Journal of a Sabbatical

January 13, 1999

cats, computers, and freezing rain

Nancy claims my busy schedule for today means I have a life. Since I've never figured out what having a life means, I can't argue with that. Cats, computers, and freezing rain can make a life I guess.

Things were less chaotic this morning at the cat shelter.

I saw that rare sight visible only once in a blue moon - the bottom of the laundry basket. I put a load in as soon as I got there and when that was done put the remaining stuff in the next load. That was it. Empty laundry basket. Everybody was commenting on it. Of course, Bob and another volunteer had just started cleaning the cages at that point so the laundry basket was to be full again in an hour, but we savored the experience while it lasted.

A very nice retired man named Roy showed up out of the blue yesterday to volunteer and came back again today despite an unpleasant encounter with Samantha yesterday. Roy dried dishes and litter boxes and folded laundry, which meant I didn't have to stop in mid-dishwashing to dry stuff in order to have room to stack more wet ones, nor did I have to stop to unload the dryer. That doesn't seem like much of a time savings but I was done 25 minutes earlier than usual without all the start/stop. That gave me plenty of time to pet Jaguar who was being very affectionate and cute today.

The person who was approved to adopt Moses hasn't shown up to pick him up, so maybe he'll be available for Brigham Manor if they get it together to apply. Every time they're set to apply, something comes up and they have to wait for a new administrator or a new nursing director or something and by the time that's worked out the cat they wanted is gone. I really hope they can adopt Moses. He just took to that place like it was his long lost home yesterday.

Joey, who is fiercely territorial, has taken up guarding the top of the big yellow bucket where we keep the clean litter. Up to now, he's restricted himself to defending his cage and about a 1 foot radius around it. Branching out to the bucket greatly extends his territory. We haven't had to contend with a cat to get to the clean litter since Pumpkin got adopted, so we're all out of practice. Everybody was treating Joey with kid gloves. Then Roy, the new guy from out of the blue came in, and Joey jumps down and starts rubbing up against him and rolling over and stuff. I told him he'd better apply to adopt Joey ASAP!

The steps and the parking lot were covered with a thin coating of ice when I left the cat shelter and I was not looking forward to driving to Framingham to unstick Zsolt's e-mail. A few miles further south on 495, the freezing rain was so bad it was coating the windshield between swipes of the wiper blades, but at my house the precipitation was light snow. The forecasts all seemed to indicate it would get worse tonight and be worse west of here, but Zsolt talked me into driving out there anyway. The last thing I want to be is a weather wimp.

Turns out it wasn't just Zsolt's mother clogging up the e-mail. He had a couple of dozen messages with huge attachments filling up the disk. People have been sending him e-mail attachments for months without realizing he couldn't get at them and didn't know they were there. This strikes me as a design flaw in large popular e-mail provider's product.

We loaded the upgrade from 4 diskettes that another friend of his had backed it up onto. That took over an hour. Well over an hour. Once I got the upgrade installed and connected to his mailbox, discovering the mass quantities of attachments, it took hours to download them. It would download a few and then lose the connection. Repeatedly. None of the keyboard shortcuts for viewing the attachments worked, so I had to mouse around clicking all over the place at various menus to stash the attachments away in a folder for later reading. It was supper time and I was still downloading e-mail.

Gyongyi cooked supper for us: Hungarian mushroom soup. cucumber salad, and some kind of Hungarian potato and sausage paprikash dish. All, the while, the stuck e-mail continued to pour in.

After supper we went over to CompUSA to buy a new computer, one big enough and fast enough and with a CD drive. This was quite an adventure, looking at all the spiffy new machines with DVD and gigs and gigs of hard drive and so on. The store brand PC was on sale, and using my technique of stalling until they lowered the price, we got a pretty good price on it and a new monitor. The real adventure was paying for it though. It's not so much that I had agreed to put it on my credit card and have the institute pay me back. That they could handle. Nope. Gyongyi whipped out the tax exempt certificate and not only would the name International Dendrological Research Institute not fit in the cash register's pinched little computer mind, but the cashier kept saying "International Dental What?" Gyongyi had to keep spelling it for her, and fill out three separate forms just to get the tax exemption. Three forms? There's only one state to collect the sales tax!

When we, the international dental institute, finally go out to my car it's snowing significantly. The computer and monitor won't fit in my trunk so they end up in the back seat while Gyongyi sits on Zsolt's lap in the front seat. I'm glad we didn't have far to drive! I brushed the snow off the windows while they got settled and crawled back to their house.

Everything went smoothly with the setup until we tried to register the software with Microsoft. It core dumps! I haven't seen an hex dump in years. This amazed me. People really truly prefer this to the Mac? And besides the core dumping registration program, everything took eons and gave inexplicable error messages at the drop of a hat. I was not impressed.

Meanwhile, the last of the e-mail finished downloading onto the laptop, so I cleared out the mailbox and sanity was restored for the time being.

The drive home in the snow and freezing rain took way too long but was only really scary on the on/off ramps from 128 to 93 and from 93 to 125. Well, 125 was a little dicey in "valley of the static" but I made it home in one piece with no new dents in the Auntmobile.