I can touch type

Really, I can.  I just proved it to Josiah.  He wanted to know if I have to think in order to type.  I thought that was a silly question.  Of COURSE I have to think in order to type!!!  What he really wanted to know was if I had to think about where the keys are.  I said, yes, but he further wondered if I had to look at the keys in order to type.  I was pretty sure I did (I always do), but just out of curiosity, he asked me to type, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”  Which I did.

“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog/.”

Only one error; not too bad.

Then he asked me to do it with my eyes closed.  Sweet Georgia peaches!!!

“Rghe qwyucj vrioewb foir junoed iver the kast fij,”

We both had a good laugh over that.  Then I tried it a few more times, just for fun.

“Ehe wucko brown dghol jumped ovet the laus dfogh,”

“The qyuick brown gfox jumped over the lasty dog.”

“The auick brown coah jumnped ove thds lasy fgo,.”

At least I improve with practice!  Up to a point.

Josiah asked if I have to look at the keys ALL the time, and I told him that there are a few words that I can type without looking because I use them so frequently.  He said I have those words in muscle memory.  He then typed that same sentence (perfectly) with his eyes closed, and announced that, due to touch typing, for him ALL words are in muscle memory.  We therefore concluded that I either have no muscle or no memory.   = )

Going screenless

Andrew made some choices that resulted in some consequences, one of which is that he is to have no screen time until May 10.  Translation:  he can’t play any computer games, and he can’t watch any TV.  Now, this shouldn’t directly affect me, but I confess that it does.

For years at lunch, we watched “The Andy Griffith Show.”  That was fun and made me smile and reinforced some good values.  However, more recently it’s often just Andrew and me home alone at lunch, and Andrew’s viewing choice is typically HGTV.  Loyal readers and/or those who have been in our home – well, probably all the former are also the latter – know that our home in no way approximates anything on HGTV (much to Andrew’s ongoing displeasure), but I have learned that I really do enjoy watching some of those shows.  Yes, they are really all the same, and yes, those designers tend to make everything look the same, and no, I’m not about to do any of it in our house, but 30 minutes of mindless HGTV in the middle of my day is actually kind of relaxing.

No more.  = (  At least not in the near future.

So, here it is – lunchtime – and Andrew and I will do something more productive while we eat. . . like maybe, talk to each other!

Heard at supper

Us four and no more sat down to a supper of Malisa’s Chicken Enchiladas, cheese dip and chips, and sliced pears.  Scott prayed, we dug in, and the conversation began.  Josiah and Scott were talking, while Andrew and I listened and looked quizzically at each other.  I’m fairly facile with the English language, but their heavy usage of acronyms rendered the whole thing all Greek to me.

In the space of five minutes, I heard – but did not comprehend – the following:

dpi

tiff

ie5

jpeg  (I know that one! It’s a file extension for photos.  Pretty saavy, that Walnut Shade Mom, huh?)

ui

aspect ratio  (This is bound to be a fraction of some kind.)

artifacts  (These are evidently undesirable, as opposed to the kind that archaeologists unearth.)

png  (I thought that stood for Papua New Guinea, but instead, it’s something that always looks great.)

bit depth  (I’m fairly sure this is a condition that is corrected with orthodontics.)

So they spoke in this foreign language for quite a while, and even though I did earn a college degree and I listened very carefully, I couldn’t even figure out if they were talking about something for the Rendezvous or something for ANPAC or something for some aspect of ministry!  It turns out it was ANPAC (work-related), but that was not at all obvious to us non-geeks.

Perhaps I should keep a small glossary in my lap with my napkin.

A moment of silence is to be observed in honor of Othello

It seems that he’s having a little trouble breathing following an accident last night that could be described a a case of ministry-related violence.  Following the service, Othello was relaxing contentedly in his backpack, leaning against the sanctuary steps, while the Llama had fun chasing and being chased by younger kids.  A younger kid who shall remain nameless was then spotted hauling Othello on HIS back and grinning at the Llama.  Othello being the quiet type, the kid had no idea of his presence.  The Llama then mocked stalked the child, glaring in a sinister manner at said kid.  The kid, most assuredly thinking that the Llama’s backpack which he was wearing contained only the miscellaneous junk found in most backpacks, slipped it off his shoulder and dropped it on the floor.  OUCH!!!

Back at home, the Llama diagnosed a closed-head injury and administered appropriate first aid.  Othello has been, shall we say, slow to come around today, and surgery may be indicated.

Slower than Christmas?

That would be my trusty computer.  Right now, it’s kind of grunting and groaning under the weight of SO MANY gigabytes of memory in use. The little PC machine is getting older and slower, and it simply has to work harder to do all the tasks I expect of it.

Actually, my brain experiences similar overload responses several times a week.

But back to the computer. . . methinks it may finally be time to break down and buy a new one.  This situation has gendered much research and commentation in Walnut Shade as of late.

I have clearly stated what I want my computer to do:

~ Run Word, Excel, Firefox, Quicken, and QuickBooks with ease (and Publisher with difficulty, because I hate it)

~ Be compatible with our dinosaur version of Rosetta Stone, so Andrew can at least finish Spanish

~ Run and burn CDs

~ Run DVDs

~ Have multiple USB ports on the front to plug things in to

~ Accommodate mini-plug earphones (also with front jacks)

~ Run Lotus Organizer, or some similar scheduling program that can import my current stuff from Lotus

I think that’s about it, but there have been all kinds of discussions about things like laptops, big monitors, huge monitors, more than one monitor, desk rearrangements, and lots of words that I can’t even define, much less use intelligently in a sentence.  I have taken the Ostrich Approach to Computer Upgrades, which means giving your opinion, sitting back, waiting to see if something new appears, and if it does choosing to be thankful for it and attempt to learn all its new features with minimal frustration.

I’m a little concerned about that frustration thing.  Historically, I would not fall into the category of those given to change.  To say the very least.  I know that with whatever new computer lands on my desk, I will have to (A) learn a whole new operating system – note that the transition from 97 to XP was not without challenge, and now I will be staring down 7 each time I look at my screen; (B) learn new versions of Word and Excel – which, just from looking over other 7 users’ shoulders, I can tell are not set up in ways that are maximally congruent with my brain chemistry; and (C) do all that without owners’ manuals for reference, because nobody prints real books like that anymore – note that this lack of printed instruction leads invariably to either stress in the marriage (when I ask Scott for help) or frustration in the Pelican/Llama symbiosis (when I ask Josiah for help).

I am hopeful that one or more of the girls will be around when this grand shift occurs, as they tend to deal with me and my computer issues a bit more slowly, logically, and patiently than do some of the males in the household.

Then there’s the whole issue of learning to use a laptop as a laptop.  I really like the idea of a laptop; there are just a few specifics about them that are difficult for me:  their keyboards, their mice (their mice are MUCH worse than their keyboards), and their screens (which you have to keep adjusting to be able to see).  Then you also have the issue of charging their batteries and plugging and unplugging all the peripherals (my beloved keyboard, my beloved mouse, my critically important external hard drive, etc.)

Of course, I think my preference would be to use the laptop as a desktop (which is why Josiah suggested just getting me a new desktop), but while I may be perfectly content with that set-up, I fear that if my laptop just sits on my desktop and never moves, Scott will be frustrated that he spent the extra money and tried to set me up with a mobile system that I don’t use. That is to say, another opportunity for marital stress, which we would like to avoid.

The final issue as I see it – pun intended – concerns my 51-year-old eyes.  With my monitor at arm’s length, I can focus in my mid-range lenses.  However, the text has to be large enough for me to see it.  Once a laptop gets mounted up on a stand and moves 8 to 10 inches farther from my face, the text will have to be quite a bit larger in order for me to read it comfortably.  Some people may consider that font size downright huge.

One of the reasons Scott wants me to have a HUGE monitor is so that I can put two windows on it, side by side.  Now, that may well be a useful set-up, but it seems to me that if you want to put two windows on a screen where you used to put one, the text will have to be half as big, and it may well be that the aforementioned 51-year-old eyes won’t be able to read that text.

Ah, well.  I’m glad that I have chosen not to stress about this.  In fact, the only computer stresses I’ve had so far today have been when my computer wouldn’t let me update an email address in gmail, when it wouldn’t let me view my in-box, and when it wouldn’t let me play Words with Friends (online scrabble) with Katie.  Thankfully, after moaning to Josiah about those woes, I was able to come up with work-arounds:  I got on Scott’s computer to tend the email issues, and I conceded the game to Katie.

So far, I can still post to wordpress, and it seems to be not quite as slow as Christmas now.  = )

 

 

My phone may be dying – so sad, so sad

I like my phone a lot.

It’s very sturdy.  I can drop it, snap the battery and back back on, and always turns back on and works like a champ.

It’s loud.  I can actually hear well on it, as opposed to the house phone or face-to-face conversations.

It’s simple.  I can talk on it.  It doesn’t take pictures or play music or tune in the radio or shoot video.  If I absolutely have to text, I can.  It’s a phone.

But today, Scott told me that we’re going to have to get me another phone.  He claims that my phone doesn’t ring.  Hmmm. . . now, I guess that would be a problem.  He KEEPS calling me on the house phone on his way home from work, and that is obnoxious, because there’s so much static and I can’t hear him well.  It’s also cheaper to call my cell, so I’ve been wondering why he doesn’t.  It must be because he calls my cell first, but since it never rings, I don’t answer it.  That is probably frustrating for him – about as frustrating as the six months that his phone consistently hung up on me. . .

So now it looks like I will have to get a phone that does a whole lot of things I don’t want it to do and costs a lot of money for the privilege.  (Sigh)  I did try to buy a second phone like mine a couple years ago, against the day when mine should pass away.  I was going to buy it secretly and hide it away, and then at the necessary time I could just take the card out of my phone and stick it in the new one, and no one would be the wiser.  I tried, but when I went back to Wal-Mart, this handy little workhorse of a phone had already been phased out and was no longer available.

My phone only cost $25 and it has lasted well for probably four years.   I will now choose to be thankful for what I’ve had.  (Sniff, sniff)

Too many balances

We use Quicken to keep up with our finances, and there are a bunch of accounts in there:  the business account, the household account, and a number of credit card accounts.  We change the latter like some people change socks, in a never-ending attempt to accrue frequent flyer miles and/or hotel stays.  Those free perks are useful when your family tends to travel a lot and when your daughter is attending college 1043 miles from home.

With our household account, we have to be kind of careful not to run it too low.  That’s fine with me, and I’m glad to look at that account in Quicken from time to time, to make sure we’re not getting into the rubber zone.  My issue is that when you look at the household account in Quicken, it shows THREE (often widely different) balances:  online balance, current balance, and ending balance.  Sheesh!  In the olden days, one simply kept a running balance in one’s checkbook, and so one always knew how much money was where, but this day clearly is not olden.

Those three balances can differ by lots and lots of money, and I NEVER know which one really matters.  Occasionally, one of them has been a negative number, which scares me, but when I’d mention this to My Hero, he’d tell me that it didn’t matter and not to worry about it.  I wouldn’t worry, but I always wondered how he knew that it wasn’t cause for alarm.  Why couldn’t I know that unless he told me so?

I finally solved the problem of the balances.  (Side note:  That makes me think of Libra in the horoscope.  I’m a Libra, you know; not that I care anything about that).   I asked Scott which balance actually mattered, and he said, “current balance.”  So I took a sticky note and wrote in Sharpie marker, “current balance matters,” and taped it to my computer monitor.  As fate would have it, the very next time I went into Quicken to record stuff, ONLY TWO BALANCES were listed:  online and ending.  There was no current balance at all!  What’s a woman to do with that?!?!

I then asked him why the one that mattered was gone.  Why would it be gone, if it mattered so much?  He replied that if I put something in ahead (what does that mean and why would I do that?), then it would show a current balance.  Not understanding anything he was saying, I asked him which balance was second in importance.  It turns out that that would be the ending balance.  So now my amended sticky note says in Sharpie, “current balance matters,” with “ending” written beneath in ballpoint ink.

I just can stand to be unbalanced.

Dog whistle

I am aware that I have begun to lose a bit of my high frequency hearing.

A few years ago, we saw (or actually heard) a nifty exhibit at the St. Louis Science Center that demonstrated this fact.  You stand in front of speakers (or maybe you wear a headphones?) that produce a constant tone, and you can move a lever to change the pitch of the tone.  As you adjust it higher and higher, you can read on the display the exact frequency at which you suddenly hear nothing.

It’s very odd, because as you move the lever up, the tone doesn’t grow gradually softer until you can’t hear it; instead, it remains at full volume and then just turns off in an instant, like you’d turn off a light switch.  I no longer remember what that frequency was for me at that time, but the kids were amazed that they could clearly hear a high-pitched whine at a frequency where I heard absolutely nothing.

It seems – although I have no way to prove it – that my computer monitor emits a very annoying high-pitched squeal.  The kids come into the office and say things like, “Mom!  How can you STAND to listen to that all day?!??”  When I reply that all I hear is the whirring fan noise of the CPU, they shake their heads incredulously and say they’re glad it’s my monitor and not theirs.

Maybe my monitor is really a dog whistle in disguise.   Or maybe it’s a mom whistle.

Even trade?

Josiah was looking on craigslist at laptops.  He found someone who had one to sell but was not asking money for it.  Instead, s/he wanted to make a trade:  the laptop computer in exchange for “a very small chihuahua.”  Scott and I thought that was pretty funny!

Downgrading

I am not ashamed to admit that I have gone backwards.

Last fall, my brother gave me a cell phone of his that he was no longer using.  My trusty seven-year-old Nokia had finally gone to its final reward, and I was glad to receive his hand-me-down.  It was a Motorola phone and over the past few months I have systematically proven that I am just not nearly as tech-savvy as it is.

I can answer it, and I can call out on it, but that’s about it.  I know it has a lot of wonderful features, but I’ve never learned how to use them.  It can store multiple numbers for one name, which is useful, but it doesn’t tell me I have a message until 48 hours later.  That can be a little frustrating, especially for  message-leavers who never gets a call back from me.  Then the battery started falling off several times a day, and at that point, I began to think that maybe somewhere out there a better phone for me could be found.

Scott and I were window shopping for a phone for Katie’s birthday – HER trusty Nokia (same vintage) also being on its last legs and having gone AWOL in Virginia – and he wanted to get me a better phone, too.  I think he wanted me to have something like a Blackberry Pearl or an iPhone, but really, for me, those would all be overkill.

I need a phone with that doesn’t flip open and can perform these (and only these) functions:

1.  Have real buttons with numbers big enough for me to see and press

2.  Store up to 150 names and numbers

3.  Make outgoing calls

4.  Receive incoming calls

5.  Receive voice mail AND alert me to the existence of messages

6.  Show me the time of day

7.  Be loud enough for me to hear

That’s it.  Really and truly.  No joke.

I don’t need it to access the internet, take pictures, or play music.  (I have a computer, a camera, and a radio that do those things very well, thank you very much.)  I don’t need it to shoot video, play games, or display information in languages besides English.  I don’t need it to be my alarm clock or my calculator. I don’t need it to send or receive text messages or provide mobile email.  I just need a phone that will be a phone, that will give me my messages within a few minutes, and whose battery I don’t have to retrieve off the floor all day.

As we browsed options at the Mart of Walls, I was shocked to learn that it is possible for one to spend as much as $300 (or more) on a cell phone!!!  Even for Katie’s gift, we weren’t about to invest anything like that, and for a simple phone for me. . . well, since I didn’t want it to whistle Dixie in four-part harmony, surely we could find something more economical.

Then the friendly Wal-Mart associate pointed us – perhaps with some mild disdain – toward the display of $20 Go Phones.  For me, it was love at first sight, but Scott was skeptical.  To him, the phone looked cheap.  It didn’t have a zillion features (that I didn’t want or need).  But it was a Nokia, the Toyota of cell phones, if you ask me, and the blurb on the package indicated that it would do everything I could ever want a cell phone to do.

We bought that puppy, and I am so incredibly happy.  I finally have a phone that works the way a phone ought to work.  Its functions are intuitive for me, and on MY phone, that’s what matters.

I am presently working on entering my names and numbers. I have learned that in a cell phone, you can store names and numbers on the phone (which I inadvertently did with my brother’s Motorola) and/or on the SIM card (which I am doing with my Go Phone).  Then, when this phone dies in seven years, I will have all my necessary information on that teeny tiny chip, ready to load into my next Nokia.

At the time David gave me his former phone, he had told me that there was an interesting trend developing among some purchasers of new computers.  People were buying new machines that came pre-loaded with the “new and improved” Windows Vista operating system, but then they were paying extra fees to have Vista uninstalled and replaced with the older XP system.  In essence, they were paying more to downgrade.

We paid only $20 to downgrade to my nifty Go Phone, and despite the innate shame that such a move engenders in a techhy 21st century family, I’m fully convinced I got the best end of the deal.