Fighting the good fight...

I think. I don't know. I'm getting tired of it.

Some outfit wants $400 out of us for publishing our name in some national directory. I don't remember talking to them. My gut feeling is to take them to the mat on this, complete with letters to the BBB and their local and state attorney generals, but people like this generally have the money and legal talent to intimidate small fry like me.

What the hell, though... I really don't feel like handing over $400 without a fight.

Another outfit wants beaucoup bucks for providing phone service. Tomorrow will be the second time I'll be faxing them our bill from AT&T showing the latter to be our long-distance provider. I've been trying to get rid of these imbeciles for months, now, but they simply won't go away.

Sigh.

Today was a long day that started by driving to Durango to pick up supplies. There were, in fact, so many items in the order that I had to unravel a roll of bubble wrap and lay it flat so I could drive. I stopped by the Office Depot (Office Max? Is there a difference?) and picked up a network card for Drew's machine, and found a 4-port DSL router on sale for, basically, free (the rebate exceeds the sale price).

Which brings me to the issue of the store's DSL. Reading the fine print of the user agreement, it appears that I agree not to resell any of the bandwidth without written permission, in advance, from the phone company. I suspect this means I'll be paying more for DSL (and maybe a lot more) if I want to offer it to my clients.

What is funny, though, is that I'm sure they'll not offer me greater bandwidth, just less band for the buck, on the average. If they offer a prohibitive price, I just may write to whatever passes for a public service commission here in Colorado and yell about restraint of trade. Then again, I probably don't know what the heck I'm talking about.

Gee, I'm just filled with sunshine and good cheer today, aren't I?

Galina is one step closer to going to Houston. She confirmed that she needs some continuing education credit to renew her license, and that a suitable course starts next Monday down in Houston. If she stays a week, then there won't really be a reason for us to do a "flying handover," where we each fly to the other's location so I can do my gig at JSC while Galina resumes her post at the store and not have to put excess miles on the Ford while we do it.

Dinner today was quite good. Drew cooked another package of chicken breasts, this time in a sauce that went well over spaghetti. Huntur is a little wonder, taking everything in with her big, blue eyes and making sounds of all kinds and becoming more of a person each day (as opposed to an onlooking infant).

The urge to reminisce is coming on, for which we shall turn to another post...

Cheers...

Chess... first contacts...

My very earliest memory of chess is at the age of three or four. I have been sent by my parents to a college friend of my mother's in Baltimore. My mother, it turns out, is going into the hospital to have a gall bladder removed, and I am deemed too much of a handful for my grandmother or stepfather. So, off to Baltimore I go.

I don't remember much of that place, except that all the children were girls and all older than me. I recall them trying to engage me in games. They taught me to play "war" with cards. They taught me to play "chutes and ladders." They taught me to play "Chinese" checkers.

And they attempted to teach me to play chess, but the game made no sense to me at the time, so we all went on to other things.

My next memory of chess is sometime in fourth grade. Mrs. Rosenstock is my teacher. My mother has nicknamed her "the pill," because she is very hard for me to "swallow." She picks on me, makes me the goat whenever she can, it seems. Even my mother, who is a schoolteacher herself, agrees that I am "in for it." It is an era when parents had not yet learned to sue - or threaten to sue - everyone and anyone for real or imagined slights suffered by their children, and I was expected to buckle down and bear it.

I managed to be home sick from school a lot in fourth grade. Sometimes, I was actually ill, too. This one time, I'm home from school, feeling bored. My stepdad is at work, as is my mom. I cautiously start to rustle around the bottom portion of the hall closet and come up with... a chess set.

A Renaissance chess set. The pieces, for the most part, looked like people. The king was... well.. kingly. The queen looked a little like Marilyn Monroe (I had a pretty good imagination). The bishops looked awfully Roman Catholic. The knights were in armor, astride horses. The rooks were elephants with brick towers on their back (go figure). And each pawn had been issued his very own helmet, sword, and shield.

The rules still made no sense to me, so I ignored them. But there was something about the symmetry of the board, the weight of the felted chess pieces, and the "rightness" of how the pieces looked when they stood in the very center of a square that attracted me.

I spent most of the day using the set as "soldiers." I arranged for pitched battles where everyone died and was immediately resurrected, where prisoners were exchanged, and where queens were kidnapped and then saved by daring knights (with support from the lumbering elephant-rooks).

The set was back in its box and in the bottom of the closet by the time my mother got home. My next "caissic" experience would not occur for some years.

Cheers...