Scrabble Injury

Sweetie and I have pretty serious Scrabble games. They tend to involve words such as "thrashed." And the other day, I think I broke a rib. Or bruised it. I might even have a collapsed lung. It was intense.

How it happened was....I was carrying Sweetie super gigantic Cambridge English Dictionary to check a word, and I wasn't watching where I was going. I managed to walk full-force into a wall. Which thrust the dictionary into my ribs. Yeah, super-coordinated. Way cool.

IT Hero

Sweetie and I finally caved and bought a wireless router for our house and a laptop for Sweetie (well, Sweetie bought the laptop for Sweetie but I picked it out). I was a little apprehensive about the whole router thing, particularly as the reviews for the router, while sterling, said to all sorts of mysterious things like: "I had a little trouble getting it to work.  It turned out that there was an IP conflict. To fix it I did the following: In ''DHCP Settings'', I changed the ''Start IP Address: 192.168.0.100'' to 192.168.0.1. I also cloned the mac address with the one I had on my last router. Finally, I changed the ''Default Gateway: 192.168.1.1'' to 192.168.0.1. After that, everything was working fine."

O-KAY.  

Yeah.  And, I did also recall that I paid approximately $100 extra to have my router in Israel installed by a professional and I do recall that it took Techo Geek roughly 3 hours to install it.  So, quite how I expected that I would be able to install this darn thing, I don't know.

Well, I followed the instructions and booted up Sweetie's new computer and NOTHING.  Then, I plugged it directly in my computer, ignoring the whole wireless aspect and... NOTHING.  Then, I plugged my computer directly back into our modem and....NOTHING.  Crap.  So, now, not only did the router not work, but NOTHING worked.  We had NO INTERNET WHATSOEVER.  Lovely.  

So, a small (okay, large) marital meltdown ensued as Sweetie was nastily (he will agree, it was nasty) accusing me of screwing everything up and declaring that he wanted me to repackage the whole lot of equipment and send it all back.  Meanwhile, I was crying and screaming in indignation: "I was just trying to improve our lives!!!!"  

Apparently, this is all very normal human behavior surrounding a non-professional attempt at self-installing a wireless router.

What I didn't know is that sometimes it takes up to 12 hours for the router to kick into gear.  

So, the next morning, Sweetie turned on his laptop and had an internet connection.

And all was well in the world again.

I told Sweetie he could call me "Hero" for one month.  He said he would go for "IT Hero," which I actually prefer.

The Last Straw

You may remember my tirade about our crazy neighbor "Rodeo."  Well, he just returned from one of his jaunts on his ear-blastingly loud motorcycle and is now "dusting" his motorcycle with a leafblower.  Not joking.  Wish I were.  I am about to lose my mind entirely.  The sound carries through the entire neighborhood when he has that thing blowing.  As if the nightly 11PM blasts from his motorcycle going past our house were not enough.

Is it, or is it not?

So....it started with a sore throat. And some nasal issues. So, I took some daytime cold medicine and went to work. Then, in the evening I took some night-formula cold medicine. I slept really well, only waking Sweetie up once in a coughing fit. But, then the alarm went off and I could barely lift my arm 2 inches to turn it off. I tried to sit up in bed and it was clear that I wasn't going to be making it to the living room anytime soon, let alone the office. I dashed off an email to my colleagues, stumbled back into bed, and slept for another full 4 hours and 45 minutes. Extraordinary.

I didn't have a fever, but then again, I was already taking antibiotics for an unrelated medical issue, and my body temperature is naturally a degree or two below normal, so what defines a fever for me is not entirely clear.

Yesterday I felt somewhat recovered -- at least enough to take a shower and comb my hair, so I went to the office and managed to eek out about 4 hours of work.

Sweetie has since displayed similar symptoms.

And then there was the email from the college where we work saying that a student has probable swine flu.

Hmmmm.....

So, at this point, we're thinking, maybe what we had/have WAS the swine flu?? Can I now run around campus touching door handles and drinking fountains with abandon, flaunting my new immunity?

Or, was it just a head cold?

Catching up

I'm a bad blogger. I just realized that I'm averaging one post a month. That's bad. Well, patient readers, this is what the RSS is for. Click the magic orange button on the side of your screen and you be alerted via email on those increasingly rare occasions that I post something:-)

Shock and School

As some of you know, I work at a college. And I just recently settled into a nice, quiet, work-on-projects-I-never-have-time-to-work-on summer mode, and all of a sudden, there are STUDENTS around. Making noise. Talking in the halls (horror of all horrors!). Using the bathrooms. Shouting. Interrupting my productivity-inducing tranquility. It's quite a shock to my system.

And presumably bringing swine flu back with them from all reaches of the country and world.  Should be a fun fall!

Taking a break
As some of you might also know, Sweetie and I have been house-hunting for some time now. It finally reached a point where we were so disgusted with the process that we needed to stop. So, we're taking a break for a month or two. We're not meeting our realtor, not making offers on any houses, and not visiting any open houses. Hooray for sanity.

England

I still haven't written about our trip to England. Well, it got off to a great start when I breezed through immigration and customs (my suitcase was one of the first off the carousel) so quickly that Sweetie had to do a double-take when he saw me emerge through the glass doors.  

This time, we had wisely reserved a room at an airport hotel (I arrived at night), so we took a shuttle there and were able to crash for the evening before heading out to the countryside the next day.

Brockenhurst and the Whitley Ridge Hotel

After a brief stop in the quaint, pony-populated village of Burley, we proceded toward Brockenhurst, a town which we drove around in circles approximately twice looking for our B&B for the night.  We finally asked a woman walking down the street (a non-English speaker it turned out -- isn't it always the case that the foreigner gets asked for directions?).  She was able to point us straight in the correct direction.

We entered a private, wooded driveway and at the end of it was the most elegant ivy-covered building.  An assortment of young French men greeted us and got us settled in our room.  We had some time to explore the grounds before our dinner reservation at the Michelin-starred LePoussin restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel.

They had an enchanting walled garden bursting with vegetables.  And beyond that a wild garden with a waterfall and a serene lilly pond.  

Dinner was so good, it was practically life-changing.  I shudder thinking about the pasta with canned beans and sauce that I made for dinner tonight.  You cannot call that food in comparison to what we ate at Le Poussin.  Sweetie actually declared upon eating a white truffle (of the dessert variety, not the mushroom -- those kinds of truffles were in my first course risotto) that he would never eat in a non-Michelin-starred restaurant again.  (Needless to say, that lasted all of 24 hours).  To put this comment into perspective, Sweetie is not the type to get excited about food.  He usually barely notices food.  In fact, once I came home from work looking forward to eating my leftover cheese-free vegetable pizza, only to find that Sweetie had consumed it without even noticing that it was my pizza and not his own meat and cheese encrusted pizza.

So, to make a long story slightly less long, if you go to England, you really must spend the night at the Whitley Ridge and reserve a dinner in advance at Le Poussin!  Well worth it!!!  (Easy for me to say, since it was Sweetie's treat.  Thanks Sweetie!  I love you!)

Gardens and Castles and Great Food

Sweetie and I recently escaped to England. In short, it was wonderful. I'll write more later, but here's a picture to get things started -- it's a place called Mottisfont Abbey and has the most wonderful and extensive walled garden.

Note the appropriately cloudy sky.  Miraculously, we dodged the rain for most of the trip!

Secret Gardens

Today we saw the neighbors' gardens, or yards as most Americans call them. Little did we know what wonders were hidden behind the non-descript homes on our street.

It turns out that this year's local garden tour featured homes exclusively on our street. Luckilly, we learned about this two-day fest from someone where I work. Our neighbor across the street (Rodeo) was not so lucky and was out in all his shirtless, drunken glory from 8AM until about 2PM providing the masses with some unexpected entertainment (ever watch a completely toasted man hack away at a small tree with an 6 foot electric trimmer from an 8 foot ladder? Well, lots of unsuspecting folks witnessed the spectacle today).

It was really eye-opening for us to see what secret worlds our neighbors were hiding beside and behind their homes.   There were colonies of hostas, trickling waterfalls and fountains,  fragrant gardens of basil and verbena, lush hydrangeas, benches nestled in shaded hillside nooks, large swaths of wooded areas providing privacy, built-in professional-grade out-door grills, and all sorts of gorgeous flowering beauties that I cannot name.  

One home was actually showing off its kitchen (we were a bit baffled until we went inside).  It turns out the owner is a builder and built the house and now has added a cabinet business.  We had complete and total home envy.  The home was like a luxury lodge inside, with refined yet hearty woods (the hardwood floors were the most gorgeous I have ever seen), stucco walls, a pretty amazing kitchen, and all sorts of built-in wooden cabinets.   We had no idea walking by that house on our evening walks.....It was pretty amazing.

So, we walked home to our "power sub-station"-looking house slightly dejected.  :-)  We look forward to the day when we have some at least semi-permanent, a place that we feel like investing in.  Somewhere I can plant herbs and flowers and we can build our own private paradise.  

Dear Neighbor

I need a Zen moment like this chipmunk.  Why? Because our neighbors are driving us crazy.... 

Dear Neighbor (aka Rodeo),

I know that life is tough when you have Adult ADHD and other assorted conditions that cause you to use your leafblower approximately 18 hours a day for no purpose whatsoever than to blow non-existent dust off your driveway and into your yard, at which point you crank up your lawn vacuum (a new and very exciting toy for Rodeo) and suck up all the dirt and leaves in your yard.  And I know that you really LOVE hacking your trees and bushes apart with your various electric cutters, so that you can then repeat the leaf blower+lawn vacuum process.  And yes, I am sure there are many pieces of wood that then really must be sawed apart in your garage at 10PM.  

But, for the love of every human being within earshort (roughly 5 miles) of your machines and toys, can you just.....stuff it!!!!  

Dear Neighbor #2 (aka Crazy Guy)

Listen, I know some people are really dedicated to their Lawn Boy mowers.  It's a bit like a cult, I believe.  But when the day comes that you have to run the mower over each patch of grass roughly 15 times, I think the mower needs to be laid to rest.  When it takes you one hour and approximately 10 gallons of sweat to mow a patch of grass the size of my dining room table, I think that's a problem.

Dear Neighbor #3 (aka Guy We Like) 

Although it was slightly irritating for about a week when you had heavy equipment moving between a two-story-tall cement pile on the street  and your back yard multiple times a day, we now praise you for your very considerate gesture of paving over your entire backyard and creating some sort of entertainment masterpiece of tiered patios and assorted amenities such as a hot tub.  Pure genius!!