humidify

February 16, 2002

Today's Reading
The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes by Peter Matthiessen

This Year's Reading
2002 Book List

Photos:

Beethoven

Gypsy

Jubilee

Tinkerbelle

Adopt these cats at the Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society

My life has become unmanageable. But you knew that already. My laundry is out of control. My house is out of control. Even my hair is out of control. And now Wilbur is sneezing like crazy and constantly closing his right eye. So dirty jeans, bad hair, and all I pack Wilbur into his new cat carrier with the metal door (last time I took him to the vet he broke the old carrier's plastic door right off its hinges) and drive him over to the vet.

Now to Wilbur the vet office is a place where there are lots of other animals (a very bad thing in his mind) and women in white coats who stick thermometers up his butt (a very bad thing in his mind). He does not enjoy this. Fortunately, I keep a tight enough grip on the scruff of his neck that he does no bodily harm to the vet who looks young enough to be my granddaughter. When did I get this old? The impossibly young vet concludes he has a flare-up of some viral upper respiratory thing (possibly herpes or some other kind of virus that I didn't quite catch) and it will run its course in a couple of weeks. All I have to do is humidify his environment, which should also help my swollen inflamed sinuses too. She suggests inviting him into the bathroom when I shower and buying a humidifier for my house (or turning on the one I have if I have one but I don't because the one I used to have crapped out years ago.)

Back home, Wilbur stomps off to hide under the couch lest I feel a need to take him to the vet again. I turn on my newly upgraded (to Mac OS 8.6) antique Mac to print out some documents that I promised to drop off at the shelter today. The printer, which has been flaky for about a week, emits a shrieking grinding noise, clunks ominously, and flashes all its lights. The error message from the Print Monitor says to consult with the place I bought the printer. Uh oh! OK, so I knew I was pushing the limits of its duty cycle, but it couldn't have waited say 5 more pages to give up the ghost? To add incomprehensibility to unmanageability, I discover I can't even create PDF files to take to Kinko's so I am screwed. Apparently my obsolete version of Adobe Distiller doesn't work on Mac OS 8.6. (Oh and apropos of nothing relevant here, I upgraded to Netscape 6.2 in order to be compliant to "web standards" and now my computer crashes whenever I access my own freakin' web site). Grrr. So I head off to the shelter without the promised documents.

We have this obsolete laptop at the shelter, donated of course. It arrived with the disk full so we couldn't do anything with it. I deleted tons of files, mostly huge video files, and installed Easy Uninstaller to remove applications. I reclaimed enough disk space that I could install Eudora. I configured Eudora to retrieve email from our account. It worked once or twice. That was a few months ago. It doesn't work now.

Unbeknownst to me, nobody has been using it in months. It has been gathering dust. Now everybody is after me to get it working again.

And so today...

I turned the darn thing on and DOS gave me tons of messages about files that need to be uninstalled and registry keys that are corrupt, broken, or otherwise unhappy. I ran the Fix Registry function of Easy Uninstaller repeatedly (you have to do that because fixing one batch of corrupt registry keys reveals another and so on) like 8 or 9 times until it stopped finding problems. So the registry seems fixed.

Then I ran Eudora, connected successfully to the host and checked email. It told me there wasn't any. I sent myself a message. It told me there wasn't any. I called another MRFRS person and had her send a message. Eudora still told me I had no new mail. Then Stacy called telling me she had retrieved my message and the other person's message successfully.

I reviewed the settings and the only thing I had entered wrong was the return address (mrfrs1 instead of mrfrs) which shouldn't have affected whether I could retrieve mail.

At that point Stacy exclaims: "it's not rocket science!" To which I reply that I had an easier time setting up email on the Hungarian botanists' PCs in Hungary with all the messages in Hungarian. :-) She suggested calling our webmaster and dropping it off at his house. He wasn't home. So much for that idea.

And when I shut it down and restarted it, it still gave me messages about things that needed to be uninstalled so I obviously uninstalled the wrong things or failed to uninstall the right things. Or there are immortal files...

Anyway, I can't for the life of me figure out what is going on with the email. I can only think that something deep within some configuration file somewhere is set wrong, or something on the host is set to mark the email as read once it forwards it to Stacy or something. The laptop is still sitting there on the desk looking all dusty and useless. I hereby declare myself clueless. Maybe I should humidify its environment.

At least most of the new cats cooperate in having their pictures taken for the web site. Except Noni, who is even less interested in having her picture taken than she was last week. I guess if she's not ready to be on the web site, she's not exactly ready to be adopted either. Poor Noni. All she likes to do is curl up in her litter box and hiss.

Ringo is back again. Apparently his new person though he dearly loves Ringo does not have permission from his landlord to have a cat. Poor Ringo. Plus he's sick again with a humungous fever. There are detailed instructions for applying alcohol to his feet written on his cage card. Poor Ringo.

Meanwhile, the environment has humidified itself without my intervention. It's a balmy, moist, almost tropical 40 degrees out. I am in shirtsleeves when I stop at the hardware store on the way home to fetch the replacement window panel for my storm door (or whatever normal people in the rest of the country call those aluminum doors outside the real door). I had dropped it off a week ago to be repaired or a new one built after months of tolerating being stabbed by the progressively more and more bent piece of aluminum sticking out of it since one of the local kids broke the plexiglass window pane with football. I didn't think footballs were supposed to be able to break plexiglass. Anyway, the bent aluminum had already ripped my jeans and a shirt and given me a huge cut on the left arm before I finally gave in and did something about this. The hardware store had painstakingly bent the aluminum back into place around a brand new plexiglass pane. Molded it, is what they guy at the hardware store said. He had tried to get replacement stock but couldn't. Anyway, as long as it fits I don't care.

Naturally to replace the window, I have the door open. Wilbur, who has hitherto been sulking under the couch, scrambles out to eat dead grass in the back yard. He's crouched down in the shambles of weeds and trash when the Russian Parking Space Blocker notices I am struggling to fit this window back in and offers to help. Surprised, I accept. With the Russian Parking Space Blocker comes Gerry the Russian Speaking Dog who wants to play with Wilbur. Russian Parking Space Blocker assures me that Russian Speaking Dog has never fought with a cat and won't hurt Wilbur. Indeed he puts on a play face and tries to get Wilbur to play. Wilbur thinks other animals are a bad thing. He things the Russian Speaking Dog is a bad thing. He puffs up to well over twice his size - I didn't know his hair was this long - and raises his paw to swipe at the dog. I explain to the Russian Parking Space Blocker that I am more afraid that Wilbur will hurt the Russian Speaking Dog than that the Russian Speaking Dog will hurt Wilbur. He tries to call off the dog, but the dog interprets this as an invitation to come into my kitchen! Yikes! Mrs. Russian Parking Space Blocker comes over to get the dog and I dash out and grab Wilbur. I dump him on the kitchen counter, where he stays while the parking space blocker and I finish putting the door back together.

When the door is repaired and Wilbur is back under the couch sulking, I drag one of the several bags of pending laundry out to the car thinking I'll drop it off at Cleancraft and stop on the way back for a humidifier at CVS or something. Only then do I realize I am totally exhausted, not fit for laundry, humidifier shopping, boiling water, or attending to my bad hair day. And boy do my sinuses hurt.