C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 74
December 27, 2013
Starting our New Year’s Resolutions BEFORE the 1st…getting a running start.
And the big one is—order. Neatness. We are prioritizing neatness.
This means…the long-postponed scanning of all the stacks of paper which have broken down our less stout filing cabinets. We spent over an hour trying to get the OCR software embedded in the Epson printer to do what we needed…and then a stroke of genius said: if we render it to PDF—can’t Adobe read it?
Oh, yes. It is blinding fast, you bet your sweet bippie Epson talks nicely to the 800 lb gorilla, Adobe, and we end up not only with pdf’ed docs, we end up with docs we can both search and edit. The Epson Workforce 840 is pretty good at physically shifting paper through its feeder, making a good legible scan/copy, and spitting it out again. And now we don’t have to spend ink, we don’t have to fight its internal OCR and fight it through MS docx format and all that. It just scans and stores in searchable pdf. Color us happy. Once we finally got the procedure down pat, we can rip through batches of paper, sort them, scan them in groups which the nice Epson autofeeds, and we are able to find things.
This will enable us to find things without a filing cabinet, and we can dismiss the contents of the filing cabinet to the wastecan, or to deeper storage in archive boxes, and that will let us file other things, many of those being scannable also.
We are beginning to put this office into the 21st century. We are going to be shedding books we will never read or never read again, storing things we want to find on shelves, and organizing the craft area. An hour of work and a lot of swearing produced about a 3″ stack of scanned and done-with documents, but that’s including the swearing. Now I’ve got a system, and I can double that in the same time.
Color us happy. We are going to get this place looking like a house, not a heap of office paper.
December 26, 2013
A good time (and way too much candy!) was had by all…
We got very nice prezzies, warm slippers, and a tin of Almond Roca that is now put away. We pigged out on candy for lunch, and watched the How to Train your Dragon series and Lion in Winter, our Christmas movie! I got Jane an exercise thingie and she got me some unpainted BJD cat-folk that I’m going to paint: I don’t ‘do’ BJD’s, in that I have no impulse to ‘have’ them, but I love doing pencilwork on them, so the plan is that I create their face-ups, turn them into colored and painted dolls, Jane puts them in clothes, and we sell them on Etsy… Meanwhile maybe the exercise thingie can work off the way too much Almond Roca.
Neither of us wants to see sugar for months! This will even include New Years.
December 24, 2013
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!
Christmas Eve morning—and we are officially, at least here, on holiday!
Have a very happy whatever-you-celebrate, with love to all!
December 22, 2013
We have the Christmas Eve Forecast…
Freezing rain.
Glug.
Jane’s out there shoveling snow right now, and I feel incredibly guilty. I should get out there and attack that.
December 20, 2013
Due to intensive spam traffic, we’re not accepting new members on this site until mid January
34 new ones this morning. Jane’s site also got hit. So if you want to be a member, send me a letter via cj at cherryh.com and tell me. But there’ll be no accepted signups by any other route until the holidays are over.
December 17, 2013
Phone fixed, and Soda Stream…
…sent us the wrong frickin’ order. For what I think is the third time. One bottle exploded from cold. The others are frozen. We don’t know what might happen with the ones that have to thaw.
On the phone front, it WAS the wall connector, which apparently corrodes, if repeated dosed with coffee (thank you, kittehs, who persistently knock my coffee off the ledge with affectionate swipes or in enthusiasm to murder foreign cats intruding into the garden.) Seems if one part of the phone line (as with other electrics) dies and breaks the circuit with a dead spot, phones all over the house go down. Which is why our wireless hookup was working out of the office, but the other things on the landline weren’t.
Jane fixed it. There’s nothing Jane can’t do. I thought sure we’d be in for a repair bill on this one.
December 16, 2013
Our landphone is deader than a mackerel and Soda Stream strikes again.
We made an order to Soda Stream somewhere back in … September, I think it was.
Order arrives: damaged. Sent back.
Replacement order arrives: damaged. Sent back.
Third try: we get a notification via tracking that it was delivered ‘to the back door’ —our garden gate is padlocked…and it’s a back door somewhere in OHIO…
We’re about 2000 miles from Ohio.
Between Soda Stream and their shipping department—we’re having a moment. And we’re still waiting for our diet Root Beer.
Not only that, the landline is dead.
This could relate to the new modem, which replaced the defective modem Comcast took 6 hours figuring out was defective, which replaced the defunct and defective modem that died.
Hello? Insanity central here.
December 14, 2013
Friday the 13th, enough to make you superstitious…
The live shipment from an online critter supplier (invertebrates: tank cleaning crew) arrived badly packed and frozen and smelling to high heaven.
The company was not only careless, shipping bags of live critters into the north in nothing but a cardboard box with a hand-warmer pack, they wanted pix of the unfortunate deceased before they would issue a refund.
I was annoyed, to say the least.
So I’m back and forth in e-mails with the suppliers on the dead critters, trying, politely to inform them they’re at fault, and no, the fact that the water containing the microlife caused my skimmer to overflow an hour after dosing it in informs me the microlife was also dead. And no, I’m not a novice. I’ve been at this hobby probably longer than this chap has been alive, I’m a hobbyist technical volunteer on one of the sites he pays to advertise on, though I did not reveal that fact, not wishing to use that status to get better treatment than he gives other customers, and I do know dead sea life when I smell it.
Not only that, when trying to empty the skimmer, I bobbled, and poured very vile-smelling ‘death’ skimmate (dark fluid resulting from the foam this device collects from the tank water) onto my good snow boots and my pants leg. Yecccch. This particular aroma is so bad that the human nose continues to smell it for up to 2 days after the smelly object has been removed.
Every time I tried to get to work there was another e-mail with a problem that had to be solved. Business stuff.
I went to the store (in a clean pair of pants) and got my thyroid prescription filled.
An hour after I got that filled, and got home, I get a letter from the doc with a new prescription. That one worked out ok: the prescription I just had filled is what Jane is taking.
There were several other things that blew up in more e-mails.
Heck no, I didn’t want to photograph those dead stinking things. I put them into the ivy bed in the garden. But when Jane found out why I was ticked, here we are out in the dark in our night shirts in 20 degree weather searching the ivy bed for deceased wildlife. We did find them. And freezing does mitigate the smell.
So I sent the required photos to the company. They will refund, and if they do not, though I haven’t told them so—the internet site aforenamed is going to get an advisement one of our advertisers is being a jerk.
Well, at least I didn’t burn dinner. But eating with the persistent smell is not ‘nice’.
Nothing on telly.
So we finally head for bed.
I’m just about to fall asleep watching murders on the mystery channel, the only thing that’s on, when, zap! The power goes out.
Not a breaker. The power.
I go down the hall in pitch black and advise Jane, who *is* asleep, and we start looking for the flashlight (which we had used in the dead-critter-location in the ivy) and finding a phone book. All our wireless phones are dead because the base unit has no power. My cell is in the process of charging for the first time…fortunately *that* was past the 5-hour initial do-not-interrupt battery initialization…but it isn’t activated yet…the old cell is deader than a mackerel (thank you, AT&T) and Jane can’t find hers. Fortunately we have a hardwired phone (never give those up!) and we can find one phonebook…never throw out your last one!
Now, in Oklahoma, a clever bot operates with the power company to take your phone number, compute your location, and build a picture of the outage so the OG&E guys can fix it. Not so in Spokane. Ours asks you if it’s a street light and if not, you get in queue and wait a quarter of an hour (at this point I asked Jane for the Scotch) until one elderly-sounding lady gets online to take your information.
Yes, our house is dark, our streetlight is out, and houses behind us and across the avenue are all dark. Across the street, no, they’re fine.
The nice lady informs us a guy took out a power pole (which is why the police have been running down the avenue with lights blazing) and they’ll get it fixed by 5 AM. Well, it’s 1 AM now. So the fish can go 8 hours with no pump. We’re ok.
But at this point we’re frazzled. We got out the oil lamps and had a Scotch and shortbread cookie pity party until past 2 AM. Shu investigated a lamp and nearly singed his whiskers. Sei is still snoozing through it all in my room with the door shut. We decided we’d had enough Scotch to calm down, and headed for bed.
Probably about 3 AM the power came back on.
This morning we have headaches. I wonder why.
We’re hoping for a much nicer Dec 14th.
