Author Archives: Bevin

Yeah, my mom and I met for coffee today at Tully’s.  She brought her work laptop and we tried to get it to connect to Tully’s wireless, but that didn’t work very well at all.  Stupid XP.

My sister was pretty annoying yesterday.  She called with a Mac problem, that turned out to be a user problem instead.  She was exporting her document as a Word doc, which was fine.  But when she tried to open the .doc, it would try to open it with the trial version of Word on her laptop, not Pages.  So I had her change the settings and whatnot so that Pages would be the default for future .docs, but it didn’t change the picture for the icon to a Pages icon.  We tried it again, and this time the icon was a nice little Pages icon.  Well, it opens in Pages, so that’s all good, right?  Apparently not for my sister.

According to her, if it’s a .doc it should show a Word icon.  If it’s a .pages it should show a Pages icon.  I can see where this comes from, but it seems to also make sense to have it show the icon of the program that it will open in, especially since that’s pretty much how it works universally on Macs anyway.

But no, this is bad, and changing your settings to always show the file extensions (something that is by default hidden, a nice feature I think) is the bane of all existence.   The way it should work according to her is that it should always use the icon for the type of file it is, not the program it will open in, and because of this Macs suck a big one.

I mean come on.  Is it that hard to understand?  Just because you’re a user and one way works better for you, doesn’t mean that it works better for everyone.  There are two reasons something isn’t done the way you like it: the company is incompetent, or you are in the minority, meaning that it works better for everyone else.  Considering Apple’s reputation, which one do you think it is?  Oh, right.

This wouldn’t cause me so much distress if my sister didn’t call me up and expect me to fix the problem and change how the whole computer works for her to make it exactly the way she wants it.  There are things she didn’t like about Windows, but she didn’t hold that against them.  The Mac is supposed to be the solution to all of her problems, and if I can’t fix it all hell will break loose.

Some of her problems stem from the fact that she doesn’t realize that Macs do things differently, and in the end it makes things easier… but since they don’t work the way she expects them to she gets ticked off.  Isn’t this the old-curmudgeon syndrome, not something that happens to a teen?

I’m done with my rant now, I promise.

I’m wearing one of Josh’s around-the-house t-shirts, and it smells so good.

I felt decidedly un-easter-like the other day, because I was wearing jeans and a button-up shirt that was black and dark turquoise.  No white whatsoever.

But, Easter ended up being, well, you know… Easter.  Josh and I didn’t get the memo about the venue being moved, so when we got to North Bend we found out that they’d lost power (some truck ran over the power box) and that we’d need to go all the way back to Factoria.  So much for that drive eh?

The dinner was as expected… Josh’s grandmother was stressed out due to the change of plans, and we had to fit 13 people in their small-ish house.  We had ham, a jello mold, potato salad, apple sauce, pickles, olives, marshmallow salad, peas, and green beans.  Oh, and Minute Maid’s Cherry Limeade to drink.

We had to set up two long tables to fit everybody (we borrowed on from the church down the street), so the one we were at ended up being more of a kids table, which was actually nicer.

The rest of the time I knit, and we just kind of all chatted away.

That was basically Easter dinner.  We left at about 7:30pm, which was earlier than I expected, so that was also nice.

In other news, yesterday morning my mom called and we had coffee, after which I stayed at Tully’s and knit for a couple of hours.  But I didn’t have my shuffle, so the lack of music to listen to kind of cut my knitting time short.  I was ready to go home after about 2hrs.

That’s about all for yesterday.  Today I called my mom about a coffee question and we ended up having coffee again this morning, this time because there wasn’t any traffic so she had a bit of time.  And of course, again I stayed at Tully’s for a few hours (three this time) and knit some more.

My mom has been bugging my dad again about going down to California, so the good news is that I might be able to go down pretty soon with him.  She says that if he goes down there and gets going on selling the house, then they might be able to go on a cruise (because she won’t be paying for that).  And if they go on a cruise… well, you know I won’t let them go alone without putting up a fight first.  -grin-

Josh has a conference call today between 3-4pm, so he’ll be home a little late.  But we’re going to head over to Overlake and get some more chow fun noodles… yum!

The IKEA trip was fun, although we stayed out much longer than I’d expected. Josh kind of knew that we’d end up being out past 6pm, but I was a bit too optimistic about it. At first he didn’t want to go, but in the end he did (so we could look for a little table/stand for next to the bed), and when we got home it was almost 7pm. Oof!

But we did end up getting tons of candles and candle-related accoutrement’s… we got two extra bricks of tea candles (100 each), a box of 50 (yes, 50!) of the “normal” tall skinny candles, and 6 cast iron skinny candle holders which are awesome. They’re tapered, and when oriented one way they hold the skinny candles perfectly, but when turned upside down they hold a tea candle! It’s pretty cool.

IKEA also had a little set of 4 glass tea candle holders, which are about half again as high as the tea candles themselves… the colors are various shades of green and blue, which is nice.

Because we went with my mom and she was using her gift card, she ended up getting us a french press to make coffee with, since we don’t really have a way to make coffee at the moment ourselves. It’s really fun, and we just used it this morning. Josh actually seems to kind of like it!

We have this big bottle of French Vanilla flavored syrup sitting in the cupboard, but it’s been sitting there awhile because neither of us like it much. But in coffee it’s not so bad. There’s still some coffee left from the stuff we made this morning. -grin-

It’ll be nice to be able to make my own iced coffee this summer.

After the IKEA trip, the three of us went to The Keg steakhouse, which was pretty good. I always like their bread, and their crab/spinach/cheese dip. I quite often have iced tea to drink, and surprisingly Josh ordered iced tea too! That was kind of fun.

I have to say though, I had this teriyaki classic meal, and the steak I got was much too chewy. I only ended up eating half of it (although I’d eaten a lot of bread and appetizer before hand), which was kind of sad. It would take me much too long to chew any one piece. Ah well.

As far as today goes, we’re headed out to North Bend again. Because I’d told Josh’s mom that we weren’t busy, she assumed that we’d be coming out to North Bend for Easter. And, since Josh doesn’t have or want to come up with a good excuse to be there, we’re going to be there (even though he really doesn’t want to go). I think so far the plan is to leave and get there at around 1:30pm for a 3:30pm dinner, and “work on the wireless” at camp until it starts. I doubt it’ll take that long though.

Josh claims that this time of all times will be the one where we don’t plan or end up staying until 9pm or so. We’ll see if he manages to pull it off. Heh.

What are Josh and I doing today?  That’s right!  Going to IKEA.

My mom is going (she has a really nice gift card) and asked if we wanted to go with her.   I asked Josh if he wanted to go (expecting him to say no) and he actually did want to go!  Good times!  So she’s going to pick us up in a half hour or so and we’re going to head down and get some more tea candles, because we’re almost out.  And we had close to 200 before!  Oof!

It’s the season again!

I was browsing Craigslist yesterday and found a couple of garage sales this weekend that purported to have knitting and craft supplies.  Naturally that was exciting, so I thought, “why don’t I go and see if I can get some cheap needles?”

One sale was on Friday and Saturday, so at the last minute around noon I decided that I was going to go for it and walk down to the sale.  It ended at 3pm that day, so there wasn’t enough time for Josh to me because he didn’t get off work until then.  It was in Bellevue, about again as far away from the mall as the mall is from our apartment.

Off I went, happily walking around the backside of the mall to try and avoid the sun (it didn’t work).  I couldn’t find my nalgene bottle, so all I had was a mini-bottle of water.  The walk wasn’t so bad, except for the heat, that was kind of annoying.

Anyway, the walk to the house was a lot more uphill than I imagined it’d be, so by the time I arrived (2pm) I was a bit tired out.  So what happens when I get there?

“Oh I’m sorry!  A woman stopped by this morning already and bought out all the knitting stuff we had.”

-sigh-  So I’d missed out.  I ended up spending $2 and came away with a nice 3/4 length sleeve shirt and a bag ‘o pens for my sister.  The woman bought herself all the knitting stuff she’d need to get started when her friend gave her a bunch of new knitting stuff as well… since she “didn’t need two sets” she just put the new ones up at the garage sale.   So frustrating!  Too bad I didn’t find out about it earlier.

So, that was my day yesterday.  It was pretty fun walking outside, and on the way back I went to the library and hung out there waiting for Josh to get off of work.  I activated my library card while I was there (I went to the apts front office and got a copy of our renters insurance which has my name and new address on it) as well, so that was nice to get out of the way.  Now I can borrow library books on own without Josh being there too!

After Josh arrived to pick me up we stopped by and got some strawberry bubble tea, which was immensely yummy.  They had very little boba left, so they asked if jelly was acceptable instead… in the end they were very nice and put jelly and boba in our drink, which ended up being really good.

Uhh, afterwards Josh and I listened to the new podcast novel, The Rookie, which is turning out to be a lot of fun.   Woo!

On Thursday I was talking to Josh and asked him if he wanted to sit upstairs with me on the “deck” when he got home.  He said he would, so I started getting dressed to go up there, but by the time he was home he wasn’t really interested in going up.

Anyway, in the end we decided that instead, because it was so nice outside, that we were going to go off to the gardens.  We ended up driving down, because it would have been kind of a long walk in the sun, but that gave us more time to walk when actually at the gardens.

While walking, what was I doing?  Knitting.  Yep, I had my strip from the woven scarf coming out of my bag and I was knitting it as we walked.  It was kind of amusing.

It was quite a nice afternoon… we ended up sitting on a bench near a mini-pond that had some mallard ducks in it, and one of them swam up to us to check us out.  We sat on the bench for awhile; Josh reading his book, and me knitting.

Very nice/fun/cute afternoon if I say so myself.  I’m glad Josh wanted to go with me.