Foggy, but daylight is still burning...

Wow, it's nearly noon and I've gotten... not a whole heck of a lot accomplished.

The old man called a few times last night, but I had already fallen asleep. I woke up just as he was hanging up on his second try, a little after 11 pm. Once I shook the cobwebs out of my head, I started debating calling the hospital, but figured if it was really important, they'd call again.

The phone rang as I was debating. I picked it up, and it was my dad. He was calling me to let me know where he was (I knew) and to ask that I bring his portfolio to the hospital, whereupon we hung up and I went back to sleep.

This morning, I called the hospital at around 9 am to get a status on the old man, so they connected me to his room, where the phone rang about 10 times, whereupon I hung up and decided to get in the car. I stopped by the rehab place and picked up a box that had already been packed and taped, and then drove to the hospital. I got the portfolio out of the box and went up to the room.

The old man was not looking so well, and he told me he had been diagonsed with a touch of pneumonia, and that the doctors had assured him they'd take care of it. Apparently, being in an environment where there are a lot of geriatric, sick people is a good place to catch pneumonia, and I recall how my mother had a horror of hospitals for exactly that reason. Going to a hospital, she reasoned, was merely an expedient method of getting to a funeral home.

Anyway, I ended up running another couple of errands, gassed up the old man's Toyota, and here I am, at nearly noon, feeling very unaccomplished (unless you count the hour I spent vacuuming around the house this morning). I should count my blessings, I suppose.

Cheers...

Treasure!

Though it's nothing you can take to the bank.

My mom had an immense collection of miscellaneous cassette tapes, with everything from home-rolled language lessons, to her playing the piano, to recordings of classical music from the radio, to I don't know what, literally. I say that because in pawing through one shoebox (that just happened to be in my old closet) for something to listen to while driving around, I ran across a cassette that, on one side, had "Light for [something illegible]" written on one side, and "grandmother" written on the other.

Since the writing is not mine, I surmised that this was a recording - or a copy of a recording - of my grandmother, speaking into a microphone as my mom prompted her with questions about her earlier life.

"Could it be?" I wondered.

I kid you not, my hands were literally shaking as fired up the player in the living room, checked the cassette drive, inserted the cassette, and hit the "Play" button.

It was her voice!

A voice that has been still now for more than three decades, yet still with the power to make tears well up like crazy, just as they're welling up now as I type this.

They are hybrid tears: part joy, for having found what I thought was lost; and part sadness, for having lost my grandmother.

What good fortune!

Cheers...

Snippets and fragments...

Total Recorder apparently has the capability of accelerating the conversion of audio being output from a player. When I tried this with AudibleManager, the acceleration factor actually reached a value of 8 (i.e., it would take 1 realtime hour to convert 8 playback hours), but it also caused the player to crash. Limiting the acceleration to 4 seems to be working okay.

I had always known there was a strong Italian flavor to this part of Long Island, but never really thought about it past acknowledging the fact. There's an unassuming storefront in Glen Cove, for example, for the "Napoli Soccer Club," and a number of other establishments proclaiming either Italian products, cuisine, or surnames associated with businesses. However, it was only today that I noticed that there is apparently an Italian consular office in town as well, and it was the first time that I saw an Italian flag flying on a pole outside a residence (positioned, in proper flag-etiquette manner, next to and below a United States flag).

Speaking of Italy, I never suspected that my mom apparently studied Italian and Latin, in addition to the French, Spanish, and Russian with which she helped her family earn its daily bread. I mean, I knew she had enough Italian to utter a short sentence or two here and there, or to recall a line from an Italian opera, but it turns out she studied the language seriously, if the copious notes and mimeographed verb and vocabulary lists that I've run across - yellowed with age - are any indication.

My mom took a lot of notes, no matter what she was studying, but I suspect those notes were more an aid to memorization than intended as a representation of knowledge. I tend to be that way, too: if I want to remember something, it helps me greatly to write it down, as the effort required to create the letters with a writing implement - or a keyboard - while looking at them helps reinforce recall.

In one other strange respect, my mom is very much like my grandmother. I've been going through the medicine cabinet and the kitchen drawers and throwing out outdated prescriptions and vitamins. The oldest prescription was from 1997. A few of the vitamin bottles had never even been opened, but I figure an expiration date of 2002 prevails in such cases. Such a waste!

The bad news for the day is that I was offered a 30,000 word job for next Wednesday, which represents a nice chunk of change. Considering I'll be on the road for two days this week, though, that means I would've had only today, tomorrow, and Friday in which to work before the interpretation gig starts on Saturday, which is certainly not enough time to translate such a volume of work. The good news is that the same client had another document, of about 5500 words, due in the same time interval.

Half a loaf, as they say, is better than none. I am grateful.

Shiloh continues to alternate at driving me up the wall and saving my sanity. While I do sequester her in her crate at the house during the time I visit my dad and run errands, I won't do that in order to go to the beach by myself or engage in any similar recreation. Today, in fact, it rained for the first time since my arrival (which probably means another outbreak of mushrooms as I leave, but I digress...), which cooled things off enough to allow me to take Shiloh with me to run some of those errands, and leave her in the car from as required.

We visited the pet store I stopped at the other day, and interestingly enough, when Shiloh and Zoё (the house dog) sniffed each other, Zoё took an immediate dislike to Shiloh and growled, but Shiloh did not back down. I find this very unusual, as you'll recall that Shiloh has been known to cringe in fear in the presence of clueless pink chihuahuas one-third her size (Zoё outweighs Shiloh about three, maybe four-to-one). Go figure.

It is past time to go start dinner, and then maybe try to find something watchable on the tube. For the past few nights, it seems Three Kings, Die Hard With A Vengeance, and The Dirty Dozen has been playing each night. I generally end up watching one of my dad's tapes, and even then, not to the end.

Cheers...

DRM is short for "Screw The Customer"...

From Ars Technica:

DRM can simply prevent snippets of songs from being made, but cell providers and handset vendors can also block user-created ringtones from being installed as an artificial way to boost carrier revenue. The EFF's displeasure is currently focused on the iPhone and Apple's iTunes, which charges users an extra buck to convert a purchased song into a ringtone. If that's not using DRM to nickel-and-dime customers (rather than stop piracy), then we don't know what is.

And because this is proprietary DRM, Apple can do what it wants. In this case, it wants to charge users a dollar for a ringtone that only works on a single phone (guess which one?). Switch phones and you get the chance to buy the ringtone again. Sweet.

Scroom.

Cheers...