2007-04-19

After Morning Offering, Jim donned a jacket, as it is still chilly here, and set off for a full day of mowing. On top of that, he was still finishing up a landscaping job which has dragged on because the husband and the wife do not always agree. Mick was about to finish up – as he thought – when the wife stepped outside to ask him what edging he would use on their new plantings. Mick replied that the husband had said, no edging. Half and hour later, the husband had changed his mind. So Mick cannot finish until he’s rounded up an edging they like – both of them. He spent the last of his work day going to four different nurseries looking for the right edging.

I spent all my time today on one project – getting a shout out to my MacDuffie classmates, asking for their news so I can write a good digest for all of the class come June. I wrote the news-begging letter itself in the morning and by lunch time I had e-mailed thirteen versions of the letter to the thirteen people whose e-addresses I have from the class. Then in the afternoon, I set out to snail-mail the other 43 classmates the same letter, with an added paragraph asking them please to share with me their e-mail addresses. It is way easier to do this by e-mail!

There were two glitches, besides my basic lack of technological expertise – both databases I was using were arranged randomly with regards to alphabetization. The MacDuffie database is alphabetized by maiden name. Almost all of my classmates have a married name and go by that. So the order of married names is random. And in the database Gary made for me so I could print out address labels, he had not typed in my classmates' maiden names, so when it came time to be sure I had a letter going out to each classmate, it was slow going.

To make things worse, I used a yellow highlighter to mark off names and halfway through I saw that the color was bleeding from line to line. I had to begin over! However, I did succeed, finally. I spoke with Gary later and he will be glad to alter his database to include all the ladies’ maiden names so that the next round of letters should be a whole lot easier. He will roar when he sees the two pages of the MacDuffie database table I was using. Talk about a marked-up list!

I keep thinking to myself these days, what would I have ever done if my computer hadn’t bonked? I have cleaned up an amazing amount of details in this office during my down time. There is still some to go, so I will keep hustling and hope that I am all caught up when IBM sends me Traveller Too.

After a lovely whirlpool, Jim and I settled in for a night of movie watching, as Gary had lent us The Good Shepherd. Matt Damon plays a good cold-hearted anti-hero and he had a solid ensemble backing him as the film told a somewhat fictionalized story of how the CIA got started. We paused it for the Gaia Meditation, and Jim had his supper during the watching.

We said good night after a snuggle with the kitties at 11 PM.