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The first Christmas card of the season arrived in today's mail.
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It came from Gerry and Sue Vine, friends of mine who live in England. Postmarked
on November 27th in a small town in Yorkshire, it arrived in our mailbox
here in our small town in Rhode Island early this afternoon. That's rather
quick delivery.
I guess I'd better get busy. I've not even purchased any cards yet, to
say nothing of addressing and mailing them.
We will probably get our Christmas tree this weekend. It may be Gillian
and I who go out to find a tree because Nancy is a bit under the weather
this week.
She's suffering from the sore throat bug that seems to be going around
-- Saturday night she began to feel a bit off and was definitely sick on
Sunday. She popped extra vitamin C and zinc and went to work on Monday
and Tuesday but by the end of the day Tuesday she had almost no voice left
and was feeling terrible. She knew she wouldn't be able to go in on Wednesday
so she arranged for a substitute teacher before she left school.
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Her throat hurt so much yesterday that she could scarcely manage a whisper
and had to have me call around to line up a substitute for her tennis match
today. She also couldn't manage work today -- I brought in her lesson plans
this morning and then came back home and drove her to the doctor's office.
She now has three kinds of prescription drugs but the doctor also said
she should not go to work tomorrow either -- she may also have conjunctivitis
in one eye. Since she has arranged to have the same sub all three days,
she has already e-mailed him lesson plans for tomorrow. (I've already been
through the sore throat bug but now I am terrified of contracting the conjunctivitis
-- I haven't had it in years, but used to get it a lot when I was a kid.)
Apparently both this sore throat bug and conjunctivitis ("pink eye")
have been going through students and faculty at her school. (Ah, the joys
of teaching -- exposure to every bug that comes through town.)
I finally fixed my router problem -- went out and bought a different one.
Yes, I actually went to my office, checked and found that the software
client I had was the latest release, but I did find some information on
router firewall settings and such that I printed to bring home, then hunted
online and went to the router's "knowledge base" page and finally
submitted a request for technical support, but I needed that connection
to the corporate intranet and was getting very frustrated at wasting my
time on this problem. Oh, I'm sure that if I followed the instructions
that tech support for the troublesome router sent me, I could have eventually
made the VPN IPSec work -- maybe -- but I needed that connectivity immediately
-- I had already spent several hours struggling with the problem and learning
far more than I ever wanted to know about firewalls and network stuff --
so I gave up and dashed down to Staples and bought a Linksys router, plugged
it in, plugged in the cables, set a couple of passwords, and the VPN tunneling
worked right away.
A week or two ago I signed up for Holidailies -- that is, I'm going to try to post an entry every single day from December
1st to January 1st. I've also made a commitment to myself that I will work
out every one of those days as well. It has occurred to me that if we make
an overnight or weekend trip into New York City, that will at least rule
out a day or two, but other than that... and, actually, even with that
as long as it's only an overnight trip.
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