well, tidying. well...reshuffling.
Timo has a TiVo?
Spies moved to some new hardware and software this week. Mostly this was an invisible change.
And, as the small child said in Aliens, they mostly come out at night. Mostly.
One of the lists I run (a loose term) has a digest form. There's something freaky going on with spies' digest lists, so mine isn't working. Snarl. (I think Ceej has set her mail to ignore any further pleadings from me. Or whatever the equivalent of turning off the porch light and closing all the blinds is.) People on the list are hunting me down, wanting their fix. I don't know what to tell them other than, Go watch TV for a while.
The other problem was entangled in my UNIX shell. Well, guess when the last time I did any UNIX shell hacking was. Those of you who said, "College," are almost right. Those of you who said, "Never," are even closer. Darin--he who will make UNIX all right For The Rest Of Us--stepped in and fixed my .bashrc file for me. (To tell you how clued in I was: I kept checking my .cshrc file. I didn't even know which shell I was using.)
Okay, enough nerdiness.
My mother-in-law, Carole, came into town on Wednesday for a stay of a week and a half. Yes, this will probably drive me nuts; no, this is not her fault--I think Darin is the first person in my life I've been able to be around full-time for a week and a half, and I go all the way back to when I was born.
Carole, who likes to organize things, is here to organize our house. Most specifically, to get the baby's room in order, which means
- cleaning up the tiny bedroom, which will become my office;
- cleaning out what has been my office, which will become the baby's room;
- dealing with the vast quantities of furniture that will be displaced by this reorganization, such as the extra queen-sized bed we don't know what to do with (and which I think is in too nice a condition to simply give to Goodwill);
- and figuring out something to do with the 824,963 books Darin and I have stashed in various closets around the house because we've run out of bookshelf space.
The tiny bedroom (euphemistically referred to as "the home office," since we took care of all of our financial stuff there and keep the printer and fax machine there and is totally and completely separate from "Darin's office") has been a wasteland since we moved into this house. I mean, hip-deep in crap: we put things in there and then never did anything with them. You couldn't sit on the couch. You couldn't be comfortable no matter what.
Carole went in there yesterday, filled a few garbage bags with obvious trash, and then left neat little piles of stuff for me and Darin to go through. It's like a real room again.
This morning she dug out almost all of the books that were in the guest room closet and organized them according to non-fiction, fiction hardcover, and paperbacks for us to go through. We have to get them out of the guest room by tonight, so that she can go to sleep.
She insists that it's much easier to do this in someone else's house than in your own. I sure hope so. The alternative is that Darin and I are just big slugs who can't manage our own house and I'd hate to think that.
We have a very long list of stuff she has to do and now she only has 7 more days to do them in. Eeek.
How two people have managed to fill a four bedroom house with no room left over for baby is simply beyond me.
The answer to Tuesday's question: There was a public art exhibit in Chicago called "Cows on Parade," in which artists were given fiberglass cows to decorate as they saw fit, creating "Picowso" and "Moo-chos Colores." These fine cows can now be yours--well, some of them can, at any rate. Bid now, bid often.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com