Recliner chair with AirDesk and laptop computer (“Mother’s gift of birds” Photo credit: Rusty Clark)
It’s been a while since we last posted here.
Regaining our ability to sit at the computer took nearly eight weeks. Blogging doesn’t go well in 8-minute bursts, and that was what our sore back allowed. Exploring the world from a semi-supine position in the good Starship Recliner-Chair did not allow computer use. We were effectively silenced for the duration.
It feels good to return, but there’s not much going on. Would you like to hear about our exercises? We didn’t think so… It’s been an interesting two months, though.
Encounters from the Starship’s bridge:
- Discovered some EXCELLENT TV dramas and caught up on the back seasons for Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Borgias, and Damages.
Damages, a Glenn Close drama about power and high-stakes litigation, is particularly good and I was crushed to find that the new season, #5, is available only on CurrentTV. You can’t even purchase the episodes on iTunes! Yes, CurrentTV will sell a 2-year contract for $59.95 per month so one can watch Damages. No, we are not going to do business with them, because their service is overpriced and withholding the 5th season of a serial drama is unconscionable. It will be interesting to see how many new viewers they garner with this tactic. Prior seasons are available on Imdb. Why didn’t they just sell season #5 to iTunes? They could certainly have gotten a premium price for that series!
- Sampled some other series and chose Sons of Anarchy and Bleak House as the next projects.
- Our 4-year-old HP All-in-One printer died and was replaced by its newer cousin, an HP Photosmart 7510. Only installed it this morning, but now we should be able to print wirelessly from our Droid smartphone and our Kindle Fire e-reader tablet.
- Chloe, our new granddaughter, became an American citizen on her way here from China three weeks ago. She is 22 months old and has a smile that makes hearts go pitter-pat. Our son and his wife are embracing the new-parent role, complete with all-nighters on somebody else’s schedule and not being able to speak Mandarin or English, depending on whether you’re the parent or the kidlet. Hugs and smiles go a long way, as does mutual respect.
- Tried to sew Chloe’s fancy Minkey baby blanket, but cannot bend down to the cutting surface yet. All in due time…
- Tangled up our WordPress usernames and passwords among our several layouts and managed to get locked out of The Time Is Come (this blog
Word to the wise: once your blog is hosted outside WordPress.org (see earlier posts about migration out: one really is on one’s own without technical support! A timid or inexperienced techie can be intimidated by the need to FTP into one’s domain, especially after one has been told, “Stay Out, Stay Alive!” We regained control of our blog by sneaking in through one of its testbed sisters and selecting it from a drop-down list we had never seen before.
There are rules about how to structure one’s arrays of administrative information. We did not know about them and so set things up in such a way as to make lock-outs probable. That has been resolved with a more informed set of choices for the blogs. The Time Is Come is our only blog that’s published; the others are test beds.
- Purchased a great computer work surface for the recliner. It’s called an AirDesk, and it consists of a vertical steel shaft on a large, flat base. Steel arms extend horizontally from it to support clear Lexan rectangular table surfaces. The tables seem to float above the chair. The engineering genius is in the adjustability of the arms that support the tables. They are held in place by friction (with tightened fasteners) and can be swung in and out, adjusted in height, and tilted. It’s really nice to position a keyboard EXACTLY where one wants it, even if pain got in the way of productivity.
- Watched many hours of Congressional hearings and county Board of Supervisors’ meetings. Some of those Representatives can be savage and relentless, particularly if the agency in question really messed up. To get the flavor of it, use CSPAN’s video library to watch the General Services Administration testimony about their overly luxurious conferences. Truly a blood sport!
- Enjoyed the Olympics, to the extent that NBC’s lackluster programming provided access. The highlights schedule printed in our daily newspaper was wrong more often than correct. The information screens accompanying the Guide listings for our Cable service were incomplete, prone to providing snippets of events not mentioned, and overloaded with interviews of Michael Phelps.
Congratulations to the Olympics Opening and Closing Ceremony Planners in GB!!!!! The opening and closing ceremonies were almost all elegant, professional, and lots of fun. (We do wish that all of the vocalists in the closing show paid enough attention to staying in tune. Some of their music was pretty far off.)
- Read a half-dozen books: mostly novels, but a few nonfiction ones. Look for book reports in following posts, as some of the books were great!
Summary:
Recuperating in the Starship hasn’t been boring, although there have been frustrations. The pain was foremost, until the exercises and the “tincture of time” (an orthopedic surgeon’s phrase) took care of it. We have been driving for short trips for over a week. Getting back into shape after all this lying around is Job One!
