Journal of a Sabbatical

December 19, 2000

sheep and shepherd

Today's Reading: Tall Trees and Far Horizons by Virginia Eifert, Autumn from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake

I was going to blog this article about the crane shooter possibly facing felony charges after all, though still no federal charges. I still don't get the jurisdictional thing here. I mean he clearly violated a federal law (two of them: Migratory Bird Act and Endangered Species Act) but no fed charges.

So like I said, I was going to blog this but I have been unable to connect to blogger.com or blogspot either for that matter all day. Actually for awhile I couldn't do anything at all with this bleeping computer because the 4.1 gig hard drive kept disappearing. Plaintive messages would appear telling me the device at SCSI 1 has been removed and please put it back or data might be lost. Poor lost data. Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep and her hard drive data too... Have to send a shepherd to find it.

First have to find a shepherd. La Madre wants a Schmid shepherd for one of her collectible nativities. I think I wrote about this before but can't be bothered to look up the entry. I searched high and low in collectible stores with no luck. Kevin said he thought they had them at Filene's, which of course is in a mall and I am terrified of malls. After my trip to the Burlington Mall, I have been putting off any further mall shopping. Why I think it will get any easier closer to Xmas I don't know.

Today I decided to bite the bullet and go to the Mall at Rockingham Park to see if Filene's indeed had Schmid nativities. They don't. They have Fontanini, which is another big collectible, but not Schmid. Besides, they only had complete sets, not separate shepherds and sheep and goats and yaks and much cattle... where was I? Oh yeah, Filene's. Nothing at Filene's fit the bill and I'd already tried all the little gift shops so I thought I'd brave Macy's.

I always feel trapped in Macy's because they put the racks and tables and displays of stuff too close together and don't have any straight paths to any exits. They deliberately try to trap you in the store so you spend more money. Today it was hot in addition to claustrophobic. The china/ceramics/whatever is on the third floor, which is even hotter than the second floor. Heat rises and all. No Schmid figurines there either.

However, there among the Spode dinner plates and Wedgwood place settings was a display of Lenox nativities. White like the Schmid ones. On sale. Shepherds separate from the basic nuclear family. Kings also separate but kings aren't on the list. Sheep separate too. Shepherd comes with one sheep, but you can also by a set of two additional sheep. And they're like 30% off, which is good because they are wicked expensive. I select a boxed shepherd and a box of sheep. I stand in line for half an hour while someone tries to return something that was shipped wrong from the warehouse. She is unclear on the concept that she can't exchange it at the register since the store does not have it in stock. She needs to go to the customer service desk and have them take care of it with the warehouse. Seems perfectly clear to me. Then finally, I ask about Schmid figurines just to make sure. The cashier tells me they don't' carry them. I pay for my Lenox shepherd and sheep on my Visa card and get the hell out of Macy's before I faint from heat and claustrophobia. People stare at me in the parking lot and I realize I am walking around southern New Hampshire hours before a snowstorm in a thin white T-shirt and yet sweating buckets...

Back home my computer has finished updating Silverlining, rebooting, and rebuilding the desktop but the first thing I do results in the disk disappearing again. I shut it off and on again and everything works. I connect to the Internet and blogger.com is still not available. I consider buying a new hard drive and a Jaz drive for backups (I use floppies for backup - not optimal when you have a gig of files) then don't bother because the drive has continued to function for several minutes, nearly 39 minutes actually. I know I should do something about this but I have Christmas cards to write and Christmas presents to buy and wrap and trash to take to the dumpster... I hate computers. They're more trouble than they're worth.