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Monday, November 19, 2001

Joanna dropped Ethan off here after her school drop-off; he is recovering from a severe bout of asthma. She had her exercise walk, returned for coffee, and brought me a cup upstairs. Fine, so far -- and then she slopped a good dollop of coffee straight onto the desk and into Sissy's keyboard. I mopped up promptly, but soon found the keyboard was mistyping letters and had to swap Linley's keyboard over.

Joan went off with Joanna back to Lisa Crescent, to help with preparations for Thanksgiving. Some of you may wonder why we are celebrating Thanksgiving: Joanna's husband Don is American and she likes to keep the links going -- as much for the children as for Don. The children have dual nationality, of course. I managed to get more office work through, before driving over with toolbox in hand, to help with repairing the wall where a curtain support had been torn clean out of the plasterboard. I suspect a bit of horseplay was responsible. Anyway, I prepared a small rectangle of wood to screw into place; this made the new curtain pole bracket much more secure.

Back home, I moved more stuff back into the loft area and onto shelves. Joan was returned at school pickup time, and we then drove into town to pay some bills, drop Rebeccah's cellphone in to be repaired, and stop at the supermarket for supplies. That pretty much finished the day, except for washing the coffee-drinking keyboard. I had another old one as a test spare, so added that as well. Well, here goes nothing -- as recommended by reputable Daynoters, I put them into the dishwasher with a small amount of detergent, set it for shortest wash and lowest temperature and started it. A bit of judicious nudging of the dial took it through the cycle in about 20 minutes; I didn't let it do the hot drying bit, though. Took the sparkling clean keyboards outside for vigorous shaking, toweled them dry and put them on top of the hot water cylinder to dry out thoroughly. The test will come in a day or so...

More moving and filing tonight; but took time to check out the Corel Ventura newsgroup (which I hadn't done for a while). I found that there had been another service pack released; this is good news, and a sign that Corel have at last realised they have let a great DTP program languish in obscurity far too long -- and are doing something about it. Rumour has it that version 10 is in beta, and that the files will be in XML format.

Tuesday, November 20, 2001

Russell arrived at 10 am to help with the last of the shelving. Or rather: he did the shelving and I helped. Whatever. The long 300 mm shelf right across the storage/spare room was the first job, and we had that finished by 12.30 pm. It is supported by the door frame at one end, a cleat at the other, and three heavy-duty brackets over the span.

After lunch, we tackled the wardrobe shelves, which was mostly a matter of accurate measuring, cutting the supporting cleats, and installing the shelves. We finished by using a shelf offcut to bridge over the gap between the two cupboards; this also stiffened them up. The job was completed by 3.30 pm and I swept and vacuumed the garage. This MDF (medium density fibreboard) does not produce sawdust; the residue from sawing is a fine powder which floats everywhere. Hence the need to vacuum as well as sweep -- actually, a broom is not very useful as the powder slips between the bristles. When stuff is properly returned to the shelves and things are tidy, I'll shoot a series of pix of what we've accomplished.

Oh yes: the keyboards ... 24 hours has passed, so I retrieved one from the top of the hot water cylinder, connected it to Sissy, and fired things up. I typed a bit of stuff in Notepad and all seemed to be right -- until I happened to hit the "q" key. This started to repeat madly, until stopped with ESC. Obviously, it needs more drying -- but I HAD to try, didn't I?! Or alternatively, I could have stuffed it properly...

Wednesday, November 21, 2001

The day started with overcast skies and rain forecast; hence I decided that I had better deal to the lawns, which would not improve with several days rain and the warm temperatures to help the growth along. That was completed about mid-morning, and I moved back upstairs to tackle the remaining stuff in the guest room and storage room.

The real problem was the mound of things that had to be gone through -- for example: I had kept all my mounted prints right back to about 1985, and frankly a lot of them are crap. So I winnowed them down to ones to keep, and binned the rest. The bathroom (which was full of stuff) is unpacked, and then we put the beds back in the guest room and brought the mattresses back from downstairs. So, finally, things are reasonably straight; and my daughter and son-in-law will have something to sleep on tomorrow night.

I gave the keyboard another trial: success! The repeating q key wasn't repeating any more, so I can now definitely confirm that dishwashed keyboards DO need 48 hours on the hot water cylinder. I haven't bothered to test the other old one yet, but it had some wonky keys before I washed it -- it will be interesting if the wash has fixed them as well.

Thursday, November 22, 2001 -- Thanksgiving Day

As directed by the household personnel director, I industriously vacuumed the upstairs -- and down the stairs as well, and also dismantled the hot water tap in the upstairs bathrom. The last guests had great trouble turning the tap completely off, so I thought I'd better fix it before the next lot. It turned out that the tap spindle had a circlip holding it in the tap body, and in the course of time, the groove had acquired a perceptable lip which caught on the tap body. A little filing fixed that, and it was reassembled and back in operation.

I spent a little time fiddling with Mandrake 8.1. The KDE interface needed a little understanding, but I started doing things like configuring the KD email client. Mail came down without any problem, and I sent a reply to one. I must install Star Office or similar and see how I like that. So much to learn; so little time .....

I dropped Joan at Lisa Crescent at 4.50 pm, then drove out to the airport to collect Sue and Jeremy. We knew the plane was running late, but it turned out to be another 15 minutes on top of that time due to starter problems in Wellington. I took them back to our place to drop their bags, then on to Lisa Crescent by 6. 20, where the Thanksgiving party was in full swing. We had a very pleasant evening; I carved up half of a beautifully-cooked ham, and we all ate up large. Back home by 10 pm, as we were all rather tired.

Friday, November 23, 2001

Sue and Jeremy had a sleep-in this morning. We talked over breakfast, and Jeremy and I tackled the Mac Powerbook which needed an OS upgrade. It came up with errors, so we did a complete re-install of OS 9.0, then livened the network and copied over the two update packages. Joan, Sue and I went out at 11.45 am to go to Aorangi School; it was Eli 's turn to conduct the school assembly. It's all pre-scripted, of course, and the kids have a microphone to make them audible. His class put on an item as well; it was quite good, considering they were all seven-year-olds.

We went back home to pick up Jeremy, then headed into town to meet the others at the Museum for lunch in the cafe where my exhibition is hung. Unfortunately (or fortunately) Joan noticed that one of the rear tyres was half-flat as she got into the car, so we headed straight to Andrew's Tyre Shop (they live across the road from us). Sure enough, I had picked up a screw in the new tyre; it took about 20 minutes to fix it and then we went to the Museum. No pictures sold (I really didn't expect them to!) and the display comes down next Thursday.

After lunch, we stopped at the supermarket to pick up supplies for the evening meal, then back home. Jeremy and I continued work on the Mac until tea. The family came over for the meal, as Sue and Jeremy really didn't get much chance to talk to anyone at the Thanksgiving get-together. After eating, we trooped upstairs and viewed Sue's digital photos of their recent trip to Greece on the 19 inch monitor -- most impressed.

Saturday, November 24, 2001

A leisurely morning. I set to on Milly straight after breakfast to print out the Asthma newsletter masters and get them into an envelope ready for posting. Jeremy and I returned to the Mac Powerbook and tried to make some sense of the Quicktime VR package which seemed to be having problems after being expanded. Jeremy is going to check on what he has, later. We had lunch, then I was allowed to open my birthday present (although the day is actually the 30th) as Sue wanted to have a good look at it. IT was an advance-publicity publication on the filming of Lord of the Rings, beautifully produced and lots of interesting pix. The first film is going to be a sensation, I'm sure. I think I really need to reread the book before I see the films.

We drove Sue and Jeremy over to the airport for the flight back to Wellington. Joan loaded Sue down with fresh-baked bread and a supply of the left-over ham from last night's tea. We returned home via town, posted the letter and returned home for the remainder of a quiet afternoon. I fired up the Mac again -- but it obstinately refused to talk to the network, so I'll have some work on it to do tomorrow. Some TV after having tea -- the current Lovejoy series episode, superbly put together and acted as usual. I'm back upstairs to update these Kronikles, then I think it's into bed early and catch up with some reading. At the moment, I'm re-reading Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign -- quality writing like that is worth re-reading any day.

Sunday, November 25, 2001

We went into town this morning to do some shopping; I needed more small baskets to sort stuff into and store on shelves. Joan's iron has carked it, so we went to Briscoes who were having a sale, and found a suitable iron. We also found a sandwich toaster which is capable of toasting everything from plain bread, paninis, to pita. It will also do an open sandwich because the lid props open, suspended above the sandwich -- hence will grill cheese. We returned home and promptly put it into service for lunch.

A lazy afternoon spent reading; plus another abortive attempt at WinXP. I restored the drive image and fiddled with the network settings to no avail. I changed the network card driver, and it made no difference. The ethernet light is showing on the Nokia router, so it's definitely plugged in. Restored the Win98 image in disgust.

Deirdre (Joan's niece) dropped in to have tea with us before returning to Lisa Cresc, where she is staying with Jo. After tea, I did a little sorting of stuff into baskets and straightening the shelves up.