Wednesday, September 19, 2012

#@$%&* and Shitpissfuck

Heaven help me,,,,,,the thing that I feared has come upon me.  Old Blogger,  Good old Blogger, dear old Blogger. readable and legible old Blogger has been executed and some wretched upstart is being forced upon us.  Or perhaps I should say "me", because I may be the only lone holdout and the rest of you have probably been coasting along for months. 

Well.........I don't care......I still hate the new format and I suspect it will put a crimp in my ability to blog, but I guess I must at least try.  Bah, humbug.  I am not a happy camper and besides all the above I have a backache which is causing the most dreadful sounds and words to pour forth from my ruby lips.  My beloved Chiropractor just administered a fix, but it has not had its full effect yet....groan.

Maybe tomorrow will be better.......... sigh.

I still love ya all, I think......but other issues are clouding my weak and weary mind so check back in later and perhaps the Good Lo will have returned from wherever they have put her.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Excuse Me .........Gotta Get Nekkid......My Ink Cartridges Need Refilling

I  don't know about you folks, but I decided years ago that I would give up my computer printer and go back to using smoke signals rather than pay the insane, obscene prices they charge for ink cartridges. Naturally,  I sent away for a refill kit and have been refilling my own cartridges ever since, but, needless to say, there have been a few "oopses" and a few lessons learned but actually  only a few failures.  I figure I must have saved enough money to heavily reduce the national debt if I had only not squandered it away on frivolity......well, no, I wouldn't call necessities like a cordless mouse frivolity actually.   Anyway.....the time has come once again so I had better get ready.

The truth is, I do not really strip naked any more before starting this process.  It seems to me that in years past the inks were much less removable from one's person and  garments than they are now.  I think they are making the inks washable which is why, when you set your coffee cup or water glass or ?libation down on your newly printed sheet the ink runs all over the effing document but at least you dont have to go around being the Monster with the Bluer Cuticles for the next 2 weeks.   So what that means is that I no longer take off my garment to refill the ink cartridges, but I sometimes do long for the old wilder days.

Anyway.......they are making it harder asnd harder to do this refill process, those money grubbing bastards.  Especially with the color cartridges.  Once upon a time I could drill three neat holes in the top and happily access Cyan, Magenta and Yellow.  I do not know quite how they have changed the innards or whether I simply managed to pierce the walls separating the 3 colors when I went in with the hypodermic needle.......lately I have not managed so well with the color refills, but the black ones, godblessem, are still working for me and I manage to fool the printer into accepting them even though, occasionally I will be coldly informed that my black cartridge is devoid of ink.......heh, heh, but the machine dutifully prints away anyway and I thereby save $25 or $35........hooray.. 

Today I was only 50% successful........blew the color one. but decided to reinstall it anyway even though it now contained a weird mix of blue, red and yellow.......mainly a yucky blue.  I mostly print documents so the color cartridge is superfluous anyway.  I guess I will have to break down and order one in case I need to print a photo sometime.  Once a miser always a miser, I guess, though I actually prefer to think of it as being frugal and wisely prudent, so there.

In all seriousness, I have learned to spend money freely in my old age, when the occasion calls for it.  I just bought myself a lovely gift.  Since my vision and my clumsy, dyslectic fingers make it really hard for me to type without making a gazillion mistakes which have to be corrected of course, (I was tempted by the lure of the Dragon Something or Other which is a program you load and install (at great effort and with much screeching and foul language) but which allows you to dictate into a microphone and see you words instantly appear on the screen as if by magic.  In my usual penurious fashion I found that version 12 had just been released and Amazon was selling version 11.5 for a pittance so I found the deal irresistible......I figured that if 11.5 works at all well I will spring for version 12 after I learn how to use it.  Well, by Gum. it arrived yesterday and today after I washed up from the cartridge refill project I decided I would take courage and at least open the box.  Apparently I had a speck of courage hidden away somewhere, because 5 or 8 hours later I found myself going through the Tutorial for the 16th time after successfully installing the damned program.  The Tutorial works amazingly well and causes you to utter all sorts of exclamations, but, of course, they prompt you at every turn about what to do an how to do it.  I find that even with the little cheat sheet they advise you to print out, when you are on your own it ain'g quite as easy, but i am determined to conquer it because otherwise I may find it harder nd harder to blog and write emails,. so I will persevere.  I promise to report on how I do in case you may be interested in trying this out.  I have to say I am really impressed with the program.....with my own intelligence and ability to learn,,,,,,not so much.  That may be where being a stubborn mule may help me.  All I can say is that when I commanded my computer to "start listening"  and it responded "listening" a little thrill went up my spine.  To almost everything else I said it responded "what was that?" but still.......it was a sort of a conversation.......and it also obeyed me when I screamed "undo, undo".

Now, if I can only figure out why sometimes, when I say "undo" it undoes........and other times when I shout "undo, undo" it dutifully types "undo, undo".  Sigh.

And now, I say to you as I say to my computer, You may "stop listening"..whereupon it advises me it is sleeping.  As for all of you, you may doze off too or do whatever you please. I for one, am satisfied with my vast achievements today.........I hope you are the same.











Saturday, September 1, 2012

More about Knees - If You though That Wasn't Possible

In the middle of the night I sat bolt upright in bed  and performed the old fashioned head slap when I realized that I had forgotten to include one of the most knee punishing activities of life.......Gardening.............gawd ......how could I?     The endless hours of dig, plant, weed, dig, plant, weed.  And that activity, once begun in life, never ends till they plant YOU.   

The percentage of time spent on my knees during this lifetime just went up to nearly 50%.

And, while sitting bolt upright in bed, I thought that I really should have explained that, in my current enfeebled condition, getting up from being on my knees is no small feat.  In fact, were it not for the beloved Yoga Downward Dog position in which you are on hands and knees, then curl your toes under to get a bit of purchase, hoist the fanny straight up in the air to form a human triangle between toes and hands and push off with the hands to rise to a standing position, I would probably have spent the past two years in a permanent kneeling state.  For some reason, getting down on hands and knees, while not beautiful, is possible, but getting up therefrom is another story.

If none of this makes any sense to you, it probably means you didn't read my last blog.  Shame on you.  Go back at once and all will become perfectly clear.

Writers' Cramp - Very Unlikely...... But Housemaids' Knee Still a Threat

This week I just raised my aching bod up from my knees for the for the 40skillionth time during my long life and it occurred to me that I may well have spent a goodly percentage of my lifetime on my knees........no.....not praying and not for lewd pursuits or any other weird things either.....I just realized how many supposedly simply tasks end up requiring one to crawl around on the floor on ones hands and knees like a gimpy spider.

We can skip the obvious like the crawling stages of infancy, but not long past that time it begins........subtle at first with games....blocks, marbles, pick-up-sticks  (anyone remember that one?), jacks, tiddly-winks.  Ah, but those young knees hardly even noticed any punishment, even though they were usually bloody or scabby from falling down during other games like baseball, rollerskating, Dodge ball  and almost anything that required upright bodily movement.  For me anyway.......even my  Grandma had to agree that I was a Klutz.....   ........ Sigh. 

The next extended use of the kneeling position came, for me, when I began pursuing the development of my artistic skills and, at some point, every application of some media onto paper required matting and sometimes framing.   This was done on the kitchen floor, using a large wooden plywood drawing board, a steel T-square, ruler, utility knife and  endless hours on the knees..........how else?????

Next came the time in my young starving artist life when I realized that  I had to choose  between eating or covering my nakedness with some garment and I undertook to make all my own clothes using just $3.87 worth of fabric and supplies....... except for shoes......I never quite got the knack of making those..  Naturally,  since I possessed no cutting table ( not to mention no dining table) the cardboard cutting board would  be unfolded on the dining room floor (where the dining table would  be if I could have afforded one......(.I later built one out of a beautiful discarded solid core walnut door which had one damaged side......perfectly fine for the underside of a dining table).  There was always a great deal of scrabbling around on hands and knees positioning the fabric, the pattern pieces, the pin cushion and the scissors, the tailors' chalk and the glass of bourbon......... 

Knees aging but still willing, we enter the era of Hi-Fi and Stereo.  No cigarette pack size thingy in a pocket with ear buds for us.  To properly hear music required a pre-amp, amplifier/tuner, 3 speed turntable, tape player and at least 2 very large speakers.  This stuff also required some furniture to hold it all and the totality necessitated about 3 1/2 weeks of scuttling around on the floor on said knees connecting thousands of wires from one device to the next. Oy.

And just about the time when even my knees were getting too old for such shenanigans some nerd had to invent the desk top home computer which required infinite connections of unmentionable numbers of units to one another and to the surge protector multi-plugs which greatly expanded the old 2 plug wall units and resided under the desk requiring.....you guessed it......days, weeks, months, milleniums (millenia ?) spent on one's knees under the desk, (flashlight in mouth because at least 4 hands were required for most connections) while clutching the easy-assembly sheets in at least one of them.  

Oh, well.......laptops took care of all that, didn't they?  Hmmmm.....then what the hell was I doing on Wednesday of this very week crawling around on my knees on the floor with a flashlight in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other?  Apparently, even in the most modern of times it is still necessary to obtain from the Modem which, in my house,  lives on the lowest shelf of the bookcase,  the network type and serial number in order to add a new laptop to one's personal network of computers.  And how did it happen that, at my advanced age, I should be found  yet once more on those poor knees?  Yes, I do have help these days which should be assigned to such crawlings around, but sadly, nothing can be substituted for experience when confronted with an appliance containing a mind-boggling assortment of different types of number combinations all discretely placed in the most inaccessible spots on the damned Modem thingy.  Florence was overwhelmed.  So who else was there?

Well here's how it is, folks.........whatever the next world changing gadget may come along......if it requires any kneeling of any kind, I think I'll just pass.  Not that I am too old to accept change you understand.......it's just the damned knees.



.