A Couple of Days

December 21, 2016

I guess the longest night in the last 500 years occurred last night. I didn’t notice!

One true thing: Life is an agent of planetary evolution, but not the only one.

A baking day, today it was squash muffins. The last batch of muffins weren’t as good as the squash muffins. In the last batch I substituted a banana and cooked mashed sweet potato for the pumpkin or squash, they were still good, but we like the squash muffins better. Our dinner is in the cast iron dutch oven, seared steak with carrots, potatoes, and onions, sprinkled with a little pepper and a ½ teaspoon of Garlic Plus, simmered all afternoon. It smells good at our house.

It was sunny and mild today, I did get out for my daily walk. The road was clear in the middle, so I walked in the middle, listening carefully for approaching vehicles, ready to dodge quickly to the side of the road should one happen down the road. The sidewalks are now impossible for walking, ice everywhere. It was lovely out there, the wind had the tops of the pine trees dancing, and there were numerous birds enjoying the sunshine.

The Christmas Cactus is blooming profusely now, four beautiful pink blooms.

I have completed digitizing the VHS home movies. All done, and they are gone. We no longer have to store them! I feel liberated!

December 23, 2016

The day is intermittently sunny then cloudy, there is a brisk wind running the show. Attila is enjoying his first day home for the holidays. Mostly we have been wrapping our gifts to one another, they are now gayly beckoning from beneath the pine scented branches of the Christmas tree. We have no shopping left to do, the turkey, the vegetables, are all waiting patiently in the freezer for preparation day.

Yesterday we made the decision to replace our 2007 iMac, which will no longer accept operating system updates. I found a refurbished model from 2015, the smallest one manufactured at the time it was manufactured, ordered it, and it will arrive in early January. We will need to decide what to do with the old one though, we certainly do not have enough room to store it for posterity! This expense will mean that there will be no major renovation projects this summer; it was a unanimous decision, we can’t do everything. It was only a matter of time before the 2007 model would not function adequately as our entertainment centre. We don’t have a television, or television cable service, all our entertainment comes to us on the iMac. The 2007 is painfully slow now, and the 2GB of RAM barely allows most of the programs we use to function. We have our fingers crossed that the iMac replacement lasts ten years too!

I don’t like using the migration programs that exist for switching computers. I will install all the pertinent software individually and manually, starting with the anti-virus/firewall packages. It will be a big job, but we will have a fairly stable system from the get go, even if it takes a bit of time to get going.

Back in 2008 I purchased a piece of software to handle my recipes. The company discontinued the software, and I moved on to use another software package. This morning I received an email message from the company that owned the discontinued software package, offering me a different piece of software free of charge, as a gift to a previous customer, me. I downloaded it and it seems it will be quite useful, it is called Renamer, by incrediblebee.com. The software will batch rename files according to chosen parameters, like adding characters or the date to the beginning or end of the file names. I will use this software to deal with file collections.

So time is quietly slipping into the shadow of a peaceful Christmas for us, here at Mist Cottage.

Worldly Distractions

Weather

1°C
Date: 6:00 PM EST Wednesday 21 December 2016
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 101.9 kPa
Tendency: Rising
Temperature: 1.1°C
Dew point: -1.6°C
Humidity: 82%
Wind: SW 22 km/h
Visibility: 19 km

Mostly Cloudy
3°C
Date: 3:00 PM EST Friday 23 December 2016
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 102.5 kPa
Tendency: Falling
Temperature: 3.4°C
Dew point: -0.4°C
Humidity: 76%
Wind: SW 20 km/h
Visibility: 24 km

Quote

“Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.”
Eric Hoffer

I would add the word deliberate to this, deliberate rudeness. Because there are so many cultures and ways of seeing the world, the codes defining what is rude and what is not are not totally consistent. People can seem rude to others merely because they are different, or have experienced a different social environment.