Month: September 2007

Intentional Ugliness

I wonder if spammers, big company executives, advertisers and corporate attorneys were all spawned from the same wretched source, maybe Zeus’s backside rather than his head.
What a wonderful world it would be if they would all simply – disappear.

Homely Archeology

I was asked to fill out a ton of paperwork this week, and most of it hit the fan yesterday afternoon which, one notes, was warm and humid, not the sort of day for house cleaning.
One of the documents requested was my college diploma. This is the sort of thing that one does not use every day, so it was not in plain sight or in an obvious spot.
I finally found it, in a cardboard box which was only one of many pulled out of a closet, along with ancient collection dolls, shoes, old computer equipment and disks, and useless banking records.
So at this point, I’m staring at several piles of boxes and stuff, not all of it mine, but most of it destined for a different, perhaps better, place than here.

Easy Come, Easy 90% Go

I’ve been holding on to an old, pre-IPO stock certificate for the last seven years and realized earlier this week that the company went public this past February.
Unfortunately, the company effected a reverse split at the time, so my shares were worth only about 10% of what I’d figured.
Well, it’s still “found money”, and maybe the shares will be worth something to my grandkids some day.

James and the Electric Cart

I’ve been having trouble with my right leg, and yesterday managed to tear or pop something in the knee, so I bought myself a cane.
I’d promised to do two errands: pick up James from his after-school club and do a little shopping at Roche Brothers, which is having a big sale on about a dozen different types of poultry and meat.
As I was hobbling in to the store, one of the staff asked if I’d like to use an electric shopping cart.
This turned out to be a lot of fun, so much so that when I got out to fight the crowd at the meat case, James decided he was going to be the driver by default, and me the passenger.
Amazingly, no one seemed to mind, maybe because he did an excellent job, even driving the cart through the checkout. Must be all that practice with video games.
It was incredibly cool that a mundane chore turned into a few minutes of real entertainment, both for us and, so it seemed, for the people watching us. The only bad part was having to leave the cart behind.

I Need a New Laptop

My Dell Inspiron 5160, which I bought about 3 years ago, is noisy and running out of disk space.
I could look into upgrading it, but having had a chance to work with an iMac for the last several months, I’ve been thinking about investing in a MacBook Pro instead.
Decisions, decisions.

Two Points for the Governor

Governor Patrick is expected to announce his support early this week for licensing three gambling casinos in Massachusetts. Given the state’s desperate financial situation, this probably is not a big surprise, especially since a powerful Democrat like Tom Menino already has made his support a matter of public record.
Earlier this month, the governor signed into law a bill, SB 63, that would give certain adoptees the right to obtain copies of their original birth certificates.
This bill is the result of ten years of hard work on the part of its sponsors. It is not a perfect bill, it is a compromise following Romney’s pocket veto last year of a less restrictive bill; adoptees born in the Commonwealth between July 17,1974 and January 1, 2008 still have to jump through the same hoops to get access to their real birth certificates as all of us did before.

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Videogate

The local media have been in a turmoil this week about the New England Patriots’ unauthorized videotaping of defensive signals by the Jets coaches last weekend.
Sounds like sour grapes to me.
I know very little about Bill Belichick. I know he’s been the defensive coordinator or head coach for five Super Bowl wins and was semi-named as a correspondent in a divorce case.
These two pieces of data tell me the same thing: he’s someone with money and, thus, a target for those who have less.

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Gardener’s Diary: Tomatoes

I’ve been picking tomatoes on a regular basis. Unfortunately, most of them have split, the result of too much watering.
I was prepared to throw all of these away, except that I was lucky enough to be in conversation today with a farmer, who advised me that the tomoatoes would be perfectly good in sauce.
I’ve never made sauce from fresh tomatoes, and all the recipes in my old edition of “Joy of Cooking” call for canned tomatoes or paste. So, I improvised, and the sauce actually turned out pretty well.

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