Wednesday, June 05, 2013 11:11 PM
Who cares if I miss the Daily Show (I do, unfortunately) but then anything hanging out in the strange time-window of 11PM has got to expect losses from burn-outs like me who can’t keep track of time—especially later in the evening.
Norton 360 kept me off my PC all day—and it wore me out, forcing me to make a back-up profile excluding unwanted folders and file-types from my Norton Online Back-Up (I’ve been on the brink for a long time.. ..I knew it would it would have all kinds of details and mouse-clicking—and that stuff needs a lot of focus from me these days.) But now I am among the proud the few the people who pay good money to have their personal files backed-up into the sky, or on a cloud, or who-the-hell-knows-where. And Norton goes whole hog—promising to keep actual hard media (Blue-Ray DVD, to be specific) backups of all the stuff I’m always so worried about keeping up-to-date on my own DVD Back- Ups.
I can just imagine. World War Z comes, my PC’s fried—even Norton’s ‘cloud’ is attacked—but, never fear, once the world is put back on a civilized keel, I’m secure in the knowledge that my family photo albums survived in some Symantec Vault high in the Rockies…
Well, it’s all over and the truth is I feel good about knowing all my stuff is safe now, even if I never finish making my own back-up hardcopies on DVD. Plus, I had been getting all kinds of weird incompletions in my optimizations, and red status lights all over—nothing disastrous but still, I was on notice that something was less than perfect inside my computer, and that it could be the digital death of me at any moment. But now, everything is in the green, all the scans come out clean, all the optimizations complete without incident—I love a clean PC.
Saturday, June 08, 2013 12:25 AM
I’ve been eating all too well lately—tonight was corn soup with sour cream and creamed-spinach crepes, last night was the most incredible meal—simple cod, small potatoes (with the skins still on them) and fresh corn-on-the-cob, ummm… and that’s not unusual—all my meals are top-chef quality. At first, long ago, Claire was self-doubting about her cooking, and didn’t do too well. But eventually she went from that to a good cook, and from that to a gourmet chef—but now she’s in some mega-level where everything she touches is turned into the best food I’ve ever tasted—day after day after day. It’s just incredible!
And that’s not all I have to be happy about. Spencer’s home and I get to see him and talk with him every day. He fixed my computer yesterday! It was making a big noise for years—but he just opened it up, found a wire that was being nicked by the cooling-fan blades as they spun, and just shifted the wire out of contact. I’m a little embarrassed—this must be the first PC I’ve ever owned that I didn’t take apart and put together myself—I’d never even opened it up and looked inside. So, now, the noisy PC is the silent PC—something I didn’t know I was missing, it had been so long.
Spencer is the greatest. I couldn’t have asked for a better kid, or better kids, for that matter—I’m always bragging about my kids and then I have to stop and add something so that I’m not singling one of them out. They’re both great. But Spencer is the greatest boy and Jessy is the greatest girl, so it’s really a different greatness in either case. Okay, enough. O, my kids are great. Okay.
And the doctor and the dentist and the transplant center are all done with me for a good while, and I’m fit as a fiddle and ready for love. I’m reading a book I like. I’m especially excited about some of my recent piano recordings—both the improvs and the sight-reading—I’ve had a few good ones lately, and that always perks me up. I had such a great time watching Bruce Willis in his latest Die Hard movie—just can’t get enough—Bruce is my favorite, the coolest of the cool. And a new Superman is coming out soon, and a new Star Trek just released recently—they will all end up on my cable-movie-menu sooner or later.
O, and I figured out how to revive my Nano, and I bought a slew of old mp3s (well, the mp3s aren’t old, but you know what I mean) so now I can walk around with more classical, popular, and self-performed music than I ever accrued on a shelf of vinyl, a rack of cassettes, or a stack of CDs. Those golden oldies have a surprising power of recall—I think only our sense of smell is better at triggering memories long buried than old songs from our younger days. So, I’m spoiled for choice—one good thing about it not being the sixties anymore is I can buy Bach’s complete works for nine bucks—same with Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, Brahms—it’s a classic-buff’s-holiday at Amazon’s Downloadable-mp3 Store. And the oldies, like BeeGees or Donovan or someone—you don’t have to buy the whole album anymore—you can buy the tracks you love and leave behind the tracks that used to be annoying ‘spacers’ between the good stuff. It’s like heaven. Most people into music these days have no idea what it was like in the stone age—finding out how many LPs could be stacked on a particular Turntable before they started to slide around on top of each other.
My life couldn’t be better—which is strange. I’m so used to being a sourpuss that I have no idea how to deal with this paradise I find myself in.