Dear everyone,
A week of visits. Last
weekend Vanessa and her kids drove down to see Roger. Then Lucas flew in from
Denver and was here from Tuesday through Friday. He and Cindy visited with Roger
Wednesday. While he was here, we had
Portillos Italian beef sandwiches because that is not available in Denver. Meanwhile, on Friday, Owen, Alison and Hannah
drove down from Minneapolis. Hannah is
still working at Stitch Fix, but decided to work from the Twin Cities for about
a month. We met them this morning for
brunch at Roger’s with Andy and Gail.
The weather cooperated with a sunny mid 70s day and a nice breeze (this
last week we had miserable upper 90s humid weather).
Roger’s health is much the same as it has been for the last
month. He fell again Saturday morning (presumably
on route to the bathroom), and required an ER visit with scalp staples. We have set up a bed rail on his bed, as well
as some baby monitors. Clyde MacGregor of
Harris Asso. was also among his other visitors last weekend. On a more somber note, Arnie Weber, the past
president of Northwestern died last week.
He had also been the Isidore and Gladys J Brown professor of Urban and
Labor Economics at U Chicago.
Yesterday Cindy and I helped Vivian and Jasper move from
western Hyde Park (Drexel and 53rd) to eastern Hyde Park (Cornell and 50th
place). We were helped by Jami Walloch
(who got a 4 pack of bourbon
barrel aged quadruple), and his wife’s ex, Jimmy. We had hired Jimmy because he needs the work,
and also because he sometimes has access to a small truck. Unfortunately, he
wasn’t able to secure it for the day, but luckily Jami stepped in and we used
his giant sized camping van. We could
just about take everything in one load, but in the end made two trips. This was ok, because MAC, the leasing company
totally screwed up twice: First, even
though Jasper had reserved the freight elevator in his new building from 9-11,
for some reason MAC was not prepared to hand over the keys until 10. Also, they misrepresented which building
Jasper’s apartment was going to be in (it’s a complex of 4 buildings); we had
unloaded the first truck load in front of the wrong one, so we had to repack it
and drive a half block and re-unload.
Still, it was all done by 11:30 or so for Jami and Jimmy. Afterwards we went back to Drexel one more
time for one last sweep (we found some dishes in the kitchen that had not been
packed), and then to help Jasper and Vivian get a table and chairs from another
apartment in the complex. I have to wonder how much buying and selling of household
items happened among the student population prior to the advent of facebook
marketplace groups. During the past week Jasper and Vivian have sold a couch
and a table and purchased a larger/more comfortable couch, a nicer table and
matching chairs, 2 desk tables and a coffee table. All with a click on a post.
Planned obsolescence got me riled up yesterday while I was
trying to make a new Photoshop pose for Robbie (see below). I use a pretty old version of PS (version 6)
which had been working fine until this week when we got an automatic operating
system update from Microsoft. Suddenly I
couldn’t open this software any longer.
Googling some information, many other people were complaining about this
also. It’s not like we are pro users of
Adobe products - - we just want something that will crop photos, etc. No one wants to learn a whole new program to
do something that is satisfactory with the old one. Luckily, I learned that I could go into the
properties tab of the photoshop.exe file, and set the program to emulate a
Windows 98 environment, so I was back in business. I have to figure that there is some amount of
collusion between the manufacturers of operating systems and manufacturers of
software to force consumers to re-up their products periodically.
Although I did not watch either political convention, they
were obviously in the news feeds for the last two weeks (as well as the
troubles of Kenosha). The Republic Party
certainly seems to have taken many pages of the National Socialist party to
heart: 1) tell big lies and tell them open. 2) create problems and then say
only you can fix them 3) infiltrate the police and army 4) spur violence and then use “Law and Order” to
clamp down on reasonable protest. How
far are we from Munich 1923?
We finished season 2 of the Wire. I have also been watching Midnight
Diner, Aggretsuko,
and Cobra Kai. Some interesting books include We
Ride Upon Sticks, Ken Liu’s new short story collection The Hidden
Girl, a collection of blog posts by Peter Watts, Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient
Tumor, and Matt Ruff’s second novel, Sewer, Gas and Electric,
rather plotless, but with extremely funny and prescient passages in regards to
our current political situation.
Love,
H
Built for speed
No comments:
Post a Comment