Odds and Ends

Today I tried an asian pear for the first time. Wow, they're delicious!

I went to drop off some cookbooks at the cookbook swap in order to pare down my collection. It didn't quite work the way I intended. I dropped off three and came home with eleven.

And finally, this morning there was a squirrel in the tree outside my bedroom window who was quacking like a duck . I got a bit of video of it. Most of the time in this the squirrel is expanding his repertoire to other birds, but there's some quacking in it.

This one's for Sebethis

Happy National Punctuation Day!

Bad grammar is my pet peeve in books. Nothing throws me out of a story faster than a badly placed comma. Nit-picky I know, but when the flow of language is interrupted I get cranky.

So Happy National Punctuation Day, everyone!

If the oldsters can do it...

I still want a Wii. It's not at the top of my list, but every once in a while I see an article like this and remember how much I want one.

Holiday

Happy New Year, y'all!

Edward Gorey's "Trouble with Tribbles"

Click on the picture and then scroll down a bit to see this amazing Edward Gorey adaptation of the classic Star Trek episode.

RIP Madeleine L'Engle

It's been flying around the internet that Madeleine L'Engle (author of "A Wrinkle in Time" among many others) died last night at the age of 88.

I am sad.

Yay!

Computer all fixed! I'm a genius!

Now I'm toying with idea of installing Linux, just because.

The (not-so-perfect) end to the weekend

Yesterday after coming back from Boston I decided to fix my computer. It had been running slowly and randomly giving me the blue screen of death for the past few months, and I decided that a complete reformat and reinstall was the way to go. More fool I.

I backed everything up and reformatted the partition, and then reinstalled Windows XP. After a few hours of various installation stuff, I was prompted to log in. Once logged in the screen went blue. Not the blue screen of death, but a lovely robin's egg blue background with nothing on the desktop. I had a mouse pointer but nothing to point to. The mouse buttons did not work. CTRL-ALT-DEL did work so I was able to access the task manager, but that didn't help me any.

I'm going to try to reinstall the reinstall tonight, but I don't have high hopes. This kickstarted my decision to purchase a new computer, but it will be two weeks before getting it.

If anyone has mad computer skillz and can help me out, please let me know.

And heck, if anyone has a spare laptop I can borrow so I won't be computerless for two weeks, that would be much appreciated as well!

Lesson learned: Don't mess around with the computer - I'm not smart enough for it.