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.

“Mom, may I use your blow dryer?”

So said the fifteen-year-old male with the half-inch long buzz cut.  Hmmm…  I asked WHY he wanted to use it and WHERE he planned to use it.

He wanted to try to dry out an old computer keyboard that may have become moist inside when he wiped off the keys with a damp paper towel.  I think the keyboard was already dead.  It’s definitely dead now.

The game of Life

Give it to Mikey.  He eats everything.

Tonight we played Life as a family and it was an experience.  I ended up being a teacher who was a doctor on the side.  Josiah complained about absolutely everything imaginable for the entire game and ended up winning.  The boys had somehow lost the little plastic piece that the wheel spins against, so Scott made a cardboard one that had to be manually held in place for each spin.  Tedious, but we Robertses are resilient if anything.

In other news, we are back to three usable, insured cars here at home.  The maroon Toyota had sat most of the summer because the A/C in it doesn’t work and the car is too old to warrant replacing it.  After sitting on our long skinny used car lot, it failed to start once we reinstated its insurance.  It turns out the battery had died, so Scott got a new one plus an oil change at Wal-Mart today.

Few people are steadfast enough to spend an hour in Wal-Mart without buying anything, and Scott is no exception.  There’s the matter of his cell phone.  You see, he had bought Katie a new one at Christmas, but she didn’t use it and it somehow disappeared from planet Earth.  Then, while Aunt Kristy was here, Scott’s cell phone died.  Kristy had a cell phone, but she was leaving for Africa and needed to get rid of it.  She gave it to Scott (or maybe he paid her something for it; I can’t remember), and although it’s pretty bare bones, he has used it for several months.

However, we were all sure that when Katie prepared to move to college, the ensuing excavation would turn up that brand new phone of hers, which has lots of nice features.  Scott would then confiscate that one.  It was not to be.  As mentioned above, only God himself knows for sure where that phone is.  So today, while at Wal-Mart, Scott bought himself a Blackberry.  Now, I don’t know anything about blackberries, other than the fact that when I was a child we sure picked a lot of sweet ones back by the creek on my grandparents’ land.  Hey, I’m the person whose “Palm Pilot” is a wall calendar that measures 17″ by 24″!

As I blog, Scott, who HATES to read the directions, is sitting at his desk pushing buttons on his Blackberry and glancing occasionally at the extensive paperwork with which it arrived.  I fear the next thing will be to add text messaging to our cell phone plan, as Scott says that with this phone he will be able to check his email even from other countries!

O, technology.  It is part of our game of Life.  Tonight Josiah’s career was Tech Support.

A post with a picture?

I will now try to learn how to put a picture in a blog post.

WordPress allows a certain amount of file space for free. I like free. I do not plan to pay to be able to put pictures in my blog! For that reason, I don’t think there will be many pictures in the blog posts themselves (assuming I figure out how to do it), but you can always go to my Flickr pictures over to the right. > >

If you click on More Pictures, you will be able to see my most recently uploaded pictures (which could have been taken two years ago) in a fairly large size and no particular order on the left. On the right, you can look at my sets of pictures. Over time, I am working to get the pictures in my sets labeled, and within each set, I’m trying to put them in some kind of logical order.

And now, for my big moment – putting a picture in this post. I’m going to try the one of Grandma at the Hillbilly Bowl. Here she is, in all her glory. Hmmm. . . I can’t tell if it worked. Maybe I have to hit Publish. . .

Okay, that didn’t work. Let me see what else I can try.

Maybe I need “copy image location.” Let’s try to put Grandma here: Hot Dog!! There she is. But I still have a few problems. For one thing, I can’t figure out how to type UNDER the picture.

I switched from Visual to HTML. Now if I switch back, I wonder if this sentence will appear beneath Grandma. . . ? Oh, how sweet! It did.

One of my other problems is that Grandma seems to be too big. I mean, she looks fine, but I am concerned that the file size of the picture is too big. I wonder how I can make her file size smaller AND her appearance smaller. If I can figure THAT out, maybe I cam make MY appearance smaller. Ha!

If any of you techno-whizzes know how to do that, please advise. I pasted Grandma’s location in from where she is on my Flickr site, NOT where she is on my own computer.

I wonder how I can find out how many pixels she is in this post. I know how big she is on my computer, but I purposely didn’t use that one, because I know it’s really big. WordPress help seemed to indicate that Flickr automatically re-sizes, which is why I inserted Grandma from Flickr, but I don’t know how to know how big she is on Flickr or here.

It’s late, so I will quit playing with this. If you want to see Grandma’s excellent bowling form, there’s a Flickr set over there >>> called bowling with Grandma.

Enjoy!

(5 minutes later. . .)

Okay, I lied.  I’m still playing with it.  I figured out that Grandma on my computer is 3.10 MB.  However, on the Flickr site and in this post, she is only 132.77 KB.  That is significantly smaller, so I guess I am all right.

Now I really will log off.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to

First, it was the attic air conditioner.  It’s actually a heat pump that’s about 11 years old.  It quit working a couple weeks ago.  Shouldn’t such a beast last longer than 11 years?  I thought such things should last 15 or 20 years.  I guess they don’t make them like they used to.  Now I’m waiting on the heat and air man to come give us a diagnosis.  Hopefully it’s not really dead, just sick.  It’s awfully hot for the girls who are living up there right now.

Next there was Jessica’s cell phone.  It’s six months old, and it quit working a few days ago.  Now, while our family CAN function without four working cell phones, it’s getting mighty inconvenient – to say the least.  Hers is under warranty and can be replaced, but AT&T will have to mail us a replacement. . . so we wait.

Then there’s Scott’s cell phone.  It’s older; maybe three years old, I’m guessing.  It died the day after Jessica’s, and this is critical as he uses it continually to do his job and ministry.  He confiscated mine for the time being.  And speaking of mine, it’s at least six years old, which is very old for today’s electronic devices.  It has never given me any trouble, but then, all it does is make and receive phone calls.  It doesn’t flip open, or have a hands-free headset.  It doesn’t take pictures or connect to the Internet.  It’s also nice and loud, and since I often cannot hear on our land line, I use my phone a lot, and they clearly don’t make cell phones like they used to.

I could also mention the hand mixer.  I had a Cuisinart that I loved, loved loved.  I used it for about three years and it died.  I tried to buy another just like it, but that exact model was no longer made.  I bought the comparable one (also by Cuisinart), but it was slightly more expensive, not quite as sturdy, and had a poorer ergonomic design. (Why DO companies “improve” a great product in order to make it worse?!?)  So this morning, Jessica was whipping up some Neiman Marcus Brownies for the Alaska Mission trip team’s supper dessert, and my SECOND (less than two year old)  hand mixer died.  It would only turn one of the beaters, which – trust me – causes a horrid clanging, scraping sound.  I will buy another mixer shortly, but it won’t be a Cuisinart.  Since hand mixers are evidently designed to be annual purchases now, it will be a cheap, no-name one!  The amazing thing is that my mom had a hand mixer that I am pretty sure I can remember her using  back when I was a child in Cincinnati.  I am pretty sure her old faithful unit worked until something like five years ago, which means it lasted for over 30 years.  They surely don’t make mixers like they used to!

I wonder. . . if “they” did make things like they used to, could we afford to buy them?

Feeling kind of dumb (or “Lost in a remote wilderness”)

It was almost 10:15 PM. Everyone was in bed and I was headed that way, but first I needed to go down, take the finished bread out of the machine and lock up. Once down there, I grabbed a snack, and while I stood there munching, it occurred to me that I could watch the weather, the sports, and then maybe a few minutes of M*A*S*H before retiring for the night.

I moseyed into the living room and pressed the power button on the TV. So far, so good. I went to the remote basket and picked up one of the four, selecting it purely because it was the shortest. We only have one TV, so I have never been quite sure why we have four remotes, but I can’t get rid of any of them because I don’t know what any of them do.

I punched the top right button repeatedly until the screen changed from static to AV1 to AV2 to Svideo. That stands for Scott’s Video and it’s the one that lets you watch TV. Only tonight it didn’t. Normally, when you get to Svideo, you wait a moment and KY3 (the local NBC affiliate) comes on. Tonight, the screen just stayed solid white and there was no sound.

I guess I could have pulled out another remote and started punching buttons, but in so doing I may have messed things up badly enough that no one would ever be able to watch TV again. It wasn’t THAT important for me to see M*A*S*H. (By now, the weather was over and sports was probably half gone, as well.)

I pressed the power button for the Dish Network box, and when that didn’t make anything happen, I just stood there, staring stupidly at the blank screen, and thinking, “we pay all this money for Dish Network, and it lets us access something like 100 channels, but I – with a college degree, mind you – can’t even figure out how to turn on my own TV.”

It was a depressing moment. Of course, I could have wakened a child and asked him/her to turn the TV on for me, but I didn’t. I just ate a peanut butter cup and went to bed.

* Mental note for tomorrow: ask a son how to turn on the TV

What does empty mean to you?

I like email, but sometimes it can be darn cantankerous.

Our ministry has an email list. We send updates to our partners roughly every week (or every other week, or whenever Scott says, “You know, we haven’t sent an update in a while. Would you write one today?”) and sometimes daily. Lately, we have learned that many of the folks on our email list are not receiving what we send.

Troubleshooting queen that I am, I did a trial (experimental, not judicial) yesterday. I sent out an email asking everyone who received it to reply with “got it” in the subject line. I received two replies, which, out of nearly 150 addresses, was disheartening. I use Outlook Express to get my email.

I then went to the online inbox for the address to which people had been asked to reply. It was empty, but I noticed that there is also a “junk” folder and a “trash” folder, both of which said “empty” beside them. I had never actually opened either of those, because obviously I could tell by looking at them that they were (duh!) empty. However, something urged me to open the trash folder anyway, and lo and behold there were almost 200 messages in there, some from up to six months ago! So “empty” didn’t mean the folder was empty. It meant that I should click on the word “empty” in order to empty the folder. Aha! I’ve been home all along, but now the lights are on.

I will not bore you with the details of trying to figure out how and why all those replies got into the trash folder. Suffice it to say it involved another hour or so of computer fun, fun, fun and all kind of gyrations with our ISP, the web-based email provider, mail forward, and account settings.  I enjoyed reading all 175 of those replies and I almost cried with gratitude.  You see, for months, we have not heard much from our partners and we assumed that people just didn’t care.  Those emails showed that LOTS of people do care a great deal!  Yay!

I think it’s all straightened out now, and I think I can hit mail forward and receive into Outlook Express the messages that are being sent to me. Of course, that doesn’t solve the problem of a LOT of our outbound ministry updates being returned to me undeliverable, (all suspiciously to yahoo addresses. . . hmmm. . .), but that will be a challenge for another day.

And now my trash folder is really and truly “empty.”

Using my own computer. . . and still married

After about 20 hours of Scott’s work, a few hours of Josiah’s and maybe an hour of Katie’s (?), my computer is up and running on some drive or the other.  Everything seems to be working fine except my email, to which Scott still needs to do something.  I would do that something myself, but I don’t know what it is.

However, given the stress and strain that this reformat has put on our relationship, I think that it is time for me to take a class in how to reformat a computer.  I need to remember that Scott resents having to fix my computer, and he needs to remember that I resent his changing my computer without telling me.  Maybe learning how to do this stuff myself will eliminate both problems.