An Interesting Week

I don't do well in the shortest darkest days of the year, but with the lengthening days, I have gotten more active.  It's nice to start accomplishing things again.

1.  I got The Salvation Army out here to pick up stuff I never used or no longer needed.  Mainly, I had a dining room table and chairs that I bought at their local showcase store 8 years ago.  It had some dings and scrapes, and I intended to completely refinish it as a Winter project.  Realizing I would never get around to doing that, I wanted to give it back.  I was also cleaning out closets and accumulated 8 boxes of miscellaneous household goods in good condition, a telescope (I have a newer better one now), an unopened flat screen wall mount (I decided to use a TV table instead), a nearly unused upright vacuum cleaner (I have wood floors now), etc.

It was all picked up last Wensday (I have decided to change the spelling; "Wednesday" is just medieval).  The new open space in my basement workshop is appreciated.

2.  I decided my cooking habits were in a rut.  20 years ago, I used to make pizzas from scratch.  I relearned how.  The first was bad.  The 2nd and 3rd were very good.  A pizza stone helps.  So does a bread machine with a pizza dough setting.  And leaving the dough sit overnight in a covered bowl helps.  I made my own sauce from crushed canned tomatoes too.  I do that for my spaghetti sauce anyway, just let it get a bit thicker.  Sliced commercial pepperoni, hot italian sausage, green bell peppers, mushrooms, and onions.

And I made chicken cordon blue, my own breaded chicken nuggets, ground hamburger from top sirloin (I have a manual grinder), pancakes from scratch, and egg rolls.

My efforts to make decent hamburger buns continue to fail, though.

3.  Rearranged and vacuumed the entire basement wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling.  The guys who filled the walls with insulation last September left such a mess (even though they did a lot of cleaning).  But I moved EVERYTHING and vacuumed.  I vacuumed some spots that may have never been vacuumed in 28 years.  When's the last time you pulled out the washer and dryer and cleaned behind there?  LOL!

4.  Reorganized all the stuff from the attic that I had to move down into the cats' room and stored them for returning to the attic when I replace the flooring up there.  The cats are thrilled to have more space for toys, exploring, and scratchers.

5.  Took almost everything out of the computer room, threw away lots of old stuff, and returned little.  And there is more to get rid of.  Why should I keep the boxes and disks from the apps from Windows 98?

6.  Emptied out 3 closets and most of the stuff went to a new pile of stuff to go to charity.  It is amazing how much unneeded "stuff" ends up on closet floors.  "Out of sight, out of mind".  For example, 30 years ago, I became the manager of an office softball team.  I had bases, gloves and balls in a box.  I'm keeping the ball and gloves, but the bases can go.  One thing charities can't say is that I have boring stuff to give.

7.  I had boxes of newspaper articles clipped out for "information".  Computer articles, gardening articles, cooking articles.  That stuff is all on the internet now.  So those are going into the recycling bin.

8.  One box was half full on fanfold perforated-edge computer paper!  That goes back to the days of dot-matrix printers.  But I'm not recycling THAT.  I now have a lifetime supply of note-taking paper!  Some old stuff is worth keeping.

9.  The weather today was GREAT.  It reached 67F!  I went outside to do some gardening work.  Mostly, I needed to dig level spots for the 6th of 6 framed garden beds.  Unfortunately, the ground was still frozen 2' down, so I did some work, but not as much as I hoped.  Still I did some work and the next warm day I can get another 2' deep.  That will be enough to build that 6th bed before Spring arrives.

10.  Haircut time!  Ever 2 months.  And I love the feel of heated shaving cream around my ears and neck when the barber does that razor cut!

11.  Visited the bank.  Got 6x higher interest rates on my savings with some creative transfers.   3% interest is better than .5%

I may have had a more productive week sometime, but I can't recall when exactly.  LOL!

Why I hate Microsoft

I play Civilization 2 on the old PC.  Its not connected to anything but it does run.  After playing a game scenario twice, I discovered that I couldn't overwrite the previous games of the same dates and was slipping into the previous game versions on the same months (the game progresses by months). I was playing the exact same game as previously.  The third trip around the game. I caught on.

That kind of thing pisses my off royally.   And I really wasn't calm about it. 

So I just spent 4 HOURS  digging into the PC and deleting most of its functions until it finally stopped fighting me.  You wouldn't believe what it was doing.  I found where it saved all the previous games.  But that wasn't enough.  Microsoft insists on protecting you from losing old games. 

It kept COPIES of all the previous games!  Every *&#$*@g time I tried to replay the designed scenario (designed to be replayed you understand),  good old Microsoft insisted on reloading the original version of the first game I played by month of the scenario.  It took me a few tries to figure THAT out.  Sort of a "Wait, I didn't do THAT this time".   But the computer did.  Everytime I hit a month file, it loaded the old one.  I was going crazy trying to change my strategy and it wouldn't let me.

I had to dig into the actual files and drag them to the death realm.  And I'm angry because I spent 5 hours playing a WWII game scenario only to have Microsoft overlay OLD games of the same WWII months over the new one AND I had to spend 4 hours killing the old files it hid very carefully. 

I'm going to repeat this so that it is clear.  Microsoft not only kept, say,"March 1942" so that it loaded that old file when I started again in Feb 1941 and gradually played to March 1942.  It kept a COPY of the old file (really copy.filename) so just finding and deleting the original version on the scenario wasn't ENOUGH to clear the game for a new start. 

They are either evil or abominably stupid,  I don't know which and I don't care...   And this is on a computer I deliberately disconnected from the internet for safety's sake.

There are times when I can barely express my "despicification" of Microsoft's controls.