Just me and the animals and computers

Jean-Luc was bouncing around the kitchen last night, for no visible reason, but was having a good old time tossing something around. A few minutes later, I think I found him out. Three feet from me, on the carpet, a spider. Not acceptable.  The sensible thing to do would have been to fetch the central vac. Neat and tidy, but offers the opportunity for the spider to dodge out of sight. Worse than seeing it is knowing it's nearby, unseen. Once upon a time I would have been paralyzed with fear to be thus trapped in my chair with no avenue of escape, but due to an incident or two I'll save for another time, I've learned to channel fear into aggression.  Sometimes.  So I dropped a newspaper over it and stomped.

Sorry. Lectures about how nice spiders are, how they benefit us by killing other insects, about the sanctity of all life, about the unreasonableness of this fear, are inadequate to combat the power of phobia. Almost everyone seems to have a phobia of some kind so think about yours. At the moment, I have to slide the newspaper back into place whenever spindly legs peek out.

That was an unexpected diversion.  Saturday was not an exciting day. I started in the morning to unbury the pages of the pocket itinerary for my trip so I could get that project completed and got diverted filing the papers piled on top of them. Come to think of it, what did I really do? I felt I was busy, not even any TV until evening. Little Girl Kitty was starved today, requiring repeated attention, although I think some of her food was eaten by a dog or a deer, as evidenced by the dirty slobber in the bowl.



Look at that pitiful little face.  "I'm starved!" she says.


I did a little updating of my mini-laptop. It puzzled me that it listed Internet Explorer 9 as an available update. I already had IE9 on it, until I realized it had been "Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate" that I had installed during my last trip, the step right before full release. I'm not all that fond of the interface and it changed how photos load in Blogger. I'll see sometime whether there's a change between RC and the "real thing" in how that works. The mini has "fences" that are supposed to keep desktop icons organized and the new installation seems to have messed up my icons and fences. I've been sitting here staring at it and finally, when I made the screen print, I see the fences with nothing in them and all the icons puddled in the middle.

Pondering for an hour or more, tried to reorganize the fences which managed to obscure (the practical effect is "lose") many of the icons. Stupid touch pads are impossible to use for dragging and resizing fences. (I only have this mini because I can't lift my heavier laptop into the overhead bin in a plane.) Turned the fences off and am arranging icons to my taste. Are any of you old enough to remember Program Groups on your desktop? I think it was Windows 3.1? I unclutter the desktop by inventing my own program groups. Yet I modernly transfer among computers by networking.

Enough for tonight. I'll try again in the morning to get my booklet completed.

See you tomorrow.

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