‘ If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all”

I burn MP3 torrents for The Girl. Tell me, I say, who you want to have. I should start a tracker for pre-teens.

I desire a DVD burner-uh..writer in the worst way.

I want to know how to do these things-take a dvd torrent and end up with a movie in my hand.

Isn’t the Internet just so luscious ? So much to learn ?

But my stinkin’ ‘spell check still will not work, and Kinga- that is indeed the villain- laying low my poor, wee cast iron stomach- and my spirit as well.

Laying*- figuratively speaking, of course- between the cool sheets of my sick bed, I find myself wondering if there are still finishing schools.

If so, what is the modern equivalent of painting a mean water-color ?

What, indeed , would a finishing school teach, to fulfill that unwritten promise of making one’s daughter ‘socially acceptable’?

How to decompress an .avi file ?

* spell-check coming soon. Since I had to renew everything anyways, I down-loaded ( uploaded ?) Firefox and I need to re-find and install my poor, wee- but very helpful- plugins. It is truly a crime- I tell you, a crime- the monies that my parents poured into my education.

Can’t spell my way out of a box. It was the sixties, dontcha know, they said that I would simply pick it up, like the H2O that I needed in order to survive.

Eh- wrong.

Mummy Dearest is a bit under the weather.

A week or two ago, The Boy caught the tail end of an Austin Powers film. The name rang a bell, for Daddy had asked me- a number of times- if I had ever seen one of the films. He- a graduate of the KSB ( I think that those are the proper initials- well, it’s the Kennedy School of something at Harvard)- mentioned it in a rather embarrassed manner, explaining that it contained a very basic sort of humor, lots of farts, dontcha know.

With Dad’s recommendation ( sortof) and The Boy pointing out to me that the TV guide stated that the film was suitable for ages 6 up, I let The Boy watch the film.

He loves it. He has taken little fun-beads and made Austin Powers decorations for his room. He hums the theme song non-stop. He wants to be from London, for Austin is from London.

As he plays the tape non-stop, I have caught bits of it as well. I don’t really think that the film is that appropriate for his age, but must confess, when those odd women start singing ‘These Boots Were Made For Walking…’, even I find myself smiling at this absurd parody of the Bond films.

The pocky beast is back, and I have spent the day re-installing the programs that were on C.

In fact, I spent most of the time re-installing that Java thing ( JRE)…hour..after hour.. after hour.

Next Nero, Photoshop, the camera and SpellCheck.

At the rate that I am going, see you….next October.

Hearing from Julie, Chrysalis , and as always, reading Edwin , reminds me of going to Kowalski’s with Frenchy, back in Detroit.

‘Chrysalis’, ‘Edwin’, and ‘ Kowalski’s’ in that first sentence are all links. I’m on The Father’s computer.

I haven’t any Spell-Check, I don’t even have NotePad, to make the link-factor more obvious.

But my, like Proust, the smell from Kowalski’s surrounds me now.

Caught up in the drama of the missing cat ( now found, and rescued by appealing to her most acute sense : that of smell. ‘ Sardines ! Rich in fish !’), the children forgot about the sweetmeats.

I- of course- was determined to like them. I read the label of ingredients, as I always do, and found ‘ lentils’ . Didn’t throw me off, for one of The Girl´s and my favorite Dutch cookies contains ‘ peulvruchten’- something in the pulse family. ‘ Gevulde Koeken’, I could eat them by the pound, indeed, two at a time.

After I had fed the children but before bath time, I decided to try one of the sweets. It was very round and rather large and was indeed much like a gevulde koek, but without that almond/apricot flavoring and a bit more flour-y.

I liked it. I liked thinking that perhaps it was a very old recipe, a treasure going back through the centuries.

I shall probably eat all of the sweets, one a day, until they are gone. They are more than just sweets, they are a bit of culture. History, perhaps.

And so far, much tastier than that cardomon flavored ice-cream ( although I have to admit that I can take or leave ice-cream) we had once in England.

The cat has gone missing. I hadn’t noticed it, but within minutes of coming home for lunch, The Boy picked up on it. Jimmy is not in the kitchen.

Our cats have always shared one trait in common with one another : they loathe The Father. I have often remarked that should The Father ever be caught under a large pile of rubble- say, a landslide or avalanche- I could simply send one of the cats out after him. They would assuredly piss on the correct spot.

And so the cats have always been confined to the kitchen or the great outdoors, far away from The Father’s things and pillow.

Jimmy is now kept inside all of the time. She is deaf as a post and half blind, at almost 20 very spry but in my opinion not able to care for herself out of doors any longer. She usually sleeps under The Boy’s chair in the kitchen, enjoying the floor heating.

She must have slipped upstairs this morning- things were unusually hectic here, with The Boy not being able to locate his gym bag, The Baby wanting to take two- count-them-two stuffed Mickey Mouses ( Mice ?) to school with her, conveniently located in the attic.

So the three children roamed through house during the lunch break, calling for the deaf cat. I told them that it was pointless, she can’t hear and that she would return to the kitchen once she was hungry. She could be anywhere. And all three replied in unison- as they always do when I say that Jimmy is deaf- that Jimmy wasn’t deaf. They know this for a fact, for when ever Frans Bauer comes on the TV, Jimmy wakes up and comes out from under the chair to listen to him.

Jimmy just loves Frans Bauer

I suddenly find myself in charge of that whole database nonsense. Last Friday, I was simply asked if it was do-able and after taking the weekend to look around on the Internet and to consider the various abilities and software skills available at the office, I came to the conclusion that it could be done. In house.

I mentioned to The Ftaher on Sunday that I had found programs ranging from 35- to about 135 dollars which could aide in all of this. All of my conclusions were based upon the ( correct) guess that their Office Manager and all around software whiz would know how to set up a database in either Access or Excel. From there, we could convert the database into MySQL and my job would be to get it on-line and presentable. There was another program, in the higher price range, which seemed to be a wysiwyg program for making a MySQL database from scratch .

This morning , The Father asked me to order the appropriate software.

Oh me, oh my, I will certainly spend the next few hours researching this one.

And then trying to find it in the UK, most likely, to avoid customs.

The Father is hanging out with a friend of his who is visiting from Bangladesh. Much to my surprise, the friend brought gifts for the children and for me. Sweets , but not like any other sweets I’ve ever seen before.

The children received a box filled with colorful, cellophane wrapped bars of some sort, while nestled within a fancy gold box, is something that resembles a spun bird’s nest, studded with almonds. That is for me. It is obvious that the sweets are very pricey, top of the line in fact. And they have to be the most exotic looking things that I have seen in years. They bring to mind what surely must have been meant when the word ‘ sweetmeats’ was used. I mean, a bag of M&M’s certainly can’t be called sweetmeats.

As The Father won’t be home until late tonight, the children and I are going to sample the sweets today at lunch. I suspect that we won’t really care for them, but I am dying to try them, curious to taste the luxuries of another world.