Yeah, It's Still Winter

The weather has been fitful these past couple of weeks. Mostly it has been cool, sometimes cold and snowy, sometimes warm (as it was today). When it snows, the warm weather melts the snow and turns my yard into a bog. Between the dying grass and the squirrels digging up my yard for food, the yard is a mess. It will be a chore to reseed the yard this coming spring.

My sister the editor recruited me to install a DOS emulator (I used DOSBox) so that Madre can play her favorite game: Scrooge McDuck and the Quest for Gold. The emulator was such that I had to mount the folder that held the game onto C:. Fortunately, I could set up the emulator so as to launch the game when the emulator was launched.

My sister also got me a belated birthday present: A wireless doorchime. This is not like the old doorchime, whose wireless frequency was so common that it rang at odd hours when there was nobody at the door. This doorchime is sold by Honeywell. It came with two ringer buttons that I installed at the front and back doors, using industrial-strength Velcro that I bought separately.

My sister goes to Chaîne Dentale because she cannot find an actual dentist. Metro Marion, where we live, is a land of, um, country people. Country people have really bad teeth, badly cared-for, but are too poor to get them fixed, especially after the vanishing of all those manufacturing jobs and their dental plans.

Because few people can afford dental care, there are few dentists in Metro Marion. The best ones are booked solid, and if you miss one appointment, out you go. (That happened to my sister.) The rest? Well, it took my a long time before I realized that not all dentists are like my childhood dentist, Dr. Vogel … the bastich.

Anyway, after months of temporary crowns that either fall out or crack in two, my sister has finally gotten permanent crowns installed. And now we can eat Sunday lunch that is more solid, rather than accommodate my sister and her fragile crowns.

This is the sister who had suckered me into animé, into Takahashi Rumiko and into Microsoft Word, all in the late 1980's. I am probably the only one in town (besides my sister) who knows who Hayashibara Megumi and Sakakibara Yoshiko are. (They are voice actresses: The former voiced Ranma-as-girl in Ranma ½ and Amano Ai in Denei Shoujo: The latter is a true veteran who voiced Sybil in Blach Magic M-66, Kushana in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and Karla/Reina in Record of Lodoss War.

As for Word, I have worked on every single release ever since the DOS version. I liked the DOS version. It was so much better than that annoying crap WordPerfect. I just know Word would win out, not just because Microsoft was pushing it, but because WordPerfect back then was fat and happy being number one. You do not want to be fat and happy when both your rival and your major platform is Microsoft. No, no, no. Being fat and happy in such an economic environment is death. That is why WordPerfect, and Lotus 1-2-3, and Netscape, and Borland, and all the other early competitors of Microsoft are dead.