daily report

Well, first there was a review of Symphony San Jose on Sunday. A very well-performed show. The guy who came in to perform his own Americana-folksy mandolin concerto reminded me of the guy who came in several years ago to perform his own Americana-folksy violin concerto, and I made the comparison in the review. I wonder if there's a whole genre of such people or if I just happened to have come across the only two.

SSJ plays on Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons. Usually I go to the evening concert, but this Saturday we'd have just gotten home from the Mythopoeic reading and eating meeting I've described before in these, uh, pages? precincts? And it would have been tiresome anyway, as waiting on the porch for us on our return was the delivery of our new floor lamp, the old one having died a few days ago, so I had to get that set up and then go out and buy light bulbs for it. This one takes LED bulbs, which is a little more convenient than the old one which ran on halogen bulbs, which are difficult to get and nasty to install. But we'd had a halogen lamp because it was one of the few that was bright enough to actually, like, illuminate the room. This one, fortunately, is also bright, and I'd found it by searching for "300 watt floor lamp."

Now I have to take the old lamp to the recycle center, and it's not the only thing I have to take. My computer keyboard is beginning to die. First the tab key crunched, which at least is better than it was doing for a while, which was staying on every time I touched it, emitting continuous tab commands until I pried it back up with a paper clip. Now many of the letter keys are finding it hard to respond too soon after I press another key, and I'm finding that typing "of" gives me "o" or typing "least" gives me "last" and so forth.

But I'm not taking that to the knackers' yard, but the one I bought online to replace it. (I use an ergonomic wired keyboard, so selections are limited.) It was supposed to be new/refurbished, and it looked fine, but it proved to have several completely nonfunctional keys, including "f", "o", and "x", and the comma. I submitted it to return, but the vendor e-mailed me saying don't return it, they'll just issue me a refund, so maybe they expected that their products would suck.

Monday turned out to be no time to write the review, as most of the morning was occupied taking the cats to the vet for their annual checkup, shots, and pedicure. Restrictions have eased enough that they're now allowing owners to come in for the checkup, so I did that and got to witness the cats, who'd been most reluctant to get in the carriers, now be reluctant to get out. The vet, who is a lot younger and more limber than we are, got down on the floor, braced her knees around the carrier, and pulled.

Now the cats are having their usual disparate post-vet reactions. Maia is afraid to eat in the mornings, because that's where and when we try to trap the cats for the vet. (In fact she'd been suspicious even on the day, and wouldn't eat then, hiding downstairs under the couch, enabling me to tip it over while B. scooped in and nabbed her.) So Tybalt tries to eat hers instead. You'd think he was untraumatized, except that now he's more insistent than ever, whenever I'm sitting at my desk, on either being held in my arms or on prowling around the desk in front of the screen, and as cats are not translucent outside of Donald Westlake novels, both these prevent me from getting any writing done, so I have to lock him out of the room.

I finally got the review finished on Tuesday morning just before the deadline, before heading out on a day/evening outing of a slightly unusual sort for me, but which I'd best save for tomorrow's post.