So, ginger ale. Pale, unassuming, mild-mannered. The rice cake of soft drinks. Right?
WRONG! You’ve never had ginger ale if you haven’t had Blenheim. I was blown away from the first sip. Apparently it’s kind of a Carolinas thing, but you should do yourself a favor and hunt down a bottle. Heck, I’ll even buy you one if you’re on my friends list.
[deleted LJ poll]
I am so sick of stuff not working on my stupid computers. Now my secondary machine, the one I use for storage of music and old data I care about, is all frotzed. It won’t boot at all, it says that one of NT’s system files is missing or corrupt. And I can’t repair or upgrade NT on it, apparently, because NT Setup can’t even find any hard drives. I had to stop trying, because if I don’t take a break I’ll probably end up taking a pickaxe to the thing.
This is the direct result of a power outage of about three seconds, which happened last week, hot on the heels of a whole slew of DSL connection problems. Add in the perpetual file transfer failures of unknown cause, being forbidden to send email from my main address using anything but webmail, and the black cloud of haplessness surrounding tmbg.net for the past few months, and it all totals up to a very frustrating digital experience overall. I swear, the Amish lifestyle has never looked so appealing.
I went out to Missouri this past weekend for the baptism of my twin nephews. I am now Sam’s godfather. I doubt I’ll ever really be called upon to give him much active spiritual guidance, but if I am, we’d all better get started praying for him now.
Alex (my singleton nephew, age 1.33 years) has developed a lot since Christmas. It took him a while to warm up to me, but I’m told it was partly due to his cold. Letting him play with my cell phone was a real icebreaker.
We also went to see the house I grew up in, which is now for sale and had a timely open-house showing. Well, the “grew up in” part isn’t quite true, because (a) I’m not sure how grown up I am even now, and (b) I was even less grown up at age 16 when we moved out of it. But we lived there for about ten years, which is twice as long as any other residence I’ve had so far. It looks pretty different now, but it felt so familiar, not at all like someone else’s house, in spite of all their stuff being in there. Some rooms seemed a lot smaller than I remember, others actually seemed bigger. The walkthrough sparked an odd assortment of memories, including some total surprises. Like the first time I was busted for swearing. Or playing wiffleball in the backyard. Or singing with my sister on our makeshift stage (the downstairs fireplace hearth). I’m really glad I got the chance to go through and remember these things.