Functioning again...

It was bloody cold yesterday, and with the local heating in the house being what it is (the stove consumes prodigious quantities of wood, but releases little heat into the house, while the electric heaters drain the bank account) it was an evening where one picked a place to be - I selected the bedroom - and stayed there.

My plans to put things up on eBay came to a grinding halt when it turned out that a low ink cartridge in the Epson printer/scanner basically disables the entire unit (i.e., since you can't print, you can't scan), so from that perspective, not going to Durango was a mistake. However, given that it snowed for much of the day makes me happy I didn't go, despite the fact that there wasn't really much snow to speak of. (On the other hand, the bird feeder, which is under an eave, was plastered with snow on the exposed side by late afternoon, which tells me the snow was being blown sideways for a while, there.)

Moreover, it stayed cold enough for the snow that had fallen on the car yesterday to remain there and freeze into a challenging accumulation of snowy ice by this morning, which took me a long time to hack off (especially since the heater doesn't work in the car).

There's not much time for navel-gazing today. I have a short assignment to do - ASAP, of course - and I've got ink cartridges on order for delivery later today so maybe I can post some items on eBay today (come to think of it, a 7-day auction might go better if it doesn't expire on Easter, as one might argue that lots of people might be traveling - or at least be out of the house - next Sunday).

Is it really after noon? Wow. Daylight really is burning!

Cheers...

Getting it out of my system...

This guy walks into the store and wants to fax pages from a book. He gets annoyed when he finds out he needs to copy the pages before he can fax them, implying that this so-called "requirement" is driven by the profit motive (3.2 cents a page) and not by the simple fact that it's really farblegargling hard to pass the book through the fax machine. Ye gods.

Today was also the day when I stood all I could stand until I could stand no more of people (FWIW, almost always men) who toss money on the counter when paying for something. It just smacks to me of disrespect to both the money - yeah, I know: it doesn't really care - and to me (who does). After receiving payment for postage from a fellow who extracted money from his wallet and let it go in my direction as if it was diseased, I put the funds in the cash drawer and then tossed a fella's change back at him (a nickel), trying to put as much "English" into the action as I could, under the circumstances.

I immediately regretted doing so, not because it might have been poorly received by the customer, but because it just wasn't the way I'd been taught to handle money. I'd momentarily allowed myself to descend (from my perspective) to the other fellow's level, and wasn't too proud of it.

Speaking of pet peeves, another one that haunts me from my upbringing is guys who eat wearing their hats. Now, I don't expect guys to uncover and conform to Amy Vanderbilt's rules of etiquette for the use of the butter knife, say, in a combat zone or at a construction site (though if circumstances warrant... why not?), but when I see folks wearing their hats in restaurants, I can't help but feel dissed.

Dinner is at the kids' place tonight, where I'll probably end up helping Drew set up his router. I need to leave instanter.

Cheers...