wow, technology is fun!

I bet you can guess who is on dial-up tonight. I’m trying to A) pay my cellphone bill, B) send someone an email and C) catch up on some OD reading and noting. And I’m having luck with D) none of the above. We’ll see how well this works. I’m trying to change my password on my cell account… oh, great, page not found!! Ordinarily I would NEVER try this at home, but when I got my new computer at work Verizon stopped remembering who I am (don’t ask me why it remembered me to begin with – I don’t generally let my work computer remember my personal passwords) and now I’m a stranger to Verizon. And the password I had written down on my List Of Ten Million Passwords doesn’t work. I’m sure that’s because Verizon has made me change my user name and/or my password about fifty times since I started paying online. Apparently I neglected to make note of Change #50. I’d hoped my laptop would remember the password, but of course not! So I’ve had to reset it, which you wouldn’t expect would be a great big huge deal. So naturally I’ve been working on this for about 45 minutes. Most of which has been spent looking at a blank page that’s trying to load. Or, even better, getting the Page Not Found!!! Loooooooser!!!! message.  

Oh my god – I’m in!!!!! I must rush over there and pay the bill!!!

Well, okay, make that "I must rush over there and hit "pay" and wait twenty more minutes for it to meander around trying to figure out what to do.

Or to come up with Page Not Found!! GREAT. And to kick me offline.

I HATE DIALUP.

I wouldn’t be doing this at all, believe you me, if my payment wasn’t due today or tomorrow. This is EXACTLY why I pay bills at work when I should be working. It would take less time to go put my clothes on, get in the car, drive to the Verizon office, and stick a payment in the drop box. Except I’m not sure we have a Verizon office anymore. We do have a store, but it’s in the mall so I doubt there is a drop box.

Wow, it finally went through!!! How exciting – and it only took 46 minutes to pay that bill!

Okay then. I know what I’ll do – I’ll post some pictures. That certainly won’t take long to load! I’ll just sit here sipping on my third glass of wine. Which isn’t as horrifying as it sounds, as my glass is about the size of a small dixie cup. I wanted a nice wine glass to sip my wine from, and somehow we’re down to one very cheap plain old boring glass from Walmart and a couple of cobalt blue ones. Which are pretty but for some reason I don’t like drinking wine out of cobalt blue glasses. So I dug out these pretty little lead crystal wine glasses that I had in a box up in the cabinet. I keep them in the box so they won’t get broken. Because they are just lovely and quite priceless. I got them for opening a checking account with First Union when I was a freshman in college. They really are very pretty, though. And very very tiny. I think one glass holds about a shot-glass worth of liquid. They’re more like the teeny glasses you drink fancy liquor from, although they call themselves wine glasses. But they’re very pretty and that’s the important thing. Who cares if I have to go get five refills before I end up with one normal glass of wine?

Well, I was going to post some pictures of our Charlottesville trip – which was much shorter on the return than it was going up, I’m happy to report – but silly me, I’m on dial up! And it’s taking forever to find them on Flickr. So I’ll post the most recent ones I’ve downloaded, which are largely of pretty fall leaves. In Asheville. They are all gone here now. Now it looks like winter, and it’s also cold.

Oh, I have to post these first, though – this is what was grimly watching me as I tried to sleep on the underinflated air mattress in my uncle’s computer room:

Both these pictures used to be in my grandfather’s house, and the baby was hanging right over the bed where we always slept, so I really should have felt right at home. I think the woman is my father’s grandmother. I know the baby is his oldest sister, Elizabeth, who died before any of the rest of them were born. From a hairball, of all things.  We used to be fascinated by poor little dead Elizabeth’s picture when we were kids. I don’t know what in the world that is that she’s holding, but I’m SURE it’s not a rifle.

The fall trees were in Asheville  – these next ones were on the Cone trails off the Parkway on Monday –

I liked the odd lighting in these two.

The old apple barn.

And finally an old apple tree.