Woody’s phone has been dropping calls and even an important interview with increasing frequency, so he decided to get a new phone.  As electronics becomes more and more complicated, the information on how to use them has just about disappeared. If you have a problem, you go on line and ask if someone else has that problem;  forty different sites offer the answers.  You try some of the likeliest gambits and your new equipment goes crazy.  I got a free phone as part of the Verizon deal where you sell your soul to the company and for a reward generally get a phone, though nobody will help you transfer data from your old phone and set up the new one. But Woody lucked out. There was a very nice woman [actually drafted up here from Mississippi because they’re impossibly short-staffed] who helped him do just that.  She also did the same for my new phone.  But yesterday, Woody warned me to ignore Facebook Messenger because it completely screwed up his phone.  It took him a day and a half to get it right again.

They keep offering programs I don’t understand what they’re for and no explanation ever accompanies the offers. I’m beginning to understand and in fact empathize with people who move off the grid and into a cave or a tree house in the wilderness.

I’m slowly beginning to do what most women do at this time of year, put away summer shorts, sundresses, tank tops, summer pants, etc. etc and bringing out transitional clothes and some lighter sweaters.  It has been quite cool. It went from summer to late fall feeling overnight. 

It's time for me to start bringing in potted herbs I hope [ha!] to overwinter as well as some that are in the herb bed and a few ornamentals. I try to bring some through the winter every year, most importantly a huge red fuchsia and a purple-leaved plant I have forgotten the name of but which I’ve kept alive and growing successfully for five years.  Maybe it’s a coleus with unusual foliage?

I’ve reading BITCH by icy Cooke. So much about evolution has been incredibly sexist and centered on the male.  Some women scientists have been trying to rectify the sexism in evolutionary biology with astonish8ing results.  I am about 40% into the book and it’s all I want to read right now.  I just lent PROFILES IN IGNORANCE by Andy Borowitz to my friend Karen, who I believe will enjoy it as much as I did.

I was a very early adapter of desktop computers.  I used to love my old IBM PC, considering it an extension of my brain, and all the iterations of it that followed.  Now I’m constantly at war with a machine that does 95 things I have no interest in, playing games, graphics, who knows what, and no longer does word processing well or conveniently.  It erases what it feels like erasing.  It stalls, goes trickle-slowly at times, freezes up and generally makes writing harder, not easier.