A strange day...

It started with breakfast downtown, at Victoria's, a place where Galina and I have eaten before, but not breakfast. The ambiance was good, the coffee was excellent, and the food was better than one comes to expect in Pagosa.

But I was not there for any of that, I happen to like the other people who show up, too. :^)

In a world where I increasingly notice that I tend to be the oldest in any given group of people I normally associate with, I am the baby in this crowd. And it's a very easygoing bunch. When I expressed curiosity about the speed of the wind the other day, I was given a URL to a site one of the members maintains, which reflects data from a weather station they've set up at home. (It turns out that despite our off-the-cuff estimates of gusts approaching 60 mph, the hardware recorded a maximum speed of 35 mph, which is still pretty respectable.)

Upon leaving, I shared the address of the PBwiki that I had created with an initially ambiguous audience in mind. During breakfast, with everyone exchanging tips and information, I decided that the group had both the ability and the need to maintain a wiki, and so I returned home, spent about 20 minutes writing a "home page," and then sent passwords to everyone.

There have been two responses so far, neither of which called me names, which is encouraging.

* * *A client called, with 87,000 words due for next Wednesday. Obviously, I'm not going to do the whole job, but I did put myself down for about 10% of the job, which I ought to be able to complete without going crazy.

* * *While picking around in some of the stuff that's piled up around my office, I serendipitously ran across a small Phillips-head screwdriver and my Strobe USB scanner, which had developed the habitof recording an unsettling thin black line down the middle (more or less) of any page that I scanned. Such a line, I reasoned, was very likely caused by a bit of dirt that had embedded itself on the scanning platen under the rubber roller (the alternative, of course, was that the element doing the scanning had died, in which case I could do nothing but cry in my beer).

So, I openend the scanner and sure enough, there was some kind of dirt - perhaps the result of scanning something that had some not-completely-dry whiteout on it - at about the place where the black line appeared. I took a piece of unwaxed dental floss and carefully flossed the platen and removed the dirt.

After reassembling the unit, I plugged it into my VAIO and - voilà! - no more black line.

* * *It's been snowing since just after 9 am and our downhill neighbor has just been by with his snowplow to clear our driveway. The weather dweebs say this snow is supposed to continue over the weekend, which means we'll definitely not be seeing any water coming out of our taps anytime soon.

* * *Galina and I watched Must Love Dogs last night, and although it was an enjoyable romantic comedy, I am starting to get really weary of the generic story line of the post-getting-dumped life of a woman of (presumably) middle age, in which everybody offscreen seems to sleep with everybody else, and sex is far and away the most important, and in some cases, the exclusive focus of everyone's life. Then again, perhaps that's the modern formula for romatic comedies, I don't know.

There was good chemistry between Diane Lane and John Cusack (what little of it we saw), and I definitely liked the sound track. But what really blew me away was the recital, by Christopher Plummer's character, of Brown Penny by William Butler Yeates:

I whispered, 'I am too young,'
And then, 'I am old enough';
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
'Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.'
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

Cheers...