In The Wastelands

Yesterday our phone and Internet were both out most of the day.  You have no idea how frustrated you can get in the hour before you think to listen to the dial tone because your $#%&* laptop won't connect to the Internet and you realize that the phone hasn't rung (and it's Durwood's 75th birthday so people should be calling) so you call the company on a cellphone to find out that there's an outage in your area and they anticipate it being all better by about, oh, 9 o'clock PM and that's roughly 8 hours from right now.  A person gets frustrated.


We went back to the pawn shop.  I bought a $40 one-step-up digital camera (with no battery charger or cables or memory card all of which I have ordered on Amazon for about $30 bucks total, with shipping [not bad]) and Durwood circled around a much better DSLR Canon, looking for a pie-in-the-sky price.  He took the afternoon to think about it and we stopped on the way to supper and got it at a pretty good discount.  Now the learning starts.  I'll be taking a ream of paper to work with me to print out the user manuals... well, as much of them as I anticipate us needing.  The things are each almost 200 pages long, for pity's sake.

It's August and that means tomatoes.  I harvested a few 'maters yesterday.  Durwood's beard should be well-soaked with juice for a few days.  Sunnyhill Farms corn's ready too so it's easy to swing by and nab a couple ears for supper.  Mmm, fresh tomatoes and corn.

I didn't manage to rewrite any chapters while in the throes of the head cold but I picked the red pen back up at work on Monday and edited and typed my way through Chapter 9.  Yay, me!  I'm not doing "a chapter a day" like I'd intended but I'm pretty stoked that I haven't given up when the plan relaxed a bit.  At least I'm working on, thinking about writing again.  That's a good step forward.

August 6--Egypt, Figuring of a Man.  He huddled in her hand, his arms wrapped around himself.  She thought he looked cold or maybe afraid and hoped that a little of her warmth would spread to him.  She knew he was only an ivory carving but there was something about the shape of his mouth and his uneven eyes that made him seem real.  She carried him in her pocket all the time.  He was small enough that he stayed in even the shallowest pocket.  No one ever knew he was there.

They just announced on the morning news that the Russian Mafia hacked into the entire internets stealing everyone's passwords and identity stuff so we're supposed to go and change ALL our passwords, etc.  This is tiresome, isn't it?  Why don't we just give them all our stuff and turn over our money and they can leave us in peace to live cold and starving in the mud?  I firmly believe if criminals expended as much energy and craftiness in positive pursuits (such as a job?) they'd be able to stop being criminals.  But that's probably naive of me to think.  I'll be over here changing passwords.  Sheesh.  I'm going to work.
--Barbara