“Many are the world’s wonders, and none more wonderful than….” Man, in the original Greek poem*, but this is about Computers.\u00a0 Wonderful indeed, but among their “wonders” in the sense of oddnesses, is their propensity for working wonderfully and then not working, with no explanation whatever, and then, after snarling, turning them off, turning them back on, snarling again, and walking away overnight…they turn on, all bright faced and grinning and pretend nothing ever happened.<\/p>\n
Or, even more annoyingly, pretend they haven’t a clue who you are or why you think you have a right to poke them and say “HEY!” in their ear.\u00a0 So right now I’ve become unknown to Twitter (again) as well as Facebook (still) and my faithful old browser announced last night that I didn’t actually exist, did I?<\/p>\n
This morning it admits I exist but asked “New here?\u00a0 Let’s get started…”\u00a0 No, you witless wonder, I muttered, I’m not new here and you’ve been my browser since Netscape went away, and I know if I follow the fairy trail to “let’s get started” you’ll suddenly say you can’t make me an account because I already have one and why am I not in possession of my password and username?\u00a0\u00a0 Luckily, it had this blog on its front page list for me (see, it KNOWS I’m not new here, but it has found some electronic reason to quibble) so I could get here to let people know, one more that Things Are In Confusion Country.<\/p>\n
*The quote is either from Pindar or a chorus from one of Sophocles’ plays, but where o where are my Greek texts?\u00a0 Somewhere in the back corner there, covered in dust, and no I’m not going to go sneezing over to find them.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile the weight loss program was going fine until this morning when I managed to gain a pound or so *overnight* after two days at a weight I was going to brag about.\u00a0 Weight does not like to be bragged about but I can’t figure out how, with nothing eaten or drunk overnight or this morning, it’s gone UP in spite of what (she attempts to say delicately) has vanished into the unmentionable.\u00a0 Surely it should have gone down.\u00a0 SIGH.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I could cheat and use yesterday evening’s weight, but that is, after all cheating.\u00a0 The official weigh in is Monday before breakfast.<\/p>\n
Oh, well.\u00a0 I stomped a scorpion at 2:30 am, so that’s good.<\/p>\n
Despite layers of bulky protective software on the computer, I’ve had problems with incoming mail to an address I no longer use, and whose account I deleted from my mail software.\u00a0 Repeatedly there’s been some level of malware in there that has to be marked, scrubbed, and then the machine restarted.<\/p>\n
But the horses are both OK, doing well, and needing hooves trimmed.<\/p>\n
And my clothes are looser.<\/p>\n
Other Business (not writing, not horses) obscured last week just about completely, and the final cherry on that was someone needing the name of the photographer for an image they wanted to use in advertising.\u00a0 I had to dig through an avalanche of stuff but found it and got it mailed off.\u00a0 The main ice cream sundae is still ongoing and will be for quite awhile, probably.\u00a0\u00a0 (Oh.\u00a0 Wait.\u00a0 There’s something I was supposed to mail off and still need to mail off and need to extract from the papers on my desk and get into the mail today.\u00a0 Umph.\u00a0\u00a0 Stories on paper are one thing.\u00a0 Paperwork to be signed, dated, and the form filled out correctly is…rather like wanted software in a computer,\u00a0 in my brain.\u00a0 It wanders in and out of consciousness.\u00a0 Everybody wants their paper filled out, signed, dated, the moment it arrives, even if it needs to be held until something else is completed (which is what the filling out is for: were a, b, c, d done, and by whom, and the date completed.)\u00a0\u00a0 This Other Business isn’t going to make me money, but it’s going to remove from my list of to-dos something that costs me money and time and worries.<\/p>\n
And Richard is back from taking M- to the dentist and then down to Austin and then back here.\u00a0 Or there’s a prowler in the house.\u00a0 Guess I should go see…..of course, it was Richard.\u00a0 We went out in the yard to look at a wasp burrow I’d spotted this morning on the path to the north lot gate (we have three known burrowing wasps, one red with golden wings, one very large black with black wings, and one about the size of the red one that’s shiny black with iridescent blue wings), and the horses grazing in the north lot spotted us and came trotting up to the barn, not directly to us.<\/p>\n
Communication.\u00a0 If a horse goes to the barn other than at feeding time, but only after seeing us, it means “something needs to change in the barn.”\u00a0 They *could* just be hoping for cookies, but with Rags actually trotting fast to the barn in the middle of the day and Tigger giving me The Look, I guessed it was that they’d drunk a lot of water–the weather switched suddenly to very hot, very bright, very dry, from warm and moist.\u00a0 The breeze is hot and dry.\u00a0 The ground is hardening.\u00a0 So we walked back around and into the barn, and one look around the corner from the aisle told me yup, the water was down *a lot* by 1 pm-ish.\u00a0 Still enough water maybe, but heat will continue to build into the afternoon.<\/p>\n
I gave each horse a Lesser Cookie for good communication, and then had to correct Rags for trying to rob my empty pockets and check out my legs.\u00a0 Got both tubs refilled; Rags went over and drank and drank and drank…he always drinks more.\u00a0\u00a0 Meanwhile Tigger walked up to the aisle gate and said (ears, angle of head) “That wasn’t enough cookie, I want a better one.”\u00a0\u00a0 As it was a very polite ask, he got a Medium Cookie (Mrs. Pastures).\u00a0\u00a0 Best Cookies are reserved for Tigger for training sessions: it was way too hot for a training session.<\/p>\n
While Tigger drank (he drinks less than Rags; even though he’s a little plump, he’s got a streamlined build and Rags is a barrel with legs), Rags attempted to insist on more cookie for himself…but not as politely, so he had a lesson in “backing up, waiting, coming up when asked, then waiting again and not following right on my heels.”\u00a0 This still requires the presence of Mr.Dressage Whip or a pretty firm smack with the hand.\u00a0 He respects Mr. Dressage Whip and it often takes only a soft tap.\u00a0\u00a0 I want to transfer his understanding of Mr. Dressage Whip’s movements to a hand gesture.<\/p>\n
Best Cookies are Stud Muffins, and when I’m working with Tigger they’re broken into several pieces.\u00a0\u00a0 I kind of wish they were the size of the Mrs. Pastures ones, because they’re very rich.<\/p>\n
I don’t know if I’ll be able to get back into the browser again or not…we’ll have to see how it goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Many are the world’s wonders, and none more wonderful than….” Man, in the original Greek poem*, but this is about Computers.\u00a0 Wonderful indeed, but among their “wonders” in the sense of oddnesses, is their propensity for working wonderfully and then not working, with no explanation whatever, and then, after snarling, turning them off, turning them Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":813,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions\/813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}