New Year’s Day, Nero 9, ‘Wall-E’, 300 miles of walking, Almodovar’s ‘Live Flesh’

(posted from home)
(This post covers 1 – 6 January, 2009)

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Tuesday, 6 January –

I spent the morning working at my desk but then decided to walk early to beat the weather. Rain and sleet were due to start around 1300 so I left shortly after noon and enjoyed seeing a kingfisher catch and eat a minnow, an owl chased among the trees by two small birds, the two great blue herons flying in formation low over the creek and two of the bluebirds chasing each other. The birds apparently know the bad weather is coming for there are dozens of them flitting about at the lower end of our property. I saw cardinals, woodpeckers, jays, chickadees, flickers, and others, all seeming to be in a feeding frenzy before the ice comes.
I spent the afternoon watching the early part of ‘Citizen Kane’ on tv (for some reason I always seemed to see it from the middle) and then went back on the web to look for a good deal.
That evening we watched ‘Live Flesh’ (what a title!), a 1997 Pedro Almodovar movie about a young man whose life becomes intertwined by Fate with the lives of three others in very unexpected ways. The movie progresses quickly and it’s not easy to keep up with the visuals while reading the subtitles, but we took advantage of the pause and rewind buttons to discuss the movie as it progressed. If you like Almodovar, this one is highly recommended. Good movie. And it stars Javier Bardem—the very interesting and scary psycho-guy in ‘No Country for Old Men’.

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Monday, 5 January-

I spent the morning on the computer, reading up on estates and writing an email to our lawyer and handling email and snail-mail.
The weather is supposed to deteriorate as the week progresses. Today’s the only day the temperature is to be above 40 (c’mon Florida!). I left early for my walk and did the six – mile loop at a brisk pace. Afterwards I added up my miles of walking from my log entries. From October through the end of the year I walked 306.5 miles or about 100 miles a month and a 3.3 mpd (miles per day) average.
We spent the evening on the web.

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Sunday, 4 January-

I spent the morning uploading family video clips. We were supposed to have a light rain today but by mid-afternoon the Wunderground radar animated trace looked like it was passing west of us. I hopped on the motorcycle and rode down to Rocky Ridge for a walk. I started out on my perimeter route but ran into trail closures so just worked my way back to the bike for a six-mile total.
That evening Labashi was engrossed in a special about gorillas so I caught up the blog with the tv running in the background in my office.

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Saturday, 3 January –

Uh-oh. I’m getting hooked on this video thing. I found a great picture of one-year old grand-niece on her mom’s web page and thought I’d make a copy on my PC. But when I saw I could make it the wallpaper on my laptop, I tried that—and loved it. I loved it so much I got out my video camera and made a video of it and sent it off to family. And once that was done, I wanted to get on with installing Nero 9 on my laptop.
I spent a frustrating hour trying to figure out how to temporarily turn off my security software but the instructions on the vendor’s site don’t match what I see on my system. I went to the vendor’s web site and entered into a chat with the support technician. He took care of it and then offered to extend my subscription to the security software for two weeks because I had had to wait in line for a technician. He gave me a code for the extension but that didn’t extend it two weeks, it extended 48 days. Cool!
The sun was out and the temperature above 40 so I decided I needed to give the motorcycle some exercise. I rode into Starbucks for a mocha fix.
That evening I turned the security functions back on, fired up Nero and played with the video editor a bit. I’m a bit underwhelmed with the functionality of the video editor but I’m just getting started.
That evening we watched ‘Wall-E’, the Disney Pixar animation movie. Kinda fun! No walk today.

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Friday, 2 January –

This morning I uploaded several video clips of Mom’s 90th birthday to a private web site for family members to see. That led me to want to edit some of my other clips so I tried loading the Nero 9 package I bought a few weeks ago. What a mistake. The loader conflicted with my security software and drove the CPU to a solid 99 per cent. I had a heck of a time intervening just to shut things down in an orderly fashion. I finally got it down by 1400 so went for my four-miler while I let the over-driven CPU cool off.
We didn’t have any movies for the evening so watched ‘Bill Moyer’s Journal’ and ‘Now’.

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Thursday, 1 January (2009!) -

We took it slow—even slower than normal!—this morning. I spent a few hours on the laptop on various cleanup tasks. I’ve been using the Glary Utilities to repair registry errors and keep old files and cookies cleaned off. I also finally felt comfortable with deleting my hundreds of video clips after validating that the copies I put on my portable drive and Labashi’s PC work fine. I then remembered I still have some clips on the SD card in the camera so went through the upload process and wrote up short descriptions of them for later use.
In late afternoon I took my walk on the six-mile loop on this 30-degree-but-sunny-and-calm day. What a beauty of a day.
That evening we watched the last few episodes of the ‘Ice Road Truckers’ marathon on TV. We loved seeing footage of Inuvik (though we’d have liked to see more town footage). Last July we had driven to the beginning of the (closed) ice road so we recognized the sign and the access road.

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