May 24, 2005

• At the library… again

  
  

  I see that Greyfox passed along the sad news about the bashed and broken computer.  Yesterday was all-day stress for me, calling around, getting the instructions from the post office on what to do, setting up the meet later today with the tech in Wasilla (We’re going to stop going to the previous computer medic who replaced three hard drives for us, all before their warranty had run out, so that “all” we had to pay was his labor.) to get a diagnosis and repair/replacement estimate, and talking to both rosabelle and her techie roommate who had built the new machine and sent it to us. 

  
  

  For so long, the telephone line has been used more by our modem than by me.  I’ve been so accustomed to doing business online that I’m only gradually getting back into writing checks to pay bills and phoning to make changes in the car insurance, newspaper subscriptions, etc.  I think I may be losing some flexibility with age, in my mind as well as the body.

  
  

  I reactivated my Yahoo mail account (kathylynn_douglass, in case anyone wants to email me) so I could send rosabelle a message about the insurance red tape.  It was Doug who reminded me that I could use web-based mail from the public computers.  Duh!  Is this what Alzheimers is like, I wonder?  A couple of days ago, I let the dog in off his chain twice, each time having no memory of putting him out there in the first place.  I must have done it.  Nobody else was around who could have let him out. 

  
  

  I’m not sleepwalking all the time, just in little occasional spells, and my mind isn’t blank, just full of holes.  All those years that I smoked weed that was my excuse for the lapses.  Maybe that’s how Alzheimer’s slipped up without my noticing.

  
  

  Doug’s next fanfic writing tournament starts June 10.  Apparently, he’ll have to opt out of this one.

  
  

  We have a scary, tough choice to make.  I can tell the techs who do the diagnosis and estimate to go ahead and fix the machine or build us a replacement and put it on my credit card and hope and pray that we actually get an insurance settlement to reimburse us, or I can wait until the claim goes through before getting the thing fixed or replaced.  Option A holds some risks, especially if the weather continues as wet as it has been and Greyfox continues to be unable to open his roadside stand and do business.  Option B is the “living within my means” solution to which I was trained in childhood, but it means I’ll be back online later if ever.  Some of us never outgrow that desire for instant gratification, y’know?  Can you tell that I trust insurance companies about as much as I trust advertisers and the government?

  
  

  I took more pictures yesterday.  The muskeg is still flooded but not overflowing onto the road.  The swamp grass hasn’t yet grown enough to break the water’s surface up at our place, but here farther down the valley where the thaw came earlier there is the green of grass showing above the water in many places.  Yesterday while Doug and I were standing out in the yard (without the camera) two pairs of snow geese flew over, each pair on its own course and the two courses converging over the muskeg just across the road from us.  Their wings were so slient that we wouldn’t have seen them in flight if one of them hadn’t honked a few times in an apparent greeting.  There are fewer mosquito larvae in the water now, the submersible beetles have grown bigger, and I saw a few tadpoles yesterday.  I saw one big beetle eat a tadpole.  Dammit!  There was a mosquito larvae only about an inch away, but the beetle was indiscriminate, or else the tadpole was tastier.

  
  

  I’m off to Wasilla now, to take the comp to the techs, and hit the library there for some more episodes of  I Claudius, which we hadn’t seen since Doug was a toddler.  He remembered the intro but nothing else.  The thing that struck me on viewing the first episode was how slow it was.  Video cuts have become much faster, shorter, in the last 20-some years.  We had gotten the idea of checking out the Claudius videos from the librarian here in Willow when we checked out some Brother Cafael DVDs last week.  We were talking about how much we liked Derek Jacobi, and she got on her computer and discovered that the Wasilla library had the whole series checked in at the time.  All the libraries in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley are on one system.  It’s great.

  
  

  Later on this evening, Greyfox and I will go to the Tuesday Space Cadets NA meeting.   Yesterday was our second NA birthday.  It’s not such a big deal for me.  I’ve got several “birthdays”, having quit the IV drugs thirty-some years ago and having last been drunk in 1992 and quitting sugar (the BIG one) in 2002.  Greyfox’s accomplishment two years ago was momentous.  He quit alcohol, tobacco and marijuana (and started cutting down on sugar) all at once.  Of  course, the whole thing is totally meaningless to us (though it means a lot to our NA friends) because we’re both still addicted to caffeine and often need to use other herbal stimulants such as guarana and ephedra to have the energy to attend NA meetings.  It is, they say, a “program of complete abstinence from all drugs,” except (we say) those they approve of or can’t kick (such as tobacco).  But as they say in AA, at least we’re not drinking.

  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational. Cultural Creative 88% Idealist 88% Existentialist 75% Postmodernist 63% Modernist 25% Materialist 19% Romanticist 19% Fundamentalist 13% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

  
  

  

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