nasty Saturday

Oh, sure, the sun's out and it's in the 40s, but the puppy pen is a swamp with standing water, so the Ts have no place to play and they're alternately bouncing off the walls and sprawled out on their sides groaning pitifully. AND the university has done some kind of stupid update with stupid Zimbra (you'll remember how much I do not love Zimbra) and I haven't been able to access my e-mail since last night. If I try to go through Outlook Express, it tells me the connection has failed (which it hasn't), and of course Zimbra is impossibly slow and obnoxious if used as itself on dial-up. I double-checked the settings on the Outlook account; I tried going through my laptop; I tried rebooting, twice; I deleted the zimbra account on Outlook Express and recreated it--zip. I tried calling the help desk and the poor little student is there by himself and he doesn't know anything. I'll have to try calling Monday and seeing if any of the professionals have any idea. It may be that it's now set up so that you can't use it through Outlook Express any more, which means I won't have e-mail at home unless I get broadband, in which case I feel the university should pay for it since it's their stupid idea to use this stupid program. Grr.

I'm probably picking the worst possible time to do this, but I'm going to get some estimates for work on the house and see about refinancing and using the equity on the house to pay for the work. This means I'll have people in the house, so I'm trying to clean it up a bit--not that there's much I can do--but while I was moving things around I found a box of old newspapers from my maternal grandparents' hometown, dated 1918 and 1919. They're crumbling away; I know there's no way I can preserve them. I can't type any of the articles in because they have to be spread out flat on the floor. So I'm thinking of reading them into a tape recorder and then transcribing from the tape. There's not much from my immediate family, but a number of cousins appear. They're funny (as in odd)--maybe 8 pages, no pictures, lots of ads that don't look like ads, national and world news on the inside pages, except for the end of WWI, which got a 4-inch box on the front page. A lot of influenza, and a typhoid epidemic. That sort of tickled a memory--seems like I remember my mother's father being quite ill, and maybe it was during this typhoid epidemic.

I'm putting off going to the store. I ordered pizza and diet Coke last night, and have been more or less subsisting on that, but I'll have to go out tomorrow. I'll have to find the collars and leashes I took out of the van this summer and put them back in the van so if I get a whim to walk the dogs I'll have the materials.

I found a very cool knit cap someone had left on a bench at school. It was made in China and was knitted as a flat piece and then seamed, but I took a bunch of pictures and turned it inside out and think I have the pattern figured out. I also found some cheap yarn while I was cleaning, so I've cast on for it, and if it turns out, I'll post some pics and the pattern.