New Horizons In Technology

I am nothing if not cutting edge. I come by it honestly, too. When I was a little girl my dad started a new business and turned half of our garage into an office. I'd come in from school and help him sort punch cards for his database of subscribers and operate a mechanical collator to help with his mailings. He had a wonderful gadget for dictating letters that would record his voice to thin plastic disk just like those single 78s you'd get at the record store only a little thinner and kind of floppy.

That was cutting edge in 1965!

I've always been curious about what's new in technology. I'll read up on the latest gadgets and all their features and figure out which ones would be right for me. That way I'll know exactly what to buy when my Publisher's Clearinghouse check comes in.

Hey, it could happen.

My husband and I bought the very first Apple Macintosh computer in 1984 with its whopping 128k of RAM and its single 400k floppy drive. Who needs a hard drive anyway? We had matching Palm IIIe PDAs before most of our friends had anything like that. We could often be seen beaming important contact information or documents back and forth to each other.

That's not to say we've ever made a habit out of buying the first and the best new items on the market. Except for the Macintosh, which we knew would last us for years. And we did, indeed, use it for years, long after upgrades and newer models had passed us by.

Now I've given up the Palm Zire 72 I've been using for years and I'm getting used to the Palm TX that once belonged to my husband (he graduated to an Ipod Touch he got for Christmas). The Palm TX has a faster processor, larger screen, and more memory. One thing I'm really enjoying about it is the portable bluetooth keyboard my husband had for this. Now I can sit in my rocking chair, put my feet up on my footstool and write my blog entries (like this one) much more comfortably than sitting at my desktop computer. It doesn't matter if it's not cutting edge, as long as it gets the job done.


Who knows, maybe I'll be inclined to write more often. I might even get started on one of those books I've still got tucked away in my head....

Hey, it could happen!

Blizzard of '10 Part 3

I don't know how many more inches of snow we got during the blizzard that blew through here Tuesday and Wednesday. It was impossible to take a simple measurement because of the winds and drifting snow. Here's how it went (click on the photos to see them full size)....

On Tuesday, 2/09/10, the day started like this:

By 10:00pm it looked like this:

And it ended like this, around midnight:

We slept late Wednesday morning and as I walked to the front door around 11:00 to look out the window here's what I saw:

Outside that door, the world looked like this:

At about 1:30, after a few more hours of heavy snow and wind gusts of up to 40 mph here's what it looked like:

And at 3:30:

Here's a view of our townhouse community's parking lot... notice the icicle on the right. The snowdrift was as high as our window.

We were pleasantly surprised to see that our evening paper had been delivered by late afternoon. But with snow still blowing in 30-40 mph winds, you have to ask yourself, "How badly do I want to read that paper...and how long will it take me to dig it out later...?"

The snow had stopped by 9:00pm and the winds had died down so my husband decided to start looking for our front walk and that newspaper:

The snowdrifts to the left and right of our door:

To give you a better feel for the storm, the blowing snow, the high winds, here's a video montage of it all, shot from my windows, front & back, downstairs and upstairs...

Blizzard of '10 Part 2

I took a little walk out in front of my house yesterday afternoon with my daughter. My camera's battery was recharging (gotta remember to get a spare someday!) but I took these with my phone. Keep in mine that my daughter is about 5ft 10in tall, so that will put things in perspective for you. Oh, by the way, they're predicting more snow for tomorrow. They say we could get as much as 10 inches. Oh boy.

Blizzard of '10

This is one we'll be telling the next generations about.

It started snowing at my house near Annapolis, Maryland at around 11am on Friday, February 5, 2010. It didn't stop snowing until after 10pm Saturday night.

Here are two photos taken from my front door and my back door a little before 2:00pm on Friday:

At some point Friday afternoon my husband shoveled about 4 inches of snow off our deck. Here are photos from about 5:00pm on Friday:

This was a little before 10:00pm:

I took more pictures just before I went to bed a little after midnight:

I woke up around 3:30am and took these pictures:

Here's what I saw when I woke up Saturday morning, about 7:30am:

About 1:00pm Saturday he decided he'd better try to clear the deck so the weight of the snow didn't damage it. We measured 24 inches of snow.

Then he tackled the front walk:

The last light of day, Saturday, February 6, 2010:

My husband did a little calculating, based on the size of our deck, the depth of the snow and the average weight of wet snow like this was and figured out that he had shoveled 2.5 tons of snow from our deck. It had to go somewhere (note the height of the lawn mower handle on the left):

Let me encourage you to read my husband's blog entry, "Little Townhouse on the Peninsula" for today, . He has some photos of his own and some wise words to share.