(some of you need to get your minds out of the gutter 😉 )

Night before last a rather large group of us went to dinner post-dancing to Rice Bowl. As usual I ordered some sushi and then a Thai dish that most of would go home as leftovers (because it can as opposed to sushi… yes, I like the raw fish types). It was also berylq’s last dance practice, so a bit sad, but not too maudlin, mostly just our usual raucaus selves and I really hope we didn’t scare the new person with us too very badly.

Anyway, the thai dish that evening was something I don’t remember but it involves lots of fried squidy bits. Hence the tasty tentacles. The vast majority of it went home with me and was lunch yesterday.

And speaking of tentacles: Scylla has been slayed. (New readers will need to scroll down to the iEverything post.) Yup… *way* ahead of schedule, surprisingly enough, this first check-point on my way to a mac mini has been met.

Does Scylla have tentacles?

Well, it had a lot of heads and lived near if not in the sea, so I’m thinking there is a possibility of tentacles there.

But the more I use the Scylla and Charybdis reference I am tossed back to Freshman English and a group project I actually enjoyed doing that involved recreating a scene from the Odyssey (or was this part the Illiad? I honestly don’t remember). Anyway… I stayed behind the camera for the whole thing, but 4 other friends depicted news-flash-style Odysseus’ trip between Scylla and Charybdis that involved a diorama with puppet-like Scylla heads attacking a boat and an on-scene ‘interview’ with Odysseus.

The interview was done in a small closet in the English building and since space was small I had to stand on a chair to get Odysseus and the reporter in the shot. At a critical point in the interview this cardboard mouth (jaw, etc.) comes down and tries to eat Oddyseus, the monster operated by another friend who I was trying to keep out of the shot. Until, that is, I lost my balance and the shot slung way wide.

Keep in mind that this was 1990, we did this entirely at school, and there was no way to edit it so each scene had to be done in order, butted up one against the other on the tape, and reshoots could only be done right then.

I still have the tape, even though its becoming worn and I don’t even have a VCR anymore. I think there’s at least one place in town that will transfer VHS home movies to DVD, maybe I should have that done, have 5 copies made, and track down each person involved to send them a copy. I wonder if they would find the nostalgia as fun as I do?

But not for me… sigh…

I’m almost actually jealous of my car, y’all.

So. I knew my front tires were getting pretty worn (the dealership said when I got Phoebe last September that there was PLENTY of wear left in them… I really don’t consider 9 months plenty of wear, but anyway) and the back ones were better, so I was going to do the responsible thing and have them rotated and balanced. Yeah.

So I do a little cursory checking around and decided (even though I know things never go well down this route) to take Phoebe to the Wal-Mart service center for the r&b. I knew it would be a while, so I brought a knitting project to work on while I waited.

An hour and a half later they finally get around to looking at my car and that’s when the first shoe drops:

Tech 1: ‘Ma’am, your front driver’s side tire is separated and needs to be replaced.’

Tech 2: ‘The back one, too, it’s almost as bad.’

Tech 1: ‘What does your car do when you drive it?’

Me: ‘It drives? I haven’t been having problems with the handling or anything.’

Tech 1: ‘Well, you should replace these.’

Me: ‘Okay, so I need two tires?’

Tech 1: ‘Yes, but they’re on the same side and you cannot do that.’

Me: ‘Okay, but the passenger side is fine, right? Can’t you just swap the okay rear one with the new one so that the car is balanced.’

Tech 1: ‘No, we cannot cross them.’

[Now it should be noted that Tech 1 has a very thick Spanish accent so the ‘cross them’ concept took a while for him to explain and for me to grasp.]

So, after a couple of diagrams and the revision of everything I thought I knew about tire rotation and balancing, I was faced with the decision of replacing the one tire that really needed it, or the two tires that should be. The catch being that if I replace the two tires they were suggesting, I would really need 3 tires because only the front passenger tire could be moved back to the rear, leaving that hole up front, and by heavens buying 3 tires is like shoeing only 3 feet of a horse so I might as well buy 4 tires.

Of course, had I known I was going to need a new set of tires I would have really liked to have comparisoned shopped for the best deal. The Tire Kingdom that I almost went to the previous weekend had a sign that said 4 tires for $99. Granted, they might not have had my type of tires for that deal, and all the putting-on charges might have driven it up a bit, but still, I would have liked the option. And then it turns out there was a Sun Tire offering a 3-day vacation with the purchase of 4 tires. So, see, there were options.

But I was faced with the fact that I had waited 90 minutes already. To leave would mean having nothing (except a bit of knitting) to show for that time AND the knowledge that I had research ahead of me AND starting the waiting all over when I went some place else.

In the back of my mind I really wondered if things were as bad as they were presented to be. Two other patrons had come in for one thing or another and were being told they needed one more tire than they thought or two front tires, etc. How much was the truth and how much was a sales racket? And was that really how rotating worked?

But, I knew also that I’d feel better with a new set of tires on the car. And I knew I had someone in front of me willing to do the work right then and there. And the quote was within my budget, if you consider that it comprised all of the not-previously-accounted for monies for the month and that my budget would go from comfortably cush to having to watch my spending again until my overtime check in two weeks.

An hour and 10 minutes later they finish shoeing Phoebe and I get to hand over the money. (ouch)

Tech 1: See, I got you out of here quick.

* blink, blink *

Do you believe this guy???

If I hadn’t just wanted to get out of there and go home to examine exactly what damage I’d done to my bank account I really would have let him have it about how 2 hours and 40 minutes is no where *near* quick and let me talk to a manager *now*. As it was I leveled a glare at him, stated that it was 3:10 and I’d been there since 12:30 and do not consider that quick, took my key and left.

Yes, people, I am succumbing to the allure of a certain fruit-emblazoned technology, or at least will be soon.

When I was in elementary school I remember going to ARC (aka College for Kids) one day a week and learning how to move the ‘turtle’ around by writing Basic commands on an Apple IIc. When I was in high school I had to do a History Fair project on column styles (architecturally speaking) and typed up my display board captions and bibliography on the cute rectangular Mac at my Mom’s office, the one with the little screen.

When I graduated high school and came to work at that same place of business, it was the cute 90s-style Mac that I worked on. Then it was a g3, then not to long ago a g4. Meanwhile, I had purchased a computer for home, a Compaq if I remember correctly, because PCs were so much more inexpensive and you could actually afford the software. Only super rich people, graphic artists, and businesses used Apples, or so it seemed at the time.

Now my office is going through a metamorphoses as many of the Macs are being replaced by Dell PCs. This includes my machine, and for over six months I’ve had two computers in front of me, one of each, and have known that my Mac’s days were numbered.

It’s a shame, too, having finally been able to upgrade to OS X and seeing on the shiny fun things X can do. I love Safari and the fact that Mail is virtually untouchable by viruses. How nice not to worry about those pesky things. I like the interfaces, I adore iTunes (though I do have it downloaded on my PCs as well) and will greatly miss using my Mac regularly as we transition fully to the new system. I even like the keyboard better.

Of course, the cute advertisements and iEverything also make the lure of the albino fruit all the more enticing. And the old arguments: too expensive, software non-existant or prohibitively expensive, etc. are all falling away in the wake of the new technologies. Even my ex’s mantra “Can’t compute with fruit” no longer holds true as those lovely Macs can run Windows too, though even I’m having a tough time figuring out why I’d really need to with Mac’s own software and the open-source programs available.

All this to say, the lure of the mac mini is becoming more than I can bear. Nor do I implore my friends to lash me to the mast in order to resist the siren song for my mind is made up, but I have my own Scylla and Charybdis to tackle first.

I have put before myself two obstacles to overcome before letting my fingers click that precious ‘add to cart’ button:

Scylla is the many-headed monster that is the software transition at work. Recently it was decided that the running of the parallel systems will end after July. Once our ‘working’ August begins (always a little after the calendar one starts, just the nature of the business) I will no longer be doing everything twice. How nice. So that’s step one, and a rather fitting step since this change will be what terminates my daily work use of the mac.

Charybdis is the swirling vortex that I fittingly have called for some time The Abyss–my craftroom, office, studio… the second bedroom of my apartment that is more a retaining pond for my creative supplies and anything else that doesn’t belong in the ‘front’ of the house that people see than actually the functional space it was meant to be. It is into this room that the mac mini will go and therefore it is only fitting to place it there after running iOrganize on the space. I had started to tackle this project a few months ago, then life happened and progress stopped. The craft supply forest has made a move to reclaim its territory and now the path I’d carefully carved out has its edges blurred as tendrils of fabric snake out and replant themselves.

So that’s it. I get those two things accomplished while keeping the rest of my life at its normal clip and then I will gleefully reward myself with a super cute mac mini with the larger harddrive and DVD burner, etc. The hp desktop that currently resides in that space will go to the Shady Acres Rest Home (aka my mom’s place) where it will live out its years playing Solitaire, Freecell, and Textwist and reading the news.

Oh. My. Word.

So… who else thinks it would be crazy to restart dance classes in the middle of July? Show of hands? Yes, me too, but that’s certainly what I did last night. After a 6-month-plus hiatus on account of the tendonitis and such I’m back to dancing at Chandra’s once a week.

Granted, I haven’t practiced at home even in those 6 months, though the three and a half choreographies I’d learned through last fall were kept relatively fresh in my mind thanks to having the music loaded onto my iTunes player at work and they do come up in the ‘Party Shuffle’ mode. Because of this, and the fact they were still doing those same routines in the Intermediate class I jumped into, I didn’t fair too badly, remembering most things but I would lose my concentration easily and oh, the lack of technique is dismal right now.

Still, I think I did okay. I made it through the entire class, and Julie actually gave me a compliment in the beginning when she handed me a flyer for the Performance Troupe saying ‘I know you’re interested and I know you’re good enough.’ Of course, that’s before we started dancing… hopefully she doesn’t need to rethink that last part now. 😉

Tonight I’m going back but I’m being good, pacing myself, and just hanging out in the Performace class to help transcribe the choreographies (NO dancing). I’m a fairly good technical writer and can put the moves into written style and charts a la marching band instructions, and that helps some people so I’ll do what I can.

It was good to be back, however. Even if it meant sweating profusely for an hour then having to ice both heels when I got home. I’ll make sure to practice more of the combinations we started with to keep the hip muscles fluid and hopefully be back to performing with the group by the next First Friday!