kurt_erichsen

Mere, who recently saw YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES and really dug it, has really wanted to see the new SHERLOCK HOLMES movie with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law.  Everyone else in the house wants to see it, but we’re not sure as to whether it’s really appropriate for the little mystery junkie.

Same situation with AVATAR in regard to not-sure-if-appropriate-but-everyone-wants-to-see-it.

Post your thoughts, ESPECIALLY if you saw either of the movies, as to whether you thing either one would be something she could deal with.

The typewriter turned out to be broken; the carriage does NOT advance when a key is struck – you have to keep hand pressure on the thing to move it with each key.  Everything else is in good shape.

Anyone who has a good idea of where in the Chicago area I might get this thing look at / fixed and back into service?

More in a later post.  She’s still fascinated with the typer and using it constantly – WITH the hand work, but jeeze, I don’t want her to be stuck doing that.

I’ve switched things around on the Wordpress site to make commenting easier; hopefully, my desire to keep down the spam isn’t cutting off commenting, but we will see.

Christmas Eve is usually the day we spend with Susan’s aunt and mom at Susan’s aunt’s house in the  northwestern suburbs of Chicago; dinner is followed by passing out the presents (a small child is usually too excited to sit through dinner in any sort of relaxed fashion, and is the elf who supervises the distribution and opening of the presents).  This is the first year that we pretty much dispensed with Santa as a gift giver, and so there were only a couple of presents to distribute under the tree at home the next morning…

Usually, Connie (my MIL) would stay overnight at her sister’s house and leave there in the morning to go see Susan’s brother Doug and his family over the Christmas-New Year’s period, but there’s a terrible blizzard in South Dakota this year – high winds and over two feet of snow – so she’s staying here until the weather clears up, probably till Monday.

The big presents had already been handed out for the household earlier in the month; the house got a new HD TV setup in the living room.   Susan had needed a new pair of boots early, so the Ugg boots I bought for her went out a few days earlier – it was a necessity, but I didn’t like passing out presents early.  (She also got a very nice pair of lambskin mittens, via her mom, and a couple of other things from me.)

As some of you may have sussed out, since November of 2007, I’ve been working 99% of the time out of my basement office…with a huge long line of doctor’s excuses, bases on either my non-healing foot wound, or my weak response to infections casing raging problems on and off.  The office finally said that they couldn’t do this as a temporary thing any more, and that I’d have to file for a ‘reasonable accommodation’ – i.e, a permanent excuse to work from home, giving me the right to get work to supply certain work-related things that I would need to do this.

The first step was the gathering of enough medical stuff to prove my case, which ended with me almost sending them around 300 pages of medical results from the last ten years.

The second step was in defining what I would need to work from home that the office would provide, and I was told to ask for whatever I legitimately needed.  This resulted in me asking for a work PC, with all the necesary web-crafting software, a color laser, various office supplies, and an office chair.

I haven’t had a proper office chair down here for a while.  Part of the problem is my weight, part my height and width and so on.  The office chair I had at the office was around $900, and I can’t justify that – but when you spend a LOT of time in it, as I do, you need something that is comfortable and works.   (Right now, I have a sturdy chair from the dining room, but it’s not built for the use levels.)

The problem now is getting all this stuff to actually get here, and that’s turning into more of a mess than I dreamed, as various people are doing a it’s-their-deal thing of tossing around the responsibilities of getting these items going.   Amazing bureaucratic nonsense, and I’ve been a bureaucrat for 26 years as of today and seen a lot of silliness in my time.

Another tricky element is the PC; since there were a flurry of situations a few years ago about government workers who were being schmucks leaving laptops around with a lot of personal staff info or patient info – the federal government has been on a bender on security issues.

Bruce Schneier can speak more to this than I can, but the powers that be seem to be going to considerable lengths on internal security issues, from the apparent concept of There’s No Such Thing As Going Overboard.   A lot of it seems to be more ways of getting things checked off of a checklist and getting gold stars from the Powers That Be that they were diligent than whether the measures taken are worthwhile or work.

So I have to get a mountain of paperwork and approvals for anything that goes on that machine, including software that the agency bought for me three years ago – and that’s just the start of it all.   At this rate, I’ll be lucky to get it here and working by March.

I’ve gotten over whatever the heck I was dealing with, but Susan and Mere have been miserable for the last few weeks on and off with what looks to be an allergy to the Christmas Tree.  Susan thinks it’s the tree as allergen, her mom thinks it’s something that was sprayed on it, but in either case, the thing’s presence is messing up half the household in unpleasant ways.  Since we had problems last year and this, we VERY reluctantly will be investing in an artificial Christmas tree for next year.