP is up early because there is a special section on Ballet Austin's Nutcracker in the Statesman and he wants to see if they have introduced errors into his article in it. They have reserved their typo introduction for the cut line of a picture so he is pleased to have been spared.

I call SuRu. In spite of the fog we load up and head out. We park near Jefferson Square and walk around that little lost neighborhood west of Bull Creek and north of there. Someone I know recently moved there which makes me think of walking there.

We weave up and down, critiquing houses and gardens (some good, some bad) and encountering some loose (or invisible fence dogs) and quite a few fenced and barking ferociously. Too soon, it seems, we need to go to the bathroom so we get in the CR/V and drive to 26 Doors and CC's Coffee and sit on their patio and have coffee and snacks. Then we walk around the shopping (neither of us have been to any store around here in ages) and then decide to go home. Not a real long walk but kind of a fun one.

FFP is feeling like an outing. So we go to BookStop and then go into Central Market 'to get a tomato and some of Forrest's favorite bread' and we leave with two tomatoes, his favorite bread, some other high-fiber bread, goat cheese cheddar, a box of Clementines, three bunches of green onions, a jar of Mom's Spaghetti Sauce, some cookies to give his parents and some little freebie paper. Like I said we are always buying groceries these days.

Then it's time to go to the in-laws and take FFP's dad a birthday present. I thought it was tomorrow but it is today. But I have the present and card ready. I am not pleased to find that my 92-year-old father-in-law has been on the roof 'clearing off acorns and fixing a hole the squirrels made in the porch roof'. Sigh. I'm glad he is in good enough shape to walk with his cane to the ladder and climb it but not pleased that he's doing it. We look at all the cards he got and talk to them about various relatives and how they are doing.

Forrest gets weary and we go home.

It's late and we haven't had lunch so we did in and sauté some chicken breasts in lemon pepper and then microwave a spaghetti sauce and cheese topping on them. We have a little of that goat cheddar and some apple and Clementines.

I work on my project which involves sorting pictures on my computer and then I have a hamburger for dinner and read some of the newspaper. I watch too much TV. The Simpsons and King of the Hill are worthy. The Martin and Lewis special was OK, too. (We taped it to watch after Sopranos.) Sopranos I can really do without and the Kenau Reeves fiasco I was watching after that was really not worthy. FFP interrupted my mindless fascination with its badness to say the Internet connection was kaput. It was, too. I tried booting the DSL modem to no avail. I tried booting the LINUX box that was acting as a gateway but it hung up trying to start the firewall. I'm thinking that the ISP has a problem that's causing it all. But. I had one of those modern cheap LINKSYS firewall routers. So I installed it. Still things didn't connect to the Internet although the Linksys was assigning IP addresses. But. I hadn't booted all the machines on the system and decided to do that. Then I was trying to connect to the ISP with dial-up when things started working. Why? I don't know. But. The good news is that I'd wanted to install that little gadget instead of the Linux box, had been meaning to do it ever since I bought it when the power supply went south on the Linux box but the first one I got was defective and by then I had the Linux box working. And I was too lazy (and fearful of change when things are working) to try the new one when I got it. So. Now the Linksys works. But I don't have any idea what really happened here. As usual. And even if I did, I'd forget before I needed the info again.

JUST TYPING
Cobwebs.
Fog.
Caffeine penetrates.
A small stimulus.
To the sleeping mind.