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late summer veggies
Wednesday, September 8 2010
My recent trip to Virginia confirmed that a computer actually would be useful for my brother Don. If one could be made to work reliably, I could see him sitting around in front of it with beads of sweat on his forehead, watching movies and muttering to himself. They'd be movies about dinosaurs and cruel dictators, but it would provide him entertainment and might indirectly teach him some basic computer skills. Unfortunately, the computer I'd left there over a year ago proved unreliable, and it couldn't even be started up on my most recent visit. So I've decided for my next trip (which will follow less of an interval than most trips to Virginia) to bring another motherboard and a large hard drive pre-stocked with media, including material targeted to Don's narrow set of interests. Ideally, I'd also have some way to channel the computer's video and audio content out into the doublewide's living room so it could be watched on the television there. I don't know when I'll next be going to Virginia, but in preparation for it, I've been setting up the hard drive and Pentium IV-based motherboard I'll be taking for that purpose. There is some great Don-oriented material available on Bittorrent, including Walking With Dinosaurs and the World At War (an early 1970s television series our parents forbid us from watching due to its disturbing content).
While waiting for things to format and copy, I worked on a web development project for a company that sells downloadable software. There are some classic biz-dev types working at this particular company (which is very small and whose product is extremely niche). Some of their emails are insufferable; they use phrases like "running with the big boys" that make me want to work with a snifter of whiskey in my hand.
Gretchen went to pick up our CSA haul today and found that it included not just squash but two eggplants, several green peppers, and a couple tomatoes. These are all vegetables that Gretchen loathes (eggplant) or dislikes or that we are producing in abundance in our own garden. Late summer is not a good season for Gretchen's vegetable aversions. Still, I actually like eggplant quite a lot, so I will try to make use of one of them (we'll give the other away). But a single eggplant is a lot of food for one person.
This evening Gretchen and I met up with Jenny and Doug at our Indian restaurant in Uptown Kingston. Nobody brought wine, so it was a food-only sort of get together. The funniest thing said all evening came out of Jenny's mouth when she mentioned the experience of puberty following recovery from the childhood cancer that had claimed the lower part of one of her legs. She said, "After I got over the cancer I wanted to know, 'Did anyone want this?'" (This was punctuated with a double-handed sweep on both sides of her rib cage.). There was also a lot said that I cannot repeat, including a vexing problem that had me proposing active volcanoes as a solution.
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