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oddball manifestation tour Sunday, July 18 2010
Gretchen's distant relatives who had been sleeping in our basement guest room were, as you might have predicted, up earlier than the rest of our household denizens this morning. I went down to greet them at a certain point and perhaps show them where the coffee was. But they'd brought in some of their camping gear and made their own coffee, which was (naturally) decaf. So I took them on a tour of the greenhouse and brownhouse. As with most of our visitors (but not most Americans) they have a sufficiently-adventurous attitude to appreciate such oddball manifestations of my obsessive creative urges. The greenhouse always blows people's minds because of the obvious effort it took to construct.
Later I gave a show of the various pebbles I've collected through the years, pebbles that have accumulated near the house. Some contain fossils, some have interesting patterns, and there is one that is almost spheroidal in shape, a wonderful rarity I'd found in Esopus Creek. (I'm always on the lookout for something more spheroidal, but it has yet to materialize.)
After Gretchen got up, she prepared one of her waffle-based brunches for us and our houseguests, including Ray. I like the waffles, but I've become a big fan of the fake sausage she cuts up into little segments, which I like to dip in Rooser Sauce and then eat.
Speaking of obsessive (though not necessarily creative) urges, today I took delivery of a set of HDMI cables and immediately set about the task of replacing all the analog connections in our "home theatre" with digital ones. I'd been so out of it for the high-def revolution that composite video (as a replacement for F-connector cables) had seemed like an advance (our old television only had one F-style connector as its input). Now, though, it's possible for all our components (except the VCR, which we never use) to communicate with each other digitally, especially now that I have the necessary cables (which can be had for something like $3 each). But for some reason the DVD player was refusing to produce any signal over its HDMI port. We didn't have a manual, so I looked online for one. It seemed I would have to delve into its settings to force it to use the HDMI port. But this would require using its remote, since the universal remote only was able to send a small subset of the possible commands it might respond to. But then it turned out that the remote wasn't working (watching it though a digital camera, I could see that it was producing IR flashes, but these were having no effect). So then I tried using a different universal remote, but it was an old one from a WebTV and I couldn't find any documentation for how to set its codes. So, after what had to have been several hours of effort down a weird and previously-unexplored rabbit hole, I had to abandon my quest. The DVD player would still have to talk with the our television over the dusty backroad of an analog S-Video cable.
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