After 51 weeks behind the wheel of my Leaf, I still find it oddly satisfying to be able to abruptly accelerate like a proverbial bat out of Hell, in near complete silence and with a trolley-smooth power curve. Not to mention being able to look at the current posted gas prices and smile.
Green with envy. We need a new car but have been waiting with the current situation of availability and prices. I am sure we will at probably go highbred, but we will need to do some more research. With 9 grandchildren we fill our 8 passenger Pilot on a fairly regular basis. Our recent trip to Death Valley in the RV was a real nail biter when it came to pumping gas.
My dad saw how well I was doing with my Leaf (tentatively named "Millie," because she's "Thoroughly Modern"), and bought a Kia Niro plug-in hybrid. When I first saw the model designation, I immediately wondered if Kia also had a model named after Caligula. And so he can plug into my charger any time I'm not using it. Back when I bought my Camry, two decades ago, I took a vow that it would be the last hydrocarbon-burning vehicle I'd ever own. And I held myself to that. Even though I had to rent a vehicle briefly, when the Camry was no longer able to get out of its own way. I had no regrets when I stood next to "Millie" and watched the sagging old rust-bucket being hauled off to its final rusting place.
You may recall that my 1978 Datsun 510 was "Arabella." Named after the restored Model A Ford in Nanny and the Professor.
My new Chromebook is so much better than my cheap-ass tablet. A real keyboard; it's not wasting CPU cycles synchronizing things I neither need nor want synchronized; and on top of all that, it can run T-Bird, instead of some ridiculous joke of a tablet-based email reader. And it leaves the tablet in the dust before the tablet has a chance to get out of its own way. (The wallpaper on my tablet is my usual brick wall, with a picture of Commander Data's face in the middle. Only as slow and balky as it is, maybe it's not a picture of Data; maybe it's a picture of his dimwitted brother B4.)
Even better: Today, I installed Firefox, GIMP, and LibreOffice. Firefox was the biggest challenge: if you go through the Google Play Store, the only Firefox you can get is the lame tablet version. The Mozilla Foundation recommends installing the Linux version from a Flatpak, but I couldn't get the Chromebook to talk to the Flatpak repository. But eventually, I found a version I could install via "apt" (which is to say, Chromebook Linux is Debian-derived, rather than Red-Hat-derived), the same as T-Bird, GIMP, and LibreOffice.
Nice! I got a new laptop recently. My old one was soooooo sloooooow. The CD drive had stopped working, the headset jack went backwards on me so that I had to plug something in to get sound and even the replacement battery had quit holding a charge, so it had to stay plugged in. This one is so fast it scares me. Next up is a wireless printer so I do not have to walk over to the printer and plug in to print. I am still working on transferring files. Especially pictures.
Hmm. My DOS notebook is fast enough that, in Xerox Ventura Publisher (runs under a runtime version of GEM, and was written to run on an XT, back when a Turbo-AT was considered fast), the arrow buttons on scrollbars are almost too fast to control the scrolling. On the DOS side of my Pentium II DOS/Linux dual-boot, there's no "almost" about it.
My sons and I were just discussing DOS the other day. I remembered some sitcom where, when throwing insults, a teenager said, "Your computer is so old; it has MS-DOS." (Modern version of your mom is so ugly...)
That reminds me of one of Yakov Smirnoff's old stand-up bits: Something to the general effect of, "Never tell a Russian his mother wears combat boots. Because she probably does. And she will hurt you." Which is to say, if somebody said "Your computer is so old; it has MS-DOS" to me, I'd probably say, "And your point is?" Which is also to say, I don't allow WinDoze in the house.
At any rate, the real Xerox Ventura Publisher (not the memory-hogging PageFaker knockoff that Corel turned it into) doesn't run on anything but DOS. Corel seems to have a reverse Midas touch: everything they touch turns to memory-hogging <censored>-ware.
The nurse who gave me my booster shot had a really good touch: subtle as a mosquito's mouthparts. Then again, when you give the same shot a hundred times a day for a year, you probably get good at it.
I had to read this out loud to the whole family. We all appreciated it. We get our boosters next week. We waited until after the Holidays in case we get sick. Our first round gave us minimal effects. Hopefully the shot itself will be easy. I did not feel my first two but my husband got a pretty bad bruise.
Puppy shot: about 5 minutes after, I was lightheaded, pale, and diaphoretic as all Hell, with roaring tinnitus in both ears; after about 10 minutes (and some apple juice that the supervising nurse got for me, when she noticed my distress), I was fine. I still sat for another 15 minutes, then found the Men's room (my bladder was about to explode), then got some lunch in an office building coffee shop a short distance away. I remained a little sore for a few days. Second shot: No immediate reaction (although I stayed for half an hour again, before going to the same coffee shop for another turkey melt). But about 6 hours later, I developed a moderate fever, which lasted about another 6 hours. Booster: No reaction at all, other than a sore arm, for about 14 hours. I then woke up feeling hot and dry (even though my temperature was 98.4), and right now, I'm shivering, my back feels like I threw it out, and I generally feel like <censored>. I expect that this, too, will pass in a few hours.
Update: yesterday, my fever peaked at 101.3, and leveled off there for several hours. And my "day-trip to the People's Democratic Republic of Lumbago" (I could not stand or walk for more than a few minutes at a time without my back going into spasms) was the result of extreme constipation. Once the underlying cause was, ahem, flushed away, the lumbago, sciatica, and spasms went with it.
Sorry you had a such bad day. Hopefully all of the effects have or will subside quickly. Yuck to the constipation issue. Something I have literally not dealt with much in my life; after my hip replacement the Vicodin *backed me up* (to use my MIL's euphemism). When I was able to *flush away the problem* I was literally dancing when the PT came over for my therapy.
We have not gone out for NYE since 2000. And even that was not planned. This year it was going to be the same as usual; daughter's family for food and games and Lake Placid this year. I had made a big pot of beans with the bone left from the Christmas ham and cornbread. Then, I get a call that they all had direct exposure to someone with Covid! What the...............???!!!??? Everyone was vaxxed but not boosted. Anyway, the weird thing, they got exposed by a friend that they took to the snow with them on Wednesday. We wanted to go but could not due to prior commitment. I am so happy we kept our lunch date and did not cancel. So, we are watching Jeopardy and will probably be in bed by 9:30 or 10.
