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pameladeanI spent a great part of the day wrestling with Open Office. This is a grand improvement over yesterday, which I spent in enraged tears of frustration. Last night David came up and played around with the program and got it to consent to print my book proposal out in proper manuscript format. He thought it was about as weird and flaky as I did, but he wasn't fazed by this, having a better intuitive grasp of the entire idea of this kind of word processing program. I myself am stuck in the early 1980's in this regard. Icons make my eyes glaze over and menus drive me bananas. I can't imagine why they choose the terminology they do. I can get into an endless zoned-out state of madness wondering if something is File or Format or something else. The solution, of course, is to go in and look, but I have a jittery feeling that clicking on anything I don't understand will cause the computer to open up and restart the universe.
There, now you can all feel superior. (There are good reasons I don't use a Mac and good reasons I can't go on doing what I was doing, which was running Borland's Sprint configured to look like epsilon. There are good reasons I can't use emacs. Honest.)
When I found myself writing the wrong publisher's name on one of the envelopes (one to the publisher actually interested, the other to my agent, but I got her address right), I decided I'd mail the stuff tomorrow. Tomorrow is also my mother's birthday. I have successfully made the spaghetti sauce for the dinner. In the middle I had to go over to the hardware store with a handful of change dug out of the sofa cushions, and buy a lint trap for the washer hose. The current one got clogged suddenly, as usual, and sprayed water all over. I'm doing a lot of laundry because I'm leaving town on the 11th and won't be back til the 23rd. I had said I would also make a blueberry pie, but I have a very strong feeling that pie crust is going to behave like Open Office, so I think I'll make a crumble or a slump or a crisp or something like that, less prone to error, more forgiving.
It's snowing like hell, again. It's vastly beautiful, but I am not very much interested in shovelling any more of it. David did the front today already, while the tree guys were taking down Ari's favorite tree. Unfortunately, the tree belonged to our neighbor. It was a fairly large mulberry. It was certainly too close to both houses and probably not very happy, but I liked it, and I really don't like having an unobstructed view of the neighbor's upstairs windows, rather than a nice lacing of branches in winter and a lovely screen of leaves in summer, decorated in either case with a changing frieze of squirrels and birds. I hate to see a tree come down. They pruned the two little walnuts next to it, but that wasn't so bad. If the neighbor just had to mess with trees, he should have had the ones that are messing with the power lines pruned.
Lydy is engineering the refinancing of the house (she used to work as a mortgage counsellor), and we are hoping to also get a home equity loan to get our debt under control and net us a new kitchen. It's high time we did this, and I am grateful that she is doing the work, because the mere notion causes me to want to hide under the bed.
David and Lydy and I have had some nice socializing, sitting around and talking with the gamers all one afternoon even though the gaming itself had to be cancelled; and having dinner with M, who came to my signing, and her household and outliers, a really lovely time.
I am rereading all Dunnett's mystery novels. They are really even odder than I already knew. I'm getting all tangled up trying to think coherently about the voices they are written in. They are all first-person, but really a lot of the time the description does not sound as if the character in question is speaking. There are passages, like the ones that Dunnett would use the second person in if this were a Lymond novel, where the voice of the character comes through very clearly, but others that sound like the author. I am wondering why this does not bother me more.
If I don't mutter and grumble here again before I go away, I hope you will all have a pleasant February.
Pamela
There, now you can all feel superior. (There are good reasons I don't use a Mac and good reasons I can't go on doing what I was doing, which was running Borland's Sprint configured to look like epsilon. There are good reasons I can't use emacs. Honest.)
When I found myself writing the wrong publisher's name on one of the envelopes (one to the publisher actually interested, the other to my agent, but I got her address right), I decided I'd mail the stuff tomorrow. Tomorrow is also my mother's birthday. I have successfully made the spaghetti sauce for the dinner. In the middle I had to go over to the hardware store with a handful of change dug out of the sofa cushions, and buy a lint trap for the washer hose. The current one got clogged suddenly, as usual, and sprayed water all over. I'm doing a lot of laundry because I'm leaving town on the 11th and won't be back til the 23rd. I had said I would also make a blueberry pie, but I have a very strong feeling that pie crust is going to behave like Open Office, so I think I'll make a crumble or a slump or a crisp or something like that, less prone to error, more forgiving.
It's snowing like hell, again. It's vastly beautiful, but I am not very much interested in shovelling any more of it. David did the front today already, while the tree guys were taking down Ari's favorite tree. Unfortunately, the tree belonged to our neighbor. It was a fairly large mulberry. It was certainly too close to both houses and probably not very happy, but I liked it, and I really don't like having an unobstructed view of the neighbor's upstairs windows, rather than a nice lacing of branches in winter and a lovely screen of leaves in summer, decorated in either case with a changing frieze of squirrels and birds. I hate to see a tree come down. They pruned the two little walnuts next to it, but that wasn't so bad. If the neighbor just had to mess with trees, he should have had the ones that are messing with the power lines pruned.
Lydy is engineering the refinancing of the house (she used to work as a mortgage counsellor), and we are hoping to also get a home equity loan to get our debt under control and net us a new kitchen. It's high time we did this, and I am grateful that she is doing the work, because the mere notion causes me to want to hide under the bed.
David and Lydy and I have had some nice socializing, sitting around and talking with the gamers all one afternoon even though the gaming itself had to be cancelled; and having dinner with M, who came to my signing, and her household and outliers, a really lovely time.
I am rereading all Dunnett's mystery novels. They are really even odder than I already knew. I'm getting all tangled up trying to think coherently about the voices they are written in. They are all first-person, but really a lot of the time the description does not sound as if the character in question is speaking. There are passages, like the ones that Dunnett would use the second person in if this were a Lymond novel, where the voice of the character comes through very clearly, but others that sound like the author. I am wondering why this does not bother me more.
If I don't mutter and grumble here again before I go away, I hope you will all have a pleasant February.
Pamela
Re:
Date: 2004-02-07 02:26 pm (UTC)It is a pity that there is only one Zorinth.
But what about the italics?
Pamela
Re:
Date: 2004-02-08 02:54 pm (UTC)If you've ever wondered why there are no italics in my novels, this is why.