The day before the day when many will be dozing on turkey

Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. If you look back a couple of posts you’ll see the picture of a dead turkey and a comment on Edward Curtis. That’s my sideswipe version of a Thanksgiving commentary, I guess. But I hope everyone who drops by and reads this post has a good holiday weekend.

Right now I’m deep in morosing over computers. No, I still have not purchased a monitor. The past couple of months when I was talking about how next we would be upgrading H.o.p.’s computer, in the next year and a half, I was pretending that my monitor wasn’t on its way to dying, sometimes not coming out of sleep mode. Then I was certain it had died and hadn’t, and then again. And finally the other day it wouldn’t come on for a number of hours and finally did and I have it now set to no sleep ever at all and we can only hope the power doesn’t go off here again for a little while like it did six times day before yesterday. At least not for an extended period.

My monitor is over three years old. That’s as long as I could expect it to last.

Considering I need a decent monitor for graphics, but not a stellar one, I started beating my head up over whether to go with another ViewSonic CRT, which are disappearing but great for graphics, and get a behemoth 21 incher that will break our backs and take up all my desk real estate and force all the peripherals like my scanner and printer into my lap, or go with an LCD, and have been looking at mid-range 19 inch ViewSonic LCDs for about $400 that might do and are supposed to have good color, good black and be easy on the eyes (must be easy on the eyes). I have spent all my time the past couple days reading reviews and comments. I read a great review about one of the models I’m looking at. I have read great user comments and horrible user comments about it and seems it’s a throw of the dice one won’t get the periodic loser monitor of that model. In the meanwhile, I’d discovered the rebuilt computer a friend did for me when mine died three years ago has a dinosaur video card and I called my brother for help figuring out what video card I need to upgrade to, as I’m going to need a DVI cable probably, and he is trying to get me to go with a ViewSonic or Samsung that’s about $150 more. He is telling me also that there are some problems with upgrading my computer as I have got speed and room but an antique motherboard. So I was banging my head like I said over what to do.

In the meanwhile I was pretending that H.o.p.’s computer didn’t occasionally not cut on. This has happened more and more, where the power goes out, it needs to be cut off and it doesn’t cut back on. Finally, when the power went out the other day I spent 45 minutes trying to get it to cut on. Today Marty spent a long long while trying to get it to cut on and finally cursing it and saying evil things about it and how he was tired of this and I kept thinking eventually today it will come on but next time it may not, and eventually it cut on.

9/10’s of H.o.p.’s homeschool work is via the computer so it’s priority. (I may not be able to get him interested in much of anything people recommend for a second grader–like reading and writing and arithmetic–but we spent the past couple of days reading up a little on Leonardo da Vinci on the internet and looking up his paintings and inventions. He appreciated some of the paintings but observed that Da Vinci painted “really big babies” and was amused. He was more taken with the inventions. He has been talking a lot about Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine the past couple of weeks, fascinated by it and wanted to see all the pics he could of the inventions and people’s interpretations. And one of his programs told him about pointilism and he asked me about that yesterday. And we talked a long time about Edward Munch’s “The Scream”. His new little art software program–decidedly liteweight–just said it was a “Really scary painting!” so we talked about the history behind the painting and the explosion of Krakatoa that summer which made for the rip-roaring sunset Munch saw on the bridge that influenced the painting, and we talked about the similarity of the painting with some others which appear to have to do with the death of Munch’s mother when he was a little boy. And we ended up talking a long time about cubism and Picasso as what his new liteweight software said about cubism was particularly lame. So we talked about multiple viewpoints and experimented with multiple viewpoints physically so he could get a better idea of what I was talking about. I tell myself while others on homeschool lists are speeding ahead with the required that we’re getting something done here even though we go about it all ass backwards. Hey, but he’s now suddenly getting some math concepts that were difficult for him before.)

I’m trying to figure out what in the hell to do about the computers.

I looked up the computer specs of what’s fundamentally needed for H.o.p. exploring animation a little further and my brother says my computer as it stands is adequate for that. So I could shift this computer over to H.o.p. I had been hoping to upgrade H.o.p.’s monitor which is an old 17 inch Dell which he has personalized with magic marker eyes and arms and mouth.

This isn’t our couple of weeks for electronics. The vacuum went last week after 7 years of service. We replaced it.

I took a break from thinking about the computer and started on another pic this morning and also took a break to clean out the refrigerator.


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