Our summer vacation - A Dutch MMP

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
401

That’s too funny, Soapy.

Mr. Taters got a wild hair up his hiney and showed me a Dell that Costco was selling on-line. It did not come with a monitor, but there was flat screen monitor he wanted to get with it that cost another $400.00.

I suggested we go to Costco just to compare prices and see what was there. Being ever cost concious, I was looking at an HP that came with a 22 inch monitor and had most of what we were looking for. Mr. Taters wasn’t too sure about the video card though.

So, off he went to get the big orange cart thingy so we could load that computer up. I waited a while and finally he showed up. Wherein he proceeded to drag me to another display that had the computer I’m using now. It was definitely more money than I wanted to spend, but well, I’m sure I’ll use it a long time.

402

Quiet night for Mumpers, eh? I’m up, dressed, breakfasted, and waiting for daughter to appear. She and I are heading to Baltimore. The museum opens at 9 and we want to get there near opening time for the exhibit. She wants to wander around the harbor, too, and we tried calling my sister last night about meeting for lunch - we’ll need to call again. Thus will be my day.

SIL has work and FCD, against my wishes, intends to work in the basement instead of futzing around on the boat. I wish he’d take the day off. Oh well.

Taters, I envy your new computer. I’m tolerating this one - it’s so slow!!! But I’m hoping the other one can be fixed. My computer geek connection returns from Iraq next week, and once he unpacks and settles in, I’m going to ask him if he can give it a once-over. I’m really not in a position right now to replace what is essentially a toy, so if Mark can’t help me, I’ll just put up with this thing a little longer.

My butt hurts. The right side. I probably did something yesterday while we were slaving away - either I backed into something or I moved the wrong way or I’m just falling apart faster than I care to admit. But it feels like someone or something whacked me hard on the right cheek and it aches to the bone. Getting old sucks…

The kid just emerged from her room. We shall be off soon. Behave, stay safe, stay cool, stay dry. MWAH!

403

Or all three. It comes with the territory. I did a bunch of yardwork last Sunday afternoon that involved being on my knees are sittin’ down. Last Monday and Tuesday my knees and my butt hurt. We just ain’t as bendy as we used to be.

Good Mornin’ Y’all! Up and caffienatin’ here. Fay is now a tropical depression but appears to be hangin’ around. No rain right now but cloudy and dark out. The outer feeder bands are what’s still with us. However, the pool did not need to have any water let out this mornin’ (YAY!).

I think in a bit I’ll awaken ol’ y’all know who so we can get purtified and go to brekkies and then get churchified. Accordin’ to the news the roads are ok. YAY!

Taters mayhaps I shall wander to the liquor sto this week and get some blueberry vodka. That drink sounds yummy.

404

Morning Mumpers! I’, caffeinating and getting ready for Mass, then the parish picnic.

Taters, I got an Acer 22" LCD. It rocks.

405

Good morning!

I totally understand the falling apart and getting old stuff. It is teh suxxxor! Hee.

We want a new 'puter, too. We’ve been looking, but we need to pay off a few things first. <sigh>

We went to dinner at Outback Steakhouse last night. It was yummy! Way too much food, of course. The doggies got a treat when we got home. Funny thing happened. Our waiter was a bowler friend from long ago! He was going through his opening spiel, not really looking at us, and I say, “Hi, Ronnie!” He was very surprised! We got caught up a little bit, and exchanged e-mail addies. I miss the bowling crowd. Next Thursday I’m gonna let the guys fix their own dinner, and head over to the bowling alley to visit for a while. I oughta start up again, but see above where I’m getting old and falling apart… :wink:

Grocery shopping later. I haven’t decided what’s for dinner yet. Probably meatloaf - the boys absolutely love leftover meatloaf for sandwiches. And then I get to say, “Don’t let your meat loaf!” Heh. (I know, I know. :))

Off to score a Feud… have a great day!

406

Morning, everyone!
Trying to get the kid to sleep so we can go to Mass later.
We went and looked at an apartment yesterday. It was about the size of our livingroom, but divided up. Too bad- we really really liked the super (who’d be living right above us), and we seriously considered just ditching stuff- but we’d have to ditch the freezer, washer, and some of our friends, who are too tall for it.

We got Hakka for dinner. It was yummy. :smiley:

407

Mornin’…

I mostly slacked yesterday. Though I did go to the craft store. (Yeah! for there being one on a close bus line!) I spent lots of money on knitting supplies. One would think since I’ve been knitting for a frickin’ long time, I’d have most everything, but nope. Oh well. Except for the yarn, it’s all stuff that should only need to be bought once.

Since the afore mentioned slacking off yesterday, I have much cleaning, laundry and grocery shopping to do today. No motivation though, so we’ll see.

More later. maybe.

408

I’ve been awake for two hours and have done nothing. I think I’ll go back to sleep for a bit, then get up and try again.

409

We ended up with the Dell Inspirion 530 with some way too big (22 inch? 24 inch?) widescreen monitor.

I’m not thrilled with the keyboard (no USB ports!!!) and we had to rearrange stuff when we realized it had no wireless card (so the modem is attached here now and the other computers are all wireless), but basically-- very happy!

410

:: waves at everyone ::

I’m feeling slightly nauseous tonight - I have a suspicion it might be because I just started taking Yasmin this week. Doctor’s orders. I really hope it doesn’t last because this week is the first week of our new term and the last thing I need is to be sick in Week 1. Ick.

Have a good Sunday, y’all. Mine’s almost over.

411

I believe that’s the one we saw at the Costco online site.

Sigh,** Mr. Taters** has already determined that the video card that came with this computer just isn’t big enough. We discovered this while playing WoW last night. We had to keep turning the graphics down because the 'puter would get laggy.

As you can see, I’m up. I have coffee, but I’m still somewhat sleepy. We stayed up way too late last night.

I have chores that need doing around here today. I’m going to try and get them done too.

412

Morning, all. Yes, getting old is definitely teh suxxor. I hurt from dancing too much at the show Friday night. It’s one thing to hurt from doing work, but from having fun? Not Fair!!

Ha ha! Hahahahaha! Hahahahahahahahahahahaha! There will always be a newer, nicer, better something coming along to spend your money on. New needles? Check. New technique requiring more of a certain size/type of needles? Check. New, fancy yarn? Check check check! But hey, that’s what money is for, right? :smiley:

Not being a gamer, I’m quite happy with my new Dell with the 22" widescreen monitor. It’s got plenty of speed for what I need, plus I can blow text up on the screen to where I can actually see** it. I do need to replace the power cord, though; I didn’t bother to change it out when I changed monitors since stringing cables to the back of my desk is a serious pain in the arse, but the old one is a touch loose and if I bump the monitor, it goes black till I fiddle with it again. But new computers are definitely fun. :smiley:

I fell asleep insanely early for me last night, but was awakened by the cat at 5:30 this morning by that lovely “Hork! Hork hork!” noise we all know and love. :rolleyes: So I got up and cleaned it up. Then she decided she felt much better after horking, and it was time to play. So she proceeded to climb onto my nightstand and try to knock stuff off. And then she bounced around on the bed on top of us, leaping off onto her cat tree and flying back down, and generally causing her to nearly become Scarf, to join LiLi’s Mittens and Slippers. She finally abandoned the game after about an hour, at which point I was able to get back to sleep for a bit. But she definitely used up at least one life in the process.

Back to work. Since I pushed 'em to send me more stuff to do over the weekend so I can get paid for it on the 1st, I guess it’s only reasonable that I actually do it, eh?

**See “getting old is teh suxxor” above.

413

Evening everybody!!

(or morning… or noon… or night! :confused: ::waves back at Haze:: )

Haven’t followed very well over my weekend, so once again yay, boo, etc… to everybody.

There were actually a few drops coming from the sky this morning! This means that Summer is finally beginning to release its evil clutches from this land. Oh, it will be back… but it’s the beginning of the end.
I know **Dotty **will sympathize! :slight_smile:

Several attempts to figure out WTF I’ve got have resulted in a change of antibiotics, which finally seem to be working! Which means I was coughing up a lung only about half of the time, today :rolleyes:. So – sending “get better” vibes to all the other sickies and ouchies around.

Fay victims – stay dry, stay safe, send water… :smiley:

414

Fay brought down one of the pecan trees at church. :frowning: I like the trees even if I am allergic to pecan pollen.

So, we brekkied and then we churched. We had big brekkies so right now there’s no thought of lunch. However I expect by around threeish the need to feed will appear.

It’s really cloudy but no rain to speak of. The sun even peeked out for a little bit!

I’m thinkin’ a nappy poo would be a good thing about now.

415

Drive by…

I hit a deer with the ambulance on the way to a chest pain call. Ambulance is fine, don’t know about Bambi.

Already mowed the yard, after my nap I gotta go to the dump.

L8r g8rs…

416

Good morning, all–I’m awake, showered, gots me cawfee and putting on lotion. Today it’s mostly sunscreen since we’re taking the goggies out to the Sandy River for a little swimmy recreation. Well, Widget swims, so far Callie refuses but we’re thinking of pitching her in if she won’t go on her own. A dog should swim, dang it!

Had a nommy dinner of NOT sallit and grilled steak marinated 24 hours in cheap red wine with lethal amounts of crushed garlic, a little bit of mustard, ginormous amounts of paprika and chipotle powder and some sweet chili sauce. It was awesome! My son came by for some Mom cookin’ and another young friend of ours also stopped by just in time for dinner–it’s one of my favorite things in the world to feed a gang of guys, it just makes me feel happy to watch 'em chow down.

I had a weird, long and very involved dream last night that I actually remember, which is odd for me. Generally speaking I assume I don’t dream at all because I never remember them but last night was an exception. Maybe it’s because I had to get up and pee around 0500 and that woke me in mid-storyline. It was a little spooky going through the dark house, we watched “The Abandoned” which had some scenes of doppelgangers that seriously creeped me out. There’s just nothing worse than seeing yourself all dead and showing how you’re going to die–it’s just wrong. Scary movie, though, highly recommend it.

**FCM, **you need to get FCD to kiss it well! :wink:

Taters, I so have you beat on computer annoyance and graphics card woes right now. See, we have a media box that just coincidentally has THE ONLY graphics card that will NOT work with Netflix streaming video–they even told us this. Also it needs rebuilt due to some codec issues stemming from an earlier graphics capture card that didn’t uninstall properly and causes annoying stutters in DVD and media file playback–kinda not okay for a dedicated media box, y’know? Okay, so I order this badass Radeon 9550 256MB AGP card. We checked the support site for the mobo and it says thumbs up for Radeon 95**, sweet! Get the card, plug it in and whoops, no post! Check the support site again and it’s been changed, there’s now a little PS at the bottom that says Radeon 95** and 96** are NOT supported! Well shit. Okay fine–we have another mobo. Unfortunately that one doesn’t support the Celeron D processor we’re running. Fine, no problem, got a nice phatty Pentium D 2.53 CPU–plug it in and whoops, turns out the mobo isn’t working even though it was fine a while ago. Fucking FINE then–found a nice new mobo that supports the CPU and the graphics card, it comes in and for some reason IT won’t post either, powers up but no post. Himself left it at that because he was ready to snap stuff in half–he thinks it’s an obscure voltage issue that will be solved by tricksy jumper settings but it’s annoying nonetheless. Upshot is that we’ve been without the media box for a couple weeks with all this nonsense and we’re having to limp by using my old laptop instead, which works but isn’t terribly convenient and won’t listen to the remote.

It’s a resounding case of “for want of a nail, the shoe was lost…”

Computers are GREAT. They make our lives EASIER. We LOVE computers. Grrr. :smack:

417

Peter woke me up at 3:30 this morning to show me/play with his new dead mouse.

If he wasn’t so damn useful right now I’d have a nice catskin rug.

418

The problem for me with the graphics card, Smartie, is that 256 MB just won’t do it. I’m going to need at least 512. This computer came with a Nvidia 9300 GE card. It’s only 256 MB. Hubby has 768 MB 9800 Ultra (Nvidia). His PC runs smooth as silk with the resolution turned completely up for games.

We’re certainly not going to go out and get one of those right now, but we’ll get one that’s at least 512 MB.

WoW takes a lot of power to run as far as graphics go. You can run it on lower resolution, but it certainly doesn’t look as nice. Additionally, things become “laggy”.

I did a stupid and had to restore this PC to factory specs. I wanted to install the program that came with my camera on the computer. It said it supported Windows Vista, so I thought all was good. Until the computer wouldn’t restart. That’s when I noticed that it doesn’t support 64 bit Vista. Grrrrrr. I’m more angry at myself than anything. I’ve got it all squared away now, but now I have to reinstall WoW and all it’s patches too. Bleh.

419

I like Opus. I really do. But I don’t like today’s . That last panel hurts me to look at.

Dear Berkely Breathed,

Never do another comic that features ticks.

In good news, my neck stopped hurting last night after a hot shower. Now I need to get off my tush and apply for a tutoring job so I can make some extra $$$.

420

Afternoon! Got to Mass, came home, napped and we’re doing some minor chores and playing with Nat.
Spaz, I sympathize. Dead mice early in the morning. Ick. Buit useful cat, so you can’t kill him. Shucks.