Tom Jones and two cats

It has been very beneficial to have a few evenings at home, but I am still suffering from fairly pronounced cold symptoms! I got up early and had a productive morning, including a lot of paper commenting, then got back off course when the keyboard on my laptop stopped working - I took it in to a repair place in midtown and am anxiously awaiting news (writing in the meantime on my iPad - really I have device redundancy - but I have letters of recommendation I need to submit Tuesday, I had better be able to get it back before then!).

My evening: a lot more paper comments, but also - more pleasantly - 2 cats and the first two books of Tom Jones!

Back to normal

It's amazing having my real computer again - I went and picked it up a couple hours ago, and it feels like coming home! I live a good deal of my life via email and reading things on the internet: that little tablet was a good stopgap, but still.... In particular the Columbia webmail is hopeless, very happy to be using Thunderbird again.

New Kindle Paperwhite arrived yesterday, and I have just ordered a replacement watch (in the meantime I am wearing my other watch, a rather nice diving one - with a bezel! - that Wendy gave me after I got my scuba certification when she came to visit for Breakfast Near Tiffany's).

Saw an odd little play last night with G., Bull at 59E59. It is more of a scenario than a fully fledged play, and I thought only the sole female character had much depth - it's watchable but feels a bit purposeless. (I wasn't that keen on its predecessor Cock either.) Delicious dinner afterwards here - I had beef carpaccio (in my opinion this is the perfect dish - the combination of arugola, parmesan and raw beef is just ridiculously good), an amazing very simple branzino with lightly sauteed vegetables and a tiramisu I ordered after dimly recalling that we had eaten here once before and I had ordered what turned out to be the best tiramisu I have ever tasted. And it still is.

Season of lost and broken things

It is mildly ironic, since things in my life right now are very good and distinctly neither lost nor broken - but it has been the season of lost and broken things!

My Kindle stopped working and I got a new Paperwhite, only to leave it in the seat pocket on a plane in Portland, ME. I filed a lost property report with Delta online, but I haven't heard anything, and I think if they haven't sorted it out by now, it's not likely to surface subsequently. Will order a new one - have been using Kindle app on phone and on my new Kindle Fire, but really as an excessive novel-reader it is worth it for me to have the dedicated reading device.

The SD card on my smartphone stopped working, so I replaced the phone (it was old, I was overdue for a free upgrade), so that doesn't really count. But in the meantime I started getting an error message on my laptop saying that the battery wasn't recognized - it hasn't worked on battery power for weeks now, but as the messages became more frequent, I realized I'd better do something about it. Dropped it off earlier today with repair guy who thinks it is either the battery or the motherboard - very happy to have the Kindle Fire HD (with bluetooth keyboard) to fall back on, as being completely computer-less is not conducive to my tranquility.

I had a lovely time at swim practice last night, but not only did I leave my watch on the floor in the showers (it's old-school gym-building, even in the women's locker room there are no stalls and no shelves to put anything on, I rested my cap/goggles/suit/watch on the floor but the watch must have camouflaged itself sufficiently that I didn't see it), I also seem to have been on auto-pilot and relocked my lock onto the locker when I left! One or both of these may be retrievable by me on Sunday, and both are cheap and easy to replace - but I hope I can put a stop to this trend before it sweeps away something irreplaceable....

The Smurfberry binge

I have found myself thinking of this story so regularly since I first read it (courtesy of Brent) that I think I had better actually link to it here: at the Washington Post, Cecilia Kang considers the issue of in-app purchasing in children's games.