Cheers! And a happy Christmas Eve and joyous Christmas Day to you!
What are you up to for this year’s Joy Frenzy?
Me, I’m headed over to the church in an hour or so: rehearsal at 7:30, 8:30 service, fast potluck, midnight service, then deliver my friend back to his house (unless he decides to leave with his wife at the end of the early service), then back to the Funny Farm.
Which, I hope, will still be intact. I really don’t like to wander off on one of the premier burgling days of year. But it’s been pouring rain all day long, which I hoped would discourage the thieving activities. Even though the rain has now stopped, it’s still pretty soggy out there.
Gerardo’s cousin Antonio came over with a pile of beautiful chicken mole tamales, the kind they make in the deep south of Mexico and in Central America, wrapped in banana leaves. These I’m combining with another batch made by another friend, to present as my contribution to the potluck.
Unfortunately, it’s not much: we’re told this Christmas Eve potluck serves some 70 people. I’ve only got a couple dozen of these things. But I’m truly broke just now. Every hand has been out — often more than once, plus of course I’ve had to buy Christmas presents and I haven’t recovered (and won’t, not for another five years) from the new car loan arrangements or the various SURPRISE costs that plagued October and November. So it’ll be first come, first served.
How to keep these things warm? Argha!
Decided to put about an inch of hot water in the bottom of a crockpot, then set a steamer basket in there to hold the tamales out of the water. Then set the thing on “warm” or “low” for the two hours that we’re singing. It looks like that’s going to just about work.
La Maya suggested packing them into pot with loosely wadded-up tinfoil, to keep them upright and be sure they don’t fall into the water. So okayyyy… They’re in there, and they fill the thing up, jam-tight, to the top. The lid will just barely fit on — it certainly doesn’t sit tight.
But I think it’ll be all right. I hope.
Self-serving these things will be a trick: I’m bringing a pair of tongs, plus a stack of paper plates for people to use to discard the wrappers. And I’ve got two containers of guacamole, for those who like to top their tamales with something.
Spent half the day screwing around with a math paper that should have taken an hour or two, at most. This, thanks to effing Word’s endless, reliable intransigence.
God, I hate that program. How can I say how much I want XyWrite back!!!!!
Wyrd does not like mathematical statements. It especially doesn’t like them if they’ve been converted from some other program, like…say, LaTex. So late yesterday afternoon, I’m just finishing this goddamn thing and click “enter” on some edit and…Word does its Catastrophic Crash Trick. The whole program goes down and everything in every file that was open is lost.
Fortunately the program is set to save every five minutes, because of this behavior. But I’m editing in regular view, not in Track Changes — we’ve found it’s much easier to just edit the copy and then do a “compare documents” maneuver, which elicits a file that shows all the changes and edits. But that means I can’t tell where I left off. And that hat means I have to run Track Changes > Compare Documents on the edited copy and the original so I can view the changes (which are not really entered quite chronologically…) and then eyeball them both, side-by-side, line by line by line by line by line by line by….
God DAMN it!
So I finally finish this just as something else comes up. I save and close the file.
When I try to open it, Word refuses to open the damn thing. After much wrestling, I do get it open TextEdit — as a plain text file, missing all the math, missing all the edits, missing all the comments & queries. And single-spaced.
Now I have to go through and compare again, side-by-side, line by line by line…, and enter the math and comments back into the copy manually.
I just finish this and go to check some damnfool factoid online, and damned if Firefox doesn’t crash.
When Firefox crashes on a Mac, it brings down the entire system!
So the reconstructed file closes down, and once again, I can’t get it open.
FVCK!
Finally it dawns on me: the file appears to be intact; it’s just that Wyrd doesn’t want to open it because it doesn’t like the math, which is copied and pasted over from the original or maybe just crudely converted from LaTex. Or some such.
I e-mail it to my giant desktop superpowerful iMac.
The iMac refuses to open it.
ooooookkkkaaayyyyy… Search the problem in Google.
Here I find the observation that Word will run a program with math in it if the thing is saved as a .doc file, but that a .docx file (thank you very much, Microsoft) is likely to cause problems.
So I get onto Zamzar and contrive to convert the .docx file to .doc format, and LO! it works!
But now I have to run Compare Documents again — both files had to be converted to .doc format to accomplish this.
Now with two probably unstable files open, I wonder how the Hell this stuff is going to get to the client. The light dawns: save to RTF.
So I save both files in .rtf, evoking four files: two .docs and two .rtfs. And I suspect that the next time an attempt is made to open either file, we’re going to see the same “Word cannot open the file” message. But no: shut them down; reopen, and it still works. So off they went to the client, after much time-sucking hassle.
A two-hour project ended up taking about five hours: $35. Total, not per hour
***
It’s after 1 in the morning, Christmas Day. The tamales went over reasonably well at the potluck: all but part of one (which apparently fell apart) were eaten and several people remarked on how good they were. Much other excellent chow was offered.
We sang Christmas carols and fancy classical Christmas music, accompanied by a band of classical violinists, till we were blue in the face. At the midnight service, we were treated to a full-blown bells-and-smells service. So that was fun and interesting.
The whole religion thing is endlessly fascinating, as is human nature in general.
And so, at last, to bed…
Merry Christmas, one and all!
