Here’s some sewing gear. We got a thimble and a seam ripper, the basics. I dug out my sewing box and had a look. Then it cost me 97 cents to find out I require a large thimble rather than the medium shown here. Funny, it seemed larger in the box. Maybe it was packaged by Cadbury’s? I took a peek at WalMart sewing machines. All total junk. Bottom end Singer and Brother.
I waited too long, now I have a family of mice. Time to set out those sticky traps before I have a colony. I was up past 2:00 AM reading more of “Fair Winds and Far Places”. Since it repetitiously describes Caribbean Islands that could only be described as repetitious, the book can be put down for a few days and you won’t miss much. It includes just enough facts and history to keep me reading.While I agree people who can afford to live on sailboats are a fairly exclusive bunch, it is still wondrous how Zane, the author, has sailed for years and met only other married, middle-aged, monogamous, white couples. I hear taking your wife on a cruise is like taking a sandwich to a banquet. He does once mention jealousy over seeing hippies and renegade stock brokers who make more in one illegal operation than he did in his lifetime. But he never meets them or anything.
I rigged up a new antenna, which took me four hours and the signal I’m getting remains only 10%, or about 11Mbps. Not enough to support much more than e-mail and the weather report. I’ll overcome the difficulties but not without frustration. It is going to require something I don’t have: a parabolic dish. Oh well, there is no such thing as a computer problem that cannot be solved.
Looks like I won’t be going to Colorado before the summer is out. Good, that just means I’ll have more money to travel with. I spent and uncharacteristic 1:41 on the phone tonight, but we had a lot to talk about. Plus, it was birthday time over there. Plus, it was our 30th anniversary, we met in 1981 when Marion was just a baby. Let’s tally up, she’s divorced twice or maybe thrice, has five grown adult children, all sons, and is married again. This brought up the topic of my being single.
Marion swears by eHarmony, citing four personal cases of people she knows that gave up ever finding anyone. She’s half talked me into a the one month free trial, but let me look at the situation first, as in complaints and performance data. When I reviewed it several years back, I was not impressed. I was also put off by the ads I’d looked at, determining that 90% of the people were full of it.
By that, I’m saying the ratios were all wrong. I know that every second person I meet does not have an advanced university degree or a professional career, but they did on eHarmony. Marion assures me that has changed, so without question I will follow up. Besides, even if I meet someone, my built-in rules will eliminate the gold-diggers. For example, I always insist the first few dates are Dutch. It has the secondary advantage of ensuring that both parties enjoy whatever you do. I doubt I would go Dutch to a biker bar, but the symphony or the planetarium sound good.
Last, I tackled the hard drive trouble on my computer. Here’s some technical data you might like. Five years ago, a 100 Gigabyte drive was top of the line. Now it is 500 Gigabyte. But the technology has not improved. Instead, they added more disks inside the casing. There used to be a couple, not there are up to eight.
Sadly, they still use the same fragile read-write heads. Now there are eight of them to jam or crash. So I decided to Ghost my drives up to the newest models only to find out they no longer make IDE drives. I had to go SATA, which do not include either a cable or a power cord in the box. The cable alone is $30, which is a blatant rip-off since no internal computer cable is worth that much. Fred had some spares.And we got to talking. Turns out I am not the only bachelor who considers $18 outrageous to have trouser cuffs sewn. Remember, I don’t run with a crowd that is ever likely to converse about such topics, but once I mentioned the sewing course, that changes things. I may already have some customers, you know, another one of the “little things” I can do for “extra money”. Surprise, Fred knows a guy with a small warehouse of used sewing machines.
And to think I was using my seam ripper to strip insulation off stranded wires.
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