Cycling with a Friend
Month: June 2020
In 3s
Things go wrong in threes. That's what they say, right? So if that's the case, we're done. First, the roof. A leak. Fortunately, insurance wrote us a new roof.
Second, the lawnmower. Two hundred dollars to fix it. I could have bought a new lawnmower for that. Of course, it would have been a cheap piece of junk, but the fact stands.
Then the dishwasher. We paid a repairman $75 to tell us what I thought I knew: the main board was gone. So we went to a few places looking for a replacement, including a local appliance store that sells the crazy cabinet-depth $20,000 Sub-Zero refrigerators. You'd think that's the last place to find a deal, but we did indeed find a deal. The real deal: they had it in stock. Big-box stores didn't, and we'd still have to wait weeks for delivery.
So we got the dishwasher installed, ready to go. We're waiting on the roofing company to catch up with their work that's been thrown off schedule with all the rain. And I've already used the mower once. Are we past the threes? Who knows.
The Boy’s Photos
Visitor
Sunday with Friends
In many regards, they might as well be sisters.
After all, our kids refer to each other as cousins, and they’re here for all the major holidays.
If that doesn’t make us family, I don’t know what does.
Typical Saturday
Work-Around
I figured out a work-around for the lack of storage that, upon talking to the local Lenovo service department, promises to be relatively easily mended.
So I spent a little time this afternoon seeing just how much faster the new computer is than the old. It's fast. Blazing fast. The old computer was particularly sluggish in Lightroom when doing spot adjustments with the brush. Switching on the mask overlay could take a few seconds if there were enough adjustments on the photo. On the new computer, it's instantaneous.
Review: Rules of Civility
I wasn't sure what I thought of this book at first. There wasn't much of a plot: just some randomly connected incidents pulled together by the simple fact that they were happening to the same character. She goes to a nightclub; she eats dinner somewhere; she does this; she does that.
Then I started picking up on the allusions. This book is jam-packed with them. While there are some allusions to music and art, most of them refer back to novels. And then I started to see that the structure of the novel was itself an allusion to a classic novel we've all read. And then I started to see how Towles was taking yet another novel, itself a modern classic, inverting the structure, and placing on top of the allusion to the classic novel.
And then came this passage between a rich New York aristocrat (with a good and pure heart, though) and the narrator, a working-class girl born to Russian Jewish immigrants. The aristocrat is visiting the narrator's apartment and notices the books:
"You've got a lot of books," he said at last.
"It's a sickness."
"Are you ... seeing anyone for it?"
"I'm afraid it's untreatable."
He put his briefcase and the wine on my father's easy char and began circling the room with a tilted head.
"Is this the Dewey decimal system?"
"No, but it's based on similar principles. Those are the British novelists. The French are in the kitchen. Homer, Virgil and the other epics are there by the tub."
Wallace wandered toward one of the windowsills and plucked Leaves of Grass off a teetering stack.
"I take it the transcendentalists do better in sunlight."
"Exactly."
"Do they need much water?"
"Not as much as you'd think. But lots of pruning."
He pointed the volume toward a pile of books under my bed.
"And the ... mushrooms?"
"The Russians."
This is, at its heart, a book about books, cleverly camouflaged as something else, but it is in essence a giant hat-tip to literature. That's not all it is, of course, but that's it's organizing principle.
I won't mention what exactly the classic novel and modern classic are -- that would be a spoiler. I fear in mentioning them at all I've given too much away.
For all it has going for it, though, this novel is clearly a first novel: execution doesn't quite meet conception. Perhaps Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow, which I read first, set me up to expect too much. This is a solid novel, though, and an enjoyable read even if it does drag just a bit at times.
Day 81: Frustration
Here are the specs for the order:
Notice: a 2 x 2TB hard drive for data storage.
Here are the properties of that drive (since it’s a raid, the two drives should appear as one 4TB drive):
That’s 2TB. Half of what I ordered.
I called so many people. I chatted with online help. Most of the conversations went like the online chat:
To say I spent most of the day alternating between laughter, fury, frustration, and resignation is a vast oversimplification.
This is the last time I will ever order a computer with customizations online. From here on out, I’m either building the machine myself or having someone else locally build it to my specifications.
All of that to say that we have this incredibly powerful computer that has a woeful lack of storage. I’m working on a short-term workaround, but the upshot is simple: still no pictures for today.
Day 80: Transitions
It’s almost embarrassing how long we struggled along with the same old computer as our main computer. I was the main user: Chromebooks, laptops, and now Nana’s old computer filled the void for the others. We finally broke down and bought a new computer, though, and it’s a beast: Intel Core i9-9900 vPro (3.10GHz, up to 5.0GHz with Turbo Boost, 8 Cores, 16MB Cache) with 48GB of RAM, a 1024GB solid-state drive for programs, and a 2 x 2TB RAID hard drive for storage. It’s blazing fast. Lightroom work should be so much quicker. But there’s the problem: I have 126,000+ image files constituting 1.25TB to move before I even think about installing Lightroom and beginning to reconstruct the LR catalog.
And so for today, I have nothing more than the thought that transitions between computers are probably about the easiest transitions there are. After all, the computers do all the work…