Mac Stories

Yesterday and today are going to be mostly about my mac and the excitement it brings.

I decided to go to Rochester yesterday to look at the option of buying a new mac or upgrading my old one.

Mom decided to come along, so we were going to make a day of it - dinner out, a movie, that sort of thing. Sadly, she wasn't feeling particularly well - and she demonstrated her disease when we are out and about. The biggest indication is repetitiveness without being aware of it. She asks the same question three or four times in a row, with barely a hesitation between each asking as if she never asked it at all. And I don't know that the answer ever sinks in. It is really frustrating after not only the third or fourth iteration of a question, but after the 10th time it happens. We did make it through the day without anyone dying, which is a good thing. Oh, and we ate at the new Indian restaurant in Geneva. Mom wasn't feeling very hungry so we got some nan and one dish to share. Plenty of food, we had a chicken dish that was yummy - and the nan was great! - still a bit pricey though. They are getting their liquor license on Wednesday or Thursday, so maybe I will stop in there and have a beer...

Anyway, back to the Mac-day. First stop, the Apple Store at Eastview Mall. I was awarded a pleasant fellow named Brian as my sales associate. Not the most knowledgeable person in the store, but nice enough. He recommended a Macbook Pro - since Apple no longer makes MacBooks. The Macbook Air has been repriced to sort of fill that niche. By the way, I am not an Apple fanatic. I think the products can be awesome, and sometimes they surprise me and do great stuff for their customers (more on that later) but I don't think they are perfect and altruistic and that their poop doesn't smell. Moving on...I asked a couple of questions and Brian quickly got out of his depth. So he asked Rob, a black shirted sales person as opposed to his blue shirted-ness, to come aid us. Rob handled my first question quickly - how old is my mac (three years). The second took a few more minutes, but the answer was that it was upgradeable. Rob recommended a place called Mac Ave if I was interested in the upgrade route.

After Rob left us, Brian went into a sales spiel for the Macbook Pro. Felt sort of canned and I was bored. I thanked him for his time and we left.

Next stop, Mac Ave. The store was in the middle of Nowhere. In Victor, ostensibly, but nothing was around it. Weird but nice little place - they sold just about everything Apple related and also had shoes and jewelry for sale. Not sure what that was about. The sales person was Chris, a high school student who seems to have a good head on his shoulders, with a plan to becoming a surgeon. Go Chris. Over the course of the next hour and a half, we chatted about Macs and about xBox and that sort of thing.

The reason I was there so long, was that I decided to spend a couple hundred dollars upgrading my current laptop, rather than buying a new laptop right now. Maybe next Christmas I will get a new laptop. We shall see. Anyway, the memory was inexpensive, they said they could do it right way, and installation was free. Yay! When the tech guy came to get the laptop, he said that he could probably fix the cosmetic issues with the laptop as well - a bit of discoloration and some bits that had chipped off the old case - for free - Apple had finally determined that there was something wrong with their cases! Yippee! So, although it took a long time, I ended up with 4 gigs of RAM (instead of the 1 gig I had before) and a new case and keyboard! Yippee! It was like getting a refurbished laptop for a couple hundred dollars. I also splurged a little and bought a wireless touch pad. I haven't used it yet - waiting till I download and install Lion (the new operating system) before I set that up.

Got home, and immediately started downloading Lion. I figured it would take a while. Sadly, it failed. I was trying to do it wirelessly at first - and that seemed to be moving glacially. Next, I connected the laptop to the internet modem directly (stopping wifi at the house for the time being). And left it running all night. And when I went down this morning there was a little message saying that the download had failed. Sigh. So, today, I am going to try again. And if that doesn't work, I am going to pay the exorbitant sum required to get the file on a thumb drive. Wish me luck!

Beautiful Eastview Mall in Victor near Rochester, NY

Could this be the future Mrs. Augustus?

Mac Ave

Look, trees - I like the evening light...

I need to figure out how to take food pictures...

My spiffified laptop!

Superbowless Sunday

Mom is anti-football - and I just couldn't be bothered to sit through the game - even to see the commercials and the half-time show. I know, I am a bad American. I get that a lot. I even called my fries "French" during the beginning of the Iraq, er, war. I will never be elected president.

We watched some Downton (keep wanting to type downtown) Abbey and a 60 minutes special on 3 Special Women. The one about Wintour really felt uncomfortable to me for some reason.

I also popped out to do a little food shopping and chatted with one of my fleeting fancies! Always makes the day a little brighter doing that. Notes from the Universe extolled me (and whoever else the message was sent to) to get out more. Sigh.

Today it is supposed to be unseasonably warm again. Yay! My plan is to drag mom out to Rochester. I am looking in to fixing my stymied-ness of yesterday. Either getting a new mac, or upgrading the one I have - I don't know how long I have to be without my computer, but when I know more, I will make a decision. I wish that I could install RAM myself easily, but working on laptops has always scared me a little.

Sorry about the lack of pictures the past couple of days. I have been feeling incredibly indolent - one of my mom's favorite words. Still feeling pretty lazy in fact.

Breakfast for dinner - still trying to get hash browns perfect - or good even...

Stymied

Not majorly, but minorly. I started reading my books - well, two of them - one is the government book - interesting and easy (ok, maybe a bit too easy) so far. The next chapter is "The Constitution." Eeek! I had a really good American History class in high school and I think that is also where I had my -isms class - that or at Ithaca College - where I learned about the different political options - like Fascism, Socialism, etc. Those two sentences are just to say that this book is more of a review than all new-to-me information.

The other book I started was Objective-C for Absolute Beginners. I am very glad to have gotten this book. One of the things it does is suggest you work with a program called Alice from Carnegie Melon, which teaches object oriented programming design through a 3d graphical world building application. Fun stuff. In parallel, you start to write programs using Apple's xCode environment. Sadly, my xCode 3 download didn't work. And since the time I downloaded it, the system software has gone up a version and xCode 4 is now the norm. I don't want to upgrade this computer - too little memory to be happy with Lion. Yet I can't download xCode 4 without the new system on my machine. Hence, minorly stymied.

On the mom front - she had a good day Friday and a bad day Saturday. And I am thinking of looking into hearing aids for her (and maybe me - though I think I really just need to get my ears cleaned out...) She opted to not go to the movies yesterday. She wants to see the Daniel Radcliffe movie - even though it is a horror film. Maybe we will go tomorrow. It is inexpensive popcorn Mondays at our local movie theatre!

And it is superbowl Sunday! Woo hoo! Who is playing? When? As you can tell, I am deeply invested in the game...

Almost Seems Normal

Mom and I went out to do some errands together yesterday. This is the first time in a while that she has gone out with me on errands. I had forgotten, actually, what it was like. We had three to do - post office to mail a package to a friend, Rite-Aid, and Wal-mart.

The post office people were happy to see mom, which always makes me happy. She wanted to buy stamps and we got some really cool dragon ones. Some lucky correspondents might actually get one if they play their cards right! After we were done there, later in the day, we drove past the road that has a package store (mailing location) on it and she said that she would rather go there. So, note to me, take mom to the UPS store to mail mom's packages next time!

Next stop, the Rite-Aid pharmacy. I had been meaning to get there to find mom's cotton. And we were running low on Aricept. Our main reason to go, though, was to see if the Pharmacist, not my favorite, but a nice one, had any helpful thoughts. She did not. Mom is having eye issues. I think it is something minor that she is making major. I called Doctor Ross, the eye doctor, and he said not to use a boric acid eye wash but did not recommend anything else. Just suggested we come in if the problem persists. The difficulty with that is the 2 hours that the appointments there take. Not because he spends much time with mom, but because of the wait. And mom, of course, rails against the $30 specialist co-pay. Anyway, the pharmacist assistant looked us up on the computer, saw that we were running low on Aricept and they filled the prescription and it was ready before we left - and I didn't have to say a word! Yay!

Last stop with mom, Wal-Marts (as she will most often call it - and which irks me for some reason). She wanted to get some nuts. We took our time wandering through the store. She kept wanting to buy stuff which we didn't need. I gave in on a few things and did not on others.

All in all, a pleasant errand experience. 

After coming back from our trip to the West Coast, we are getting a cat. Mom again mentioned that she wants one. I am not looking forward to the work, the hassle and the expense, but if it makes mom happy, I will suffer through it.

Sometimes mom seems almost normal. Other times, scarily not. She remembers the weirdest things - like our server from a couple weeks ago has dogs. She won't remember if she wrote a note to Bosey or not, having just finished putting it in an envelope five minutes ago. Sigh.

Daily Challenges

Every day, little challenges appear and either get handled or ignored, hoping that they will just go away. And sometimes, luckily, they do. Other times, they don't. So they get handled. Add to this the self imposed challenges and the challenges that come from meyouhealth - also, interestingly called, Daily Challenges, and a day can get full very quickly.

Speaking of Daily Challenges, I would once again like to say how happy I am to have found the site. I have made some friends, met lots of interesting people and generally have a great time there. I have noticed that some people who were negative have either disappeared or changed their tunes. That is awesome! Sadly, some of the people with whom I have connected have basically stopped coming to the site. Well, I hope they are happy and well. It is cool that I have friends from all over the world on Daily Challenge - some of them have even become FB friends - and I hope to meet some of them eventually. I have two connections from Romania, one from Brazil, several from Canada. Yay! I have never been to Brazil and hope to visit there one day.

Yesterday was a pleasant day. Ginger came and helped mom with a shower. I played a bit and got stuff for dinner - buffalo chicken wings (home made buffalo sauce) - Mediterranean pasta salad - steamed broccoli - Yum - and a visit to Leaf diner! There was a gaggle of women from William Smith hanging out there - always a good thing. Gave a card to three of them - Shelby who was our server from the other night and two others. Later, Dan and Dan and Brett were there. And the whole evening, I had the pleasure of chatting with Emily.

Oh, an interesting exchange happened the other day. A friend had someone comment on one of her posts. I thought the someone was attractive to me so I wrote my friend and asked about her. She said she was 25, too young for me and asked if I liked redheads. I responded, yes, sadly, I do like redheads and that age doesn't matter to me since tomorrow we might all be dead. Age really doesn't matter to me and my heart - or even my head. As long as there is a connection, it doesn't matter to me if the person is young or old. They are still a person of interest and that is all that matters. :)

My books all arrived today! All four in one box, though ordered days apart. Go Amazon! Two books on programming, one on Economics (for dummies) and one on US Government and Politics (for idiots). I am so excited!

Chicken wings!

A well decorated table at Leaf Kitchen - and who is that cleaning up?

Yay books!

Mail Update

Yay! Banner mail day today! Two packages and a snail mail letter! One of my correspondents sent an awesome (in a good way) epistle! The other one is still MIA. Heck, writing isn't for everyone. Nor is reading. I was speaking with someone the other day and she sheepishly told me that she didn't read much of anything ever if she could avoid it. Maybe she has dyslexia and doesn't know it. Wow, I don't know how someone gets by without reading.

In the past two days I received three packages. One was the first of my books. Turns out it will be the most tedious and boring of them. At least I hope so. It was a handbook of Political Science. Goodness it is terrible. Trying way too hard to be scientific about a soft science. And dry. And no pictures. It may never get read. At least by me. The other packages were games! Just what I need! :)

Another temperate day yesterday - I read somewhere online that meteorologists have reasons for why the jet stream is staying North - but none of them said anything about climate change. Just a confluence of factors contributing to a rare meteorological occurrence...

And it was beer day! Beef and Brew won an award for Best New Business! I hope they stay open until I finish my beers there. Is that selfish of me? I decided to go all alphabetical on them! Three beers from the beginning of their Pale Ales list - Bass, Boddington's and Custom Brewcrafter's Canandaigua Lake Ale. All three were good in their own way. Speaking of beer, I am beginning to worry that my game won't make it onto the App store. Will I need permission from each and every brewery that is represented by their beer bottles? Probably would be wisest. Well it will be fun in any case. Even if it is yet another project that is more fun in doing than it is profitable. Why does money run the other way when it sees me? Hmm?

And love. Here we are, creeping up on Valentine's day in a hurry and there is nary a whiff of romance in the air for me. Sad? Not really, just an observation. I did see one of my myriad fleeting fancies at Wegman's - and even sort of spoke with her - if talking about Portlandia (and making a bad joke about a possible spin-off called Eugenia...) counts. And tonight is Leaf Kitchen or Red Dove Tavern Night. I am leaning towards Red Dove since I haven't been there in a couple of weeks. But the lure of the Leaf is strong. Time will tell.

Yay! Boringest book!

Flowers and a plaque for Best New Business in Geneva! Woo hoo!

Unintentional Stalking

It was an unseasonably warm day here in Geneva yesterday. I think it got up to 55 degrees. Definitely a day for some outdoors perambulation. My plan was to go to the college library and wander wherever my feet took me. As I was heading there, Emily, my current favorite bartender, caught me unintentionally stalking her! :) I walked her all the way to her dorm - up the hill! It was a great day to be out and about and walking with Emily gave me an excuse to walk more than I had originally planned. It really is more fun walking with someone than walking alone - though I do enjoy walking alone quite a bit.

I also went to the grocery store to buy, er, groceries. I got some skirt steak. Yum! And some artichokes. Double yum. Dinner was sauteed spinach, beef with onions and mushrooms, steamed artichokes with butter and twice baked potatoes. Yay! Everything turned out well.

Oh, I went to Wal-Mart looking for cotton for mom - she likes it in a box - old school - which I couldn't find, and kitchen garbage bags, which I did find! Yay! Still not a particularly attractive Wal-Mart. :(

Sadly, I have started playing Fallout 3 on the xBox. Yes, it is an older game, but it is a good RPG. And engrossing. Sigh. Well, as long as I get other things done, I don't begrudge myself playing time! Like letters. I got three FB letters done yesterday. So in January, 30 percent done! Yippee! Only 70 percent to go!

Art photo...

See! Almost fifty degrees! On January 31, 2012! Eeek!