Monday,
January 13, 2003
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get busy I stay in bed happily while FFP gets up, has some coffee, goes to club. I leave for the club when he gets home. He has an appointment for an annual checkup. They have screwed up the instructions for the last one and he's fasted since midnight for this one's blood test. But he will later find that the gal who reset the appointment and messed up the first one isn't there. And, there is no record of the appointment. There's no competence left. Anywhere. Just accept it. We might as well live in Russia. Or Italy. I do my bike ride and then, when I'm ready to do my lower body, a large
class of women is occupying three of the five machines I use. I ask the
instructor how long they will be busy. "Forty minutes," he says.
I must look dumbstruck. I go fill out a comment card that says no matter
who is in the class (the governor's wife?) that stonewalling certain machines
for 40 minutes is not fair to people who have their own routine and don't
want to pay extra just to use the equipment. "Even George W. should
have to share," I write. George is a member, I think. Or was once.
I think the intructor sees me writing. He makes room for me on the squat
machine. Then when I've worked on the machines that I wanted to use between
his charges, he tries to make me continue using the one in line for the
class. "I don't want to do the class," I say. "I just want to be able to do my own routine without waiting forty minutes." Besides it's an arm machine. I use machines every day but limit them to upper body and lower body on any given day to make sure there is always a rest day. I don't like to pay a lot of money to belong to a club and then not be able to use things machines when I want to without waiting forty minutes. I frequently write notes about children misusing equipment in the workout area and stuff, too. This probably assures that I won't be invited to be on the board of the club. That's probably, all in all, a good thing. For the record, I look when I sign in to see the member numbers. Most are a lot lower than mine. Some would say it's their club, not mine. But they should have ponied up more money so they wouldn't have to take on new members. We undoubtably paid a bigger initiation fee. Generally, the people are very nice at this club, in fact. Except for the ones with unruly kids breaking rules. Even these personal trainers seem nice but they tend to occupy too much space with their charges. Even when they are one-on-one, they will have a charge on a machine for a long time, seemingly giving psychological counseling. But it's these 'classes' using machines and doing lines of lunges among the machines and such that really get in the way. As I leave after the lower body machines, the Texas Ranger sitting in
the lounge area at the front with a magazine nods at me. I say he's a
Texas Ranger. He is in plain clothes. I suspect a suspicious look since
I've been huffing around about the class I think his charge is taking.
Instead he nods and, I think, looks sympathetic. Probably not.
Home again, I answer some e-mail and try to decide what to do with my day. I end up eating some leftover paté de fois gras and little toasts and drinking a cup of coffee while staring at the Jumble puzzle in The American-Statesman. I then take a shower. Our TV in THE ROOM has this interference 'strip' that runs through it on cable. I try to figure this out by (1) changing out the cable box; (2) changing the cable between the cable box and VCR. This doesn't work. My conclusion is that it is either in the bypass circuit of the VCR (the thing that sends the signal on when there is no tape playing) or that the problem originates with the cable itself. We don't have this problem elsewhere in the house. I end up being happy that I have it all put back together and working just as badly as before. (But just as good, too.) I have a feeling that it's the bypass circuit although probably it makes more sense that rats gnawed this cable somewhere. At least now I've tried to figure it out and narrowed it down to these two things. Small consolation. I was going to start the laundry, but FFP beat me to it. It works that way sometimes. I started the dishes and he put everything away but the silverware and I did that. Domestic things can take over your day. Which is not such a bad thing, really.
I still need to write a couple of 'thank you' notes for Christmas presents. I could just knock these out in ten minutes using our formal 'cards.' But, no. I decide to make some of them. So it takes a while. Then I start halfheatedly trying to straighten my office. I change clothes for the evening event and pack a bag for a short trip to Dallas with my dad. SuRu calls to say that her ISP (and mine) is going to stop serving her. This isn't good news. We haven't gotten such a notice but I'm sure we will. Sigh. More stuff to deal with. Soon Gayle comes and we all go to a dinner for hosts of a benefit we are giving in February. We have a nice time talking to our table mates about the event where all these individual parties are given with dinner and then we all meet for dessert and champagne. It benefits Project Transitions (housing for HIV and AIDS patients) and it's call 'Guess Who Is Coming to Dinner.' Tonight we have a wonderful dinner at Fonda San Miguel to honor the hosts of the dinners. A nice salad with napolitas and stuff followed by a natural beef ribeye and some delicious dessert. I can't believe I eat it all but it's so good. Served with a nice Rioja, too. Home again, FFP thinks the bookkeeper's machine has gone south. It is locked up and making a strange sound but it does boot. He is making various backups (although we make nightly ones) because this frightens him. You always worry that the one thing you don't have backed up, well, you know. So, anyway, I tell him that our ISP may roll over leaving us in limbo to get service, get our domain e-mail working, etc. Sigh. Ah, well, such is life. It's not cosmic, is it? It's amazing how we depend on our computers now and the Internet. Incredible. I would have never dreamed it.
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the office presents a challenge
It is not enough to be h |
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174
JUST
TYPING