Carol Archives - Page 11 of 18 - Ramblin' with Roger

A tree-killing Valentine’s Day

No, I’m not sending The Wife an electronic card.

Last year at this time, New Republic published an article called Valentine’s Day Is an Environmental Travesty. It noted:

Sure, you could criticize on environmental grounds all manner of small pleasures, such as eating burgers, or driving gasoline-powered cars, or drinking frostily refrigerated beer… Yet sending a greeting card is worse as an example of personal carelessness, because its greener alternative is so painless and, indeed, so much more convenient. I don’t like veggie burgers, I can’t afford a Tesla, and I hate warm beer. But forsaking a paper greeting card for an emailed Valentine? I’m pretty sure I— as well as my family and you— could live with that.

Reason is no match for emotion, of course, so it’s no surprise that the dead-tree greeting-card industry continues to thrive.

Sentimental sap am I – guilty as charged. No, I’m not sending The Wife an electronic card. It feels too ephemeral. And if you’ve ever seen The Wife’s e-mail inbox – it had been over 1000 unread messages for a time, and is still over 800 – you might conclude that she might not even SEE my e-card.

So it’s the dead tree, carbon footprint Valentine. At least I walk to the store.

And NOT this.

Oh, I was reading the magazine Redbook in a waiting room. There’s an article in the December 2014 issue, “Things that (mostly) happy couples know” by Lisa Miller. LESSON #1: “Go looking for signs of relationship trouble in a self-help book and you’ll find them.” Makes sense to me.

Here are Top 50 ‘Love’ Songs of All Time, from Billboard magazine.

Here’s a 12-minute film Encore un Hiver.

Why I didn’t text

I’m still a digital immigrant – heck, just off the boat – when it comes to texting.

My old cellphone died recently, a flip phone that totally broke in half, and would no longer charge. I’d had it only about five years, or maybe seven. I KNEW there was texting capacity on it but even though I READ THE MANUAL, I couldn’t figure out how to type words on a telephone keypad. I played with the # and * keys and got different, inconsistent results.

Anyway, I read RTM for the new phone; same thing: no information, assuming I’m SUPPOSED to know. But I don’t. But I Facebook IMed my old friend (and by old, I’ve known her since kindergarten) Carol (not to be confused with my wife Carol, who wasn’t born when I went to kindergarten.) I let her know that I could RECEIVE a text, but that I didn’t know how to SEND one.

She sent me this link http://phonekeyboard.com/alphabetmode.htm:

The Phone Keyboard uses the phone in the same standard way. Pressing the desired number keys [1] through [9] and a [0] still produces the numbers 1 – 9 and 0. Pressing the left asterisk [*] key once exits the standard number mode and enters a 2 key Alphabet Mode. Letters are produced in the Alphabet Mode by pressing the desired letter on a number key [1] through [9], followed by one of three position keys: the “left” asterisk [*] key for the left letter, the “middle” zero [0] key for the middle letter or the “right” pound [#] key for the right letter…

Pressing the left asterisk [*] key 2 times exits the standard number mode and enters a Shiftable Alphabet Mode. Letters are produced in the Shiftable Alphabet Mode by pressing the desired letter on a number key [1] through [9], followed by one of three position keys: the “left” asterisk [*] key for the left letter, the “middle” zero [0] key for the middle letter or the “right” pound [#] key for the right letter…

Pressing the left asterisk [*] key 3 times exits the standard number mode and enters a Multi-Tap Mode. Letters are produced in the Multi-Tap Mode by pressing the desired letter on a number key [1] through [9] once, twice or three times….

This explains everything, including how I kept shifting from mode to mode without intending to do so. Now I text. Not a lot, mind you, to friend Carol and my sisters. And I showed The Wife how to do so on her phone that’s about the same vintage as my old one.

BTW, I have a plan that costs $20 per three months, but I get charged more if I exceed the allotted number of minutes/units/whatever. I have been SO not reaching the threshold that, after I got the new phone ($12 off the balance), I still had $170 left. Texting will probably eat into that, but not sure how much.

And I’m still a digital immigrant – heck, just off the boat – when it comes to texting. Now that I know HOW to do it, can’t imagine spending hours on it. Then again, a decade ago, I couldn’t have imagined blogging every day. So what do I know?

Also, I DON’T have a smartphone yet. It’s not the cost of the phone that bugs me, it’s the cost of the monthly service. I considered doing so when I got this new phone, but then they started talking about “picking a plan,” and I bailed.

I must be cheap; I see this TV ad for a smartphone for ONLY $150 per month for four people, and that’s supposedly a good deal; not on OUR budget, it’s not! Well, maybe when the Daughter’s a little older… (Sound of blogger kicking and screaming.)

http://wronghands1.wordpress.com/2013/07/06/important-texts/ used under CC license: by-nc-nd/

Crummy, we feel

This may shock you, but people related to me have actually suggested that I might be just a touch cranky when I’m sick.

It started with the Daughter a week before Halloween, sluggish going to school, going to her team’s soccer match that Saturday but too weak to play, tired on Sunday, then home sick from school on Monday. She went to school late on Tuesday, but too fatigued for gym.

The Wife, who is never sick – just ask her – was feeling off on Wednesday, stayed home from work on Thursday, and still recovering on Friday.

There’s something unfortunate about being ill on Halloween. The night before, I slept extremely poorly. The Wife, when she’s ill, wheezes audibly so that I can’t sleep. I went down to the sofa, but the cats running around made that not a viable option. Finally, at about 3:20 a.m., I went to live down on the floor in the Daughter’s room. I literally crawled back to bed one minute before the alarm went off at 6 a.m. I thought when I went to work that I was just tired, but realized by midday that I too was becoming ill.

This may shock you, but people related to me have actually suggested that I might be just a touch cranky when I’m sick. When I got home, I schlepped furniture from the front porch to the shed, because The Wife had asked me days earlier to move them, lest the trick-or-treaters use them in their pranks. I was spent after that and could put on a happy face briefly as I handed out the candy before the others took over the task. Home all weekend with various ailments: sore throat, headache, congestion, body aches, and vivid dreams.

The result of which is that I can’t write a cleverly coherent post here, though I wrote TWO posts for my usually neglected TU blog, one on the NYS ballot proposals and Albany School Board election, and one on the governor’s race, which was time-sensitive.

I did watch about a half of (US) football on Sunday, Cardinals over Cowboys – YES! I also saw this unfortunate gaffe on NBC News Saturday night in real time.

Back to work today, but just muddling through…

This shall pass. I hope so.
**
My friend Dan’s story on how fear, nastiness and dirty tricks sideline public discussion of the Albany City budget.

The yard sale

Another thing I hate about yard sales: dealers, who come an hour before the stated time, then harrumph when the stuff you have doesn’t meet their needs.

Let me state that I generally hate yard sales, garage sales, and the like. Specifically:
*I don’t like going to other people’s sales, especially when they put out things that are, to quote Oscar the Grouch, everything “ragged and rotten and rusty.”
*I don’t like having our own sale, because it involved going through lots of our own stuff. It’s time-consuming and enervating.
And most of all:
*I HATE bringing back into the house the stuff we decided to sell, but it didn’t.

Yet we (OK, the Wife and the Daughter) agreed (and I accepted the decision) to have a yard sale on September 6. The logic of that date was that it would be after school began, but before the fall got going in earnest. Soccer began the following week, as were her tryout for the Nutcracker and rehearsal for the church play about the Beatles.

To make it better, we thought we’d get our neighbors to do the same, and two of them agreed. But we didn’t do much advertising, since we were busy with prep. In fact no ads or posters, until three days before the sale, when I placed a free ad on timesunion.com.

The Daughter was particularly motivated. Her room was not as tidy as it could be, because she had so much stuff she had never gotten rid of. Tantalized by making money, she suddenly found books and stuffed animals she no longer wanted; indeed, a few of the books I kept myself. She also sorted out clothes that no longer fit her.

That Saturday morning, one of the neighbors pulled out. They looked at the forecast, which suggested that it would rain in the middle of our 9-3 sale, and that wasn’t going to be viable. Sigh.

Another thing I hate about yard sales: dealers, who come an hour before the stated time, then harrumph when the stuff you have doesn’t meet their needs; we had three of them, one especially rude.

In the first half-hour, we had no one. In the first hour, we made about $1.50. But as the day went on, we did better. This was improved by the addition of my brother-in-law’s family driving nearly an hour to add their stuff to ours. Separate accounting, but still: more stuff makes it better.

I got rid of both of my old CD holders, which I never liked; they opened like accordions and took up too much floor space.

At the end of it all, we made close to $100. More importantly, we got rid of stuff, and the Daughter’s room is far cleaner. And while the Daughter was disappointed that almost none of her clothes sold, we’ll be giving them to someone who can use them, so it’s all good.

Still, it will be a LONG time before we have another one unless I can hire Eddie Mitchell to run it.

The 9/11 Memorial

The waterfalls, the memorial pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers, are quite beautiful, especially at night

After 9/11/2001, I had only been in Manhattan once that wasn’t in passing (train station to Charlotte, e.g.) and that was seeing a musical in 2003. I had never been particularly close geographically to Ground Zero, despite living less than 160 miles away.

When Rebecca (niece #1), her husband Rico, and a couple of their friends came out from California to NYC around Thanksgiving 2013, one of them items on the Californians’ agenda was to see the 9/11 memorial.

The museum exterior was at the site, but not yet open. There was no charge to get to the plaza at the time, but one had to order tickets ahead of time. We were booked for 4:30 p.m., the last grouping, and we had to pick up tickets beforehand.

At least at that point, the key to the enterprise was patience, for we spent over a half-hour waiting in line on an unseasonably cold November afternoon-to-evening. Then we had to go through screening, not unlike what happens when one goes to the airport.

I will say that the waterfalls, the memorial pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers, are quite beautiful, especially at night; wish I could find the pictures I took.

At the end, you end up, as all good museums do, in the gift shop. There was a constant barrage of videos about what happened “that day” and in the weeks thereafter. It was a bit numbing, actually, but not especially moving, oddly.

Only one of these pieces got me emotionally involved, and it was a cartoon – this cartoon from StoryCorps – that actually made me cry.

Now that the 9/11 Tribute Center is complete, I can’t imagine wanting to go back and relive the experience. The State Museum in Albany has some artifacts that I’ve seen, fairly often, and that’s enough for me, for now.