April Fools

I can't stand this date. All the faux "news stories" really ruin attempts to enjoy my routine. Since there's so damned little I enjoy now, it's doubly irritating. Bah.

Back to yesterday's visit to the house. The SIL was up-tight which was one reason Brother came down with the fridge. He remarked he wished he had a lawyer on speed-dial and advised me to stay single. He told me our uncle had a license plate holder on his orange van: "Happiness is being single." Even into his third marriage he kept the holder. I remember the van, even attending that wedding (that marriage stuck) but was too young to have taken note of the holder. I reassured Brother staying single wouldn't be a problem. Besides, Duckie wouldn't elope to Canada.

What else? I saw the kids. A and RL were still in their baseball uniforms. Although I noticed what they were wearing, I completely overlooked asking them about their games. Mother would've remembered.

MD was hobbling around all grins while A was trying to put things in a bookcase. The carpet cleaner is finally returned. I can't even remember how long ago it was borrowed. I still don't have the vacuum. It's lost somewhere in the cardboard jungle. The SIL couldn't figure out where to start on things. The new pantry looks OK with things in it and isn't full at this time but I have to say the quality was no where near what I'd expect of myself for free much less at $60/hr. The flaws of the new wallboard, put up where Brother and I pulled down old paneling, makes my skin cry out in horror. I did keep my mouth shut and complimented the fact there were actually walls to be seen rather than the paneling. After 30+ years it was a drastic thing and about 30 years overdo. Brother later told me he had it done because of Mother and even that she's dead she deserved to finally be rid of the damned paneling. Of course, there's still a wall with paneling but it's unobtrusive.

I wish my mood was better. It's been rather morbid over the past couple of weeks, more so than before. A downturn isn't usual for me this time of year but it's more aggressive than I remember.

I tried a couple Mac software products that let you scan barcodes to catalog books and films with your Firewire/iLink/IEEE-1394 video cam. "Delicious Library" seems to work pretty well. It reads the codes with reliability. Pulling information off of Amazon is a bit slow and sometimes the process falls short. Of the random selection of DVDs I tried, it couldn't find the governor's "Jingle All The Way" and didn't bring down the cover-art for "True Lies." The competitor I won't mention. None of the DVDs scanned and it took a half-hour to get it to recognize a hand-full of book barcodes. They need to do more work on fundamental scanning reliability. As nifty as having such an inventory might be, it seems a little pointless for me unless I want to divest myself of films. When Mother was around, it might've been fun to use although I kept track of our DVD purchases with a simple, manually entered list of titles. There are other things I'd like to track though. Food purchases, for example, so I could profile my activities. For years I've kept a photo log of toys and educational things I buy for the niece and nephews to avoid duplicates. Before gift-giving events come up, I'd send off photos to get approval or confirmation it wasn't a duplicate otherwise purchased. Since no one else was buying the educational stuff, it was fairly easy on us.

Rent is paid, health coverage is paid (although my bill was sent to the wrong address). I got a credit card bill for $0.00. I wish I was happier. Forget happy, just less self-loathing would be a turn. My hard drive cable has arrived in CA so it could actually arrive tomorrow as expected. I'm not sure I saved anything by ordering online for about $10 less. Maybe I did. I ordered the cable for the "old" desktop VAIO. One of the hard disks reported failure and after backing it up for a last time, I pulled the cable and the cable itself tore away from the plug which stuck in the drive. In 20 years I've never had that happen to a ribbon cable before.

Speaking of SONY products, the SIL got her HDTV, a 40" Bravia. I didn't note if it's 720p or 1080p.