Another birthday has come and gone. I enjoyed thoughtful presents and just enough loving attention to keep me happy. My feet are now warmer in new boots. After viewing The Two Towers, I now look forward to next year's third installment of the Lord of the Rings. Beautiful, heartfelt cards fill my desk with warmth. I received good wishes from those that love me, pleasantries from those that do not.

The best part is that I am another year older. Old is good. The women in my genetic line have not enjoyed particularly long life spans. This fact is not lost on me. Every birthday is welcome; every wrinkle is an achievement. I do old better than I ever did young.

Although the thermostat in the hall reads 68 degrees Fahrenheit, there is a chilly edge to the air. Under these circumstances, Mist is more welcome than usual on my lap. She sits there now, watching my fingers tap away at the keyboard. It may be my imagination, but I think she has been visiting my lap more frequently since the weather has been frigid.

It has been very cold for the last few weeks. Attila works outside; the weather has been a challenge. He has taken good care of himself though, and suffered no frostbite. The weather reports indicate warmer temperatures by the end of the week, thank goodness.

Since Attila spends his days in the great outdoors, he needs outerwear to suit the occasion. His boot ripped a few weeks ago, and although he attempted to repair it, the problem worsened. The boots are expensive, but have lasted over five years, and have given good service.

Yesterday was a day of great discomfort for Attila. When he arrived home, he announced his desire to replace the boots.

The Internet came to the rescue. We searched for local retailers that might sell the specific boots Attila needs. Minutes later he was on the telephone, checking to make sure they had his size in stock. An hour later we were sitting at home in our easy chairs, the new boots standing at attention, ready for service, by the back door.

Details have been taking up my most of my time. Until a few days ago, another domain "hosted" the maggieturner.net site. I finally decided to move the maggieturner.net domain to its own host. Although this is not difficult to do, it does require attention to quite a few small details with registrations, DNS numbers, redirections, and such like.

What I find most challenging are the teeny, tiny details, the ones that suddenly appear like the black fly swarms of June. Everyone knows these details. Everyone but me, that is.

I have always used Apple computers at home. I have a couple of Intel machines here, and I have used UNIX on university servers, but Macintosh has been my native environment. Until now, I have always used a little software program to Telnet into the servers at the university or at the web host. On the old Macintosh computers, this was the only option available.

Now I have OSX. Following my tried and true approach to the Macintosh OS, I looked for a little software program to Telnet into the domain host servers. All I could find on the Apple site was that it was "built-in". Hey, that sounded to me like there would be a quick and easy GUI to handle this process! Not so.

Turns out that one need only drop into Terminal, then type in telnet and the server name. Simple, clean, fast. I should have thought of it, really. The point is, I did not think of it. It is such a small detail that no one at Apple had thought to write it down, put it in print. It is such a small detail that there is no reference to it in the Mac Help files on the computer.

Hours later, a kind hearted Mac-user sent me a one-sentence instruction. I followed it. It worked. Nice guy, no snide remark accompanied his assistance, as is so often the case with these "teeny, tiny detail" situations.

This is a recurring and ironic theme in my life. On the one hand I struggle and succeed in teaching myself complex processes, while on the other hand the project becomes temporarily bottlenecked due to one "simple" detail. I was teaching myself to write access codes for a UNIX Apache server on the one hand, while on the other hand I was unable to think of a way to telnet into the server itself. Sigh.

For the want of a nail...