January 7, 2010
Dear Everyone:
Happy New Year!
“Marshall” drove up from
Fresno on
Christmas Eve and he and “Jeannie”
came down to my “new” place to admire the
holiday lights and my “tree”,
complete with tiny lights and little
University of Oregon
ducks with
Santa hats. “Jeannie”, who
is used to seeing my place in its usual state of chaos, upon seeing it
clean and decorated for the Holidays, remarked:
“Wow.”
Then we went out for our traditional Christmas Eve meal at a nearby
Chinese restaurant.
Apparently, we aren’t the only ones who have this tradition.
Good thing I made a reservation.
Christmas Day was spent at “Jeannie’s” because she has more room.
“Jeannie” presented “Marshall” and me with new
umbrellas (you can
never have too many umbrellas) and gift cards, to which we exclaimed,
“Just what I’ve always wanted!”
I gave toys from the
Exploratorium and
Santa provided
DVD movies,
including the one that “Jeannie” had specifically requested.
“Marshall” gave coffee mugs and gift cards, a very generous one
for movies to me. He also
brought each of us a beautiful
Williams-Sonoma gift box containing a
wooden cutting board in the shape of a pig.
(For those who didn’t grow up with us, our mother had just such a
cutting board for decades.)
Then “Marshall” and “Jeannie” went on their traditional hike up the hill
to get out of the house for a while.
We watched part of “Jeannie’s” movie until it was time to go to
dinner at the Duck Club. It
was a very elegant meal.
Afterwards we watched the end of the movie and the gag reel that
“Jeannie” knew would be in there somewhere.
“Marshall” went back to Fresno on Saturday.
“Jeannie” came down to my place on Monday with the intention of
going to see
Avatar at the
IMAX Theater in
Dublin.
However, we weren’t the only ones with that idea and the movie was sold
out except for the very last showing.
Instead we bought tickets to the noon showing the next day.
Then we visited the big, blue warehouse electronics store as
“Jeannie” needed some more
USB flash drives.
Back at my place we discovered that my home
laptop was in a death
spiral. It would only open
in “Safe Mode”. Fortunately,
I had almost everything backed up to yet another USB flash drive.
I went to one of the big warehouse office stores and picked out a
new laptop and had the store’s “tech department” do all the work of
setting it up for me.
I had planned to replace the four-year-old
XP laptop with a new one once
Windows 7 came out; I just hadn’t planned on doing it so soon.
When I got it home and fired it up, it found my
wireless router
(and quite a few others in the neighborhood).
When I tried to connect, the router requested the
Encryption Key.
That’s the 18-63 character security key that the router generates
the first time you use it. I
had printed it out when I installed the router many years ago.
Thing was, I knew exactly where it was in my old place.
Trouble was it wasn’t there anymore.
I went into the second bedroom, where the router lives and looked
in the drawer that I had designated for computer-relate things.
Not there. Then I
looked at the router itself and saw that it was standing on several
pieces of paper. Sure
enough, the top piece of paper was the one with the Encryption Key.
So I was able to get onto the
Internet fairly easily.
A new computer frequently means new other things.
Newer version of software.
New software because the old software isn’t supported anymore.
A new printer, which was able to find my router on the first try.
I’m gradually getting the other peripherals connected.
But enough about that.
Movies…
We did get in to see Avatar on
Tuesday. “Jeannie” summed it
up in three words: “Very
pretty colors.”
James
Cameron, who won the
Oscar for
Titanic over ten years ago, has been wanting to make this picture
for a long time, but had to wait for the technology to catch up to his
“vision”.
The whole thing is visually stunning and incredibly detailed.
If you decide to see it, do it on the largest screen that you
can. And you still won’t
catch all of it, unless you become a fanatic and see it dozens of times.
The plot is fairly simplistic.
Greedy humans bad.
Generous humans and big, blue people good.
Lovely aerial “jellyfish” float around at will.
It’s definitely fun on the first go around.
Not recommended for people who suffer from
acrophobia or
motion
sickness. Check all logic at
the door.
We also saw
It’s Complicated
on New Year’s Day, using the gift card that “Marshall” had given me.
It’s not complicated, it’s a
Chick Flick.
Refreshingly, all the “chicks” are over fifty.
Meryl Streep, who showed a flair for comedy in last year’s
Mama Mia! plays Jane, a woman
who’s been divorced for over ten years.
She’s beginning to get attracted to an
architect (Steve Martin)
who is going to help renovate her kitchen.
She has a thriving business in a bakery restaurant in
Santa
Barbara.
Her youngest is graduating from college in
New York, so the family gets
together and her ex-husband, Jake, played by
Alec Baldwin, is staying at
the same hotel. They have a
drunken fling (oops!) and that starts the “complicated” part.
The best scenes are those with Jane’s future son-in-law, played by
John
Krasinski. He does a
wonderful job with reactions.
Great fun.
Now it’s time for me to go back to fighting with
Quicken
(Microsoft
bailed on MS Money, which I’ve used since I started my checking account
at the Credit Union in 2003.)
Love, as always,
Pete
| Previous | Next |