Tag: computers

Rainy days and…well, Sundays

They don’t really get me down, though. Rain rarely bothers me except that it bothers Margot so much. Even though I did have to get out in it this evening for a grocery store run, and I’m still all damp and icky feeling, the grocery store was a pleasure. I’m currently mad at Kroger, so I went to Fiesta, not the best grocery store in the world. However, the guys who rang up and bagged my groceries exchanged witty banter of the gay variety. Better than TV, always.

Also, Lindsey and Rhonda came by for a bit today, and what’s better than being safely inside with friends on a drizzly day? This time next week, they’ll be on their honeymoon, the Wedding Bitch will be decompressing, and Rex will be saying, “Can we go somewhere in the car, can we, huh, huh?”

Between bouts of writing today, I’ve been putting music on my computer. I’m the last person on the planet who has figured out how to transfer music from my CDs into an iTunes library and buy music from iTunes. I keep marveling over the wonder of it to Tim, who occasionally walks through and gives me another nugget of iTunes wisdom to keep me happy for a while. And Tom figured out a bunch of stuff with my clip art, so I have plenty of diversions to keep me from writing now.

Still, I must get back to it. Hopefully, my fiction is better than my UnLively Journal.

Bonus dog photos, just because.


Margot: “Is that a squirrel?!?!”


Guinness: “If that’s a squirrel, there are pecans buried somewhere…”

Communication foolishness

Mercury is NOT retrograde yet. (And that’s good news for Bob, Shannon, as he starts his new job Monday.)

Someone needs to tell my computer, AOL, and Live Journal. Mercury is NOT retrograde yet. So stop it.

For anyone who enjoys astrology, here’s info from some random web site.

October 28, 2006 Mercury turns retrograde at 25° Scorpio
November 18, 2006 Mercury turns direct at 9° Scorpio


Scorpio represents our deeper sense of power and motives and aligns our inner and outer goals with our philosophy. Scorpio requires that we take a closer look to understand what truly is within. This being the last mercury retrograde of 2006 opens the door to grab hold of something of substance and that capsules our beliefs and bring this out into the world of career, business and literally bring our inner beliefs to the outer world in one way or another.

State of The Compound: Temptations

Victories: Yesterday I finished a chapter. It was probably the chapter that intimidated me the most. Today, I plan to finish another one.

Mishaps: Unfortunately, as I’m sure EVERYONE who deals with computers knows, no matter how many times you get burned and tell yourself you’ll never do THAT again…

I saved a For-Tim-and-Jim-To-Read draft over a working draft and lost about eight pages of writing I was doing on two different chapters. Those particular pieces of writing were saved nowhere else. It’s only eight pages, not as bad as the time I lost 200 pages, but still…

At moments of realization like that, it’s hard not to wish I were:


Filling this canvas with the painting that a lovely person has commissioned from me. Or:


Getting lost in one of the three books I’m simultaneously reading, all of which are completely absorbing for different reasons.

I’m sorry if I’m not responding (or am responding s-l-o-w-l-y) to your e-mails, phone calls, or your wonderful blogs and journals. I’ll be more communicative soon.

Other people’s dogs

Wednesday night, Tom and I went to Lynne’s. He was setting up her wireless router so Tim and I could work on our laptops even WAY OUTSIDE THE LOOP. However, his attempts to bend DSL to his will were thwarted, and he’ll have to try again. Our wireless is set up with cable modem and went smoothly, but this DSL thing… If anyone has any wisdom to share, I’ll pass it on to him though I won’t have a clue what you’re talking about.

However, I DO know dogs. And tonight I was entertained by four of them.


This is Sparky, the dog Tim has to shoot when he dogsits. With insulin shots, that is. Sparky lives by the belly, so going on a strict diet has been hard for him, but he’s a little trooper.


This is one of the granddogs, Seig. Seig would like to believe he looks ferocious, and we don’t tell him his non-pointed doberman ears make him look like a big cupcake.


This is Seig’s new little sister, Black Eyed Susan, or Sue, an American bulldog. She won’t be Seig’s little sister long, as she’s expected to weigh about a hundred pounds as an adult.


Right now, Sue’s all snoozy, pink-footed puppy. I love yelling for her outside: “Suuuue! Suuuu-eeee!” Takes me back to my Southern hog-calling days. Okay, I never called hogs, but I could have if I’d wanted to.


And this is the dowager doberman, Greta (age 15), who just wishes all of us would get the hell out of her house.

I am, therefore, I bitch

Maybe it’s because I’m sleep deprived, but it feels like nothing has been working here. Dying phones. My desktop won’t stay connected or hesitates every couple of minutes. I’m having the same trouble with my laptop at Tim’s that he’s been having with signal strength from the wireless router. On The Compound, if it’s communication-related, it’s faltering. And Mercury isn’t even in retrograde. Yet.

After waking from a post-client session/post-writers’ conference call nap (and missing my window of opportunity to go with Tom to Rich’s to watch Lindsey and Rhonda make fools of themselves to raise money), I decided to check into this signal problem we’re having. Based on research I accomplished during the five minutes that my computer worked, some geek (I say that with the utmost respect) recommended something called a “repeater.” Since my car is in the suburbs with Tim, I walked to Office Max to check on this “repeater” thing.

(By the way, my car also has problems. I can’t make the driver’s door electric lock or window work, not a good thing when I do all my pharmacy and banking at a drive-through. And Jack in the Box. Will I have to go inside for a sourdough Jack? Is it worth it? Tom says the car problem is not a fuse. It must be something that will cost at least $300 at the dealer, because I never get away from there without spending a minimum of $300. They think I should be happy because they have Starbucks coffee and a massage therapist on site who’ll give me a 15-minute neck-and-shoulder massage. Um, I know the second-best massage therapist in Houston whose rate is $75/hour, and I can get out of Starbucks drive-through at less than five dollars a trip. Or at least I could when I could lower my car window.)

On the way to Office Max, I fended off some kind of bug attack. Too big to be a mosquito (though there were plenty of those), too small to be a palmetto bug tree roach. Very big men in very big pickup trucks playing very loud music were driving through the ‘hood. What is it with big white rednecks and hip hop? Who are they kidding? They don’t intimidate me as much as having to pass one of those fuzzy little dogs on the sidewalk. (Note to self: Consider therapy for emotional damage caused by Cujo/ Creep/ Chocolate/ whatever his name really was.)

Then I jaywalked. Ha! I’m such a lawbreaker. Bring it on, hip hop rednecks.

Office Max was closed. Sort of. The exit door was still open, so I slid in and asked the cashier if they were closed. I have become my own retail nightmare. I just know she was thinking, No, dumbass, we have those bars across the door because we’re open. When she asked what I needed, I lied and told her phone batteries, because I couldn’t remember the word “repeater.”

After she graciously directed me toward the phone batteries, I found another employee and used really technical terms like “some thing that makes your wireless signal stronger that I can’t remember the name of.” He called someone else on his Office Max radio.

Those Office Max people are like cops; has anyone else ever noticed that? They’re always radioing each other. I’ll bet when no customers are around, they make that “donging” noise from Law and Order. Plus their breakroom probably has a two-way mirror and a box of stale Krispy Kremes. They could have taken me back and roughed me up for jaywalking if they hadn’t been trying to close.

The answer that Employee Two came up with was not “repeater.” It was something else. They didn’t have it in stock.

I guiltily went to the phone battery aisle. I’d actually looked at the battery pack of my dying phone earlier, so there was a remote chance I might buy the right thing, even though I didn’t have any information with me.

Paid for the battery pack. They had to unlock the door to let me out. At which point, Employee One morphed from cop wannabe to Bill the Cat, made a hairball/ack noise, and said, “Bug! On her back!” Hitchhiking bastard. Employee Three knocked it off, and I walked home.

I noted how many houses in the ‘hood:

1. Still have their tape up from Hurricane Rita. Hurricane season is like necktie widths. Wait long enough, and you look like you’re on the cusp of a trend instead of behind the times. I learned this trick from my father and my Uncle Dwight. Unfortunately, I don’t wear neckties. And I don’t want tape on my windows all year.

2. Have grass. Grass makes me bitter. I wouldn’t give up my trees to have grass, but I used to actually live in a state where you could have trees AND grass. Crazy.

3. Have fences that are falling in. Maybe I should rubberband that Robert Frost poem that says, “Good fences make good neighbors” to their gates. Except they’d probably just think it’s the fortieth Chinese takeout menu of the week and throw it away.

4. Have dogs watching me from windows. Including the one where two red mini dachshunds jumped on the back of the sofa and used their little German barks to tell me that if they could only get to me, they’d bite my ankle. Yeah, yeah. You’re not fuzzy? I don’t fear you. I’m a jaywalker, bitches.

Got home. Restarted my computer three times to try to make it work. All the lights on the cable modem showed it should be working, but I still couldn’t connect. I finally unhooked everything from the modem and restarted it. That worked. Once. I wrote this LJ entry. When I got ready to publish it? Not connected anymore. It’s Saturday night, 9 p.m. Let’s see when this thing actually makes it to my Live Journal.* There will be a correlation between the time lapse and the number of new gray hairs on my head that Tim will have to color when he returns from keeping dogs alive in the suburbs.

By the way, the phone battery pack? THE RIGHT SIZE! I suppose my luck could change…

*11:49 p.m. Two reboots and one firewall adjustment later…

Let sleeping blogs lie

I just checked my list of bloggers. I have 28 blogs on the list (these are separate from my LJ friends). There are another five or so nationally known blogs (usually on politics or popular culture) that I check from time to time to keep up with what’s being talked about. Then there are around ten that are linked on some of my favorite blogs that I also read occasionally.

When I first got online in 1997, I was all about my chat room. Actually, there were two chat rooms–the one where I met my writing partners and made some other good friends, and one that was for authors that I visited from time to time but where I rarely talked and made no friends. About four years later, my main “room” had changed a lot, and my focus shifted to message boards. There were four of those that interested me and where I made an entirely different group of online friends based on shared interests.

About 18 months ago, my interest shifted to blogs, and around that time, I followed Tim to Live Journal. I don’t consider myself to be a blogger. I like what I’m doing because it’s no pressure and random. It’s not a problem, but reading all those blogs can be. As a person who’s always shunned TV as a time thief, it’s deplorable how much of my time and energy I’ve given to this computer monitor. So I’ve cut back on blogs–and cut back again. I may go a couple of weeks and read only my top two or three favorite blogs, then rapidly skim some of the others for anything of interest.

So I was doing well with my online time management. I’m not an e-bay, craigslist, myspace, or online games person (although the games thing was a passing interest for a while), so except for keeping up with Live Journal, I’ve been using my Internet time for research.

And then… in the middle of that research–I swear!–another blog sneaked into my online world. I’m not going to link to it. I’m not going to promote it. Not because it’s anything that’s weirdly out of character for me. It’s not porn. It’s not Republican. It’s not dogmatic. Far from all of that. This blogger seems to be a regular person. A working man. A very articulate working man with a distinctive voice and an unapologetic attitude that is so not politically correct that it’s… refreshing. And I’m so jaded by liars and posers that I can’t believe he’s real. I keep waiting for the “Gotcha,” and until I’m certain it’s not coming, I guess I plan to keep him my reading secret.

It’s murky, this online world.

Evil Internet

I remember times, writing in the middle of the night, when I needed information that was available only in a library or a bookstore. I remember when I could call telephone operators (and get REAL PEOPLE!) in another state and ask them questions about where they lived and they would answer me and be glad I gave them a break from their 3 a.m. boredom.

But even now with the Internet, research can be a painful process. While everything you could ever want to know and all its inaccurate versions may be available, finding it is challenging. First you plow through the million things that have nothing to do with what you want. Then you begin to weed out the unreliable information. And there’s a delicate balance between giving a search engine too many parameters and not enough. Then…you are constantly diverted to other places where you never intended to go.

Shannon asked why I was up so early in the morning. Actually, I was up so late at night. I just wanted some simple answers to a few questions, and I ended up spending all night reading about the NYPD, finding a fascinating blogger who got a book deal for his blog, checking out his links to other bloggers who got book deals for their blogs…. Is it possible that there’s much of anyone left who DOESN’T have a blog and ISN’T being offered tons of money from Big Publishers to write a freaking book?

I’m not saying some of those who are writing memoirs at 22 haven’t led fascinating albeit brief lives and aren’t good writers. But on behalf of those who’ve spent decades polishing their fiction-writing skills and don’t get six-figure advances for writing disparaging things about their families, coworkers, professions, and certain ethnic groups, may I just say….

Aw, never mind. I’ll save it for my memoirs.

The End of an Era

Things have changed here at the Home Office.

When Tim first moved to Houston (just after IT HAD TO BE YOU was published), he accessed the Internet via dial-up in his apartment. In the Big House, we’d recently made the transition from dial-up to cable modem, and we had a couple of computers linked in a network. Tim frequently used the second computer to write (mainly to keep documents software compatible), then permanently after his Mac died. We sat face to face, but we couldn’t see each other because one of the desks had a high back with shelving on it. That was the situation when we worked on HE’S THE ONE and THE DEAL.

When Tim got his new Mac, he used dial-up in his apartment for a while, and I’M YOUR MAN was finished during that time. Then we needed the Home Office for temporary housing for my mother, so the cable modem was moved to Tim’s apartment. For a while, we worked side by side upstairs, but our hours weren’t compatible, which meant I was often interfering with Tim’s sleep. So we dropped a line downstairs, and we finished writing SOMEONE LIKE YOU and THREE FORTUNES IN ONE COOKIE on different floors in the same building.

After my mother moved out, we set up the Home Office in a way much more conducive to two work spaces, and Tim and I have sat side by side for about a year and a half. We changed to wireless (secured, you Stalkers!), which means my laptop often serves as a guest computer, but Tim’s Mac didn’t have wireless capability.

Now we’re working on TJB FIVE, and Tom and I just gave Tim an early birthday gift–whatever thingie (I don’t do geek talk) he needed for his Mac to be wireless. The wireless signal is more than strong enough to reach the apartment, so Tim can now office in his own space.

It remains to be seen how this will affect progress on TJB FIVE. I’m sure Tim will be happy not to deal with the ten million questions I ask him a day (his brain is like my encyclopedia), and Rex and the girls will get some time apart, which should help their socialization issues.

But this is the first day, and it’s kind of lonely over here.

sad

I knew we would see damage from Katrina, and we did. What I wasn’t prepared for was the damage we’d see from Rita.

I’m so tired that I can’t do a decent LJ entry. Last night, I wrote a lengthy one from our hotel, only to find out when I tried to update LJ, that the wireless service I paid for wasn’t until midnight on Sunday, but midnight on Saturday.

Bye, post, lost somewhere in cyber space.

More later. With photos.