Heartstopping

Longtime readers may remember my girlhood habit of leaving my library card in the stacks when I was browsing for library books. Old habits, apparently, die hard.

Friday evening I was at work after we closed, trying to finish up some things for Monday morning so I didn't have to go in on Saturday. Part of my work involved a trip down to Reference to look at some encyclopedias. So, I armed myself with paper, pencil, flashlight, and keys (they turn off some of the lights at closing and the Reference shelves can be pretty dark). I went downstairs, did what I needed to do, and was ready to head back up to the office when I realized the keys weren't in my pocket.

Without keys, I had no way back into our office area or into my very office, wherein lay my car keys and ID to exit the building. For a second or two, I imagined how I could pass the night in the library until someone came to open up at 8am (I was going to find a novel and pass the time reading and sleeping. and being hungry). Then, I thought to backtrack through the Reference shelves, because I was CERTAIN I had checked my pocket for keys before I went downstairs.

Sure enough, the keys were on a shelf where I had stopped, and I was able to get back into my office and safely exit the building.

Sorry to say that's the most exciting item to report right now, but it is. Welcome to my world!

My TV is Broken, Or, an Adage Proved

I own an inherited TV with a universal remote. I'm not complaining in the least, but that piece of information may help you understand why I've never been able to turn on closed captioning while the TV volume is up. So, if I need to backtrack to see what pithy insult Greg House has just hurled at some deserving minion, I have to mute the volume. I often wished I could have captions and sound at the same time.

As they say, be careful of what you hope for, because it might come true. And so it has for me. I don't know what magic remote button I pushed, but now I have closed captioning all the time and I can't turn it off.

Any advice?

Ho-Hum

When my mother catches a cold and loses her taste, she sometimes worries that the loss might be permanent. In similar fashion, I'm a bit worried that my lack of creativity and/or interesting events to blog about might become permanent.

The only mildly interesting event lately was the opportunity to chaperone a church dance last Saturday. Twenty+ years is apparently not enough time since my last youth dance for the pain to have dissipated--it made me nervous and self-conscious just being there as an adult! The girls I drove all seemed to have a good time. They spent the whole ride there and back (hour each way) sharing iPods, two girls to a player, one girl to one ear bud, and texting various people in and out of the car. What did teens do before iPods and phones?

BTW - Octavia and Arachnus have gone on to that big vacuum bag in the sky. That's about the only other thing of note lately--I managed to thoroughly clean the kitchen and semi-thoroughly clean the bathroom this week.

The Other Side

Hello, readers:

We're the two little spiders who live in Auntie K's bathroom. Perhaps she is tired of her long days and lack of free time, but we're on the other side of that workaholic lifestyle, and we're all for it. In fact, our very existence depends upon K's lack of time and energy. One day, she's going to take it into her head to point the vacuum nozzle our way and that will be curtains for us.

Actually, K. hasn't worked quite as much the last few days as she was doing previously, but so far, we still seem to be in the clear. If you can think of anything that might save us from certain destruction, please let us know.

Signed,

Octavia and Arachnus

Anti-Awesome

My weekend trip was very good, and I loved seeing three of my nieces. More about that later, perhaps. The week back at work was particularly tough, filled with four very long days, and I'm looking at more work over the weekend. :-(

So, this post will only be a short rant against Mozilla. Please ignore me if you have no interest in Firefox (or think it's only the name of a movie).

The Firefox 3 location bar is, imho, decidedly anti-awesome. In what world is my bookmark for a government Web site about raw fruits and vegetables relevant to my action of typing www into the location bar? It's not relevant in my world, and I don't want to see it cluttering up my computer screen, along with all my other bookmarked sites that have some vague connection to the letter w.

If I want to search for a site containing a "w" I'm going to use the handy search engine box next to the location bar. Call me old-fashioned, but I liked my plain-jane location bar, and I didn't start typing in it unless I knew the URL I wanted.

Trust me, I'll either be trying a fix or returning this upgrade to the sender.