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Easter: Look What the Bunny Gave Me!

Posted on April 17th, 2009 by Anna Zhan.
Categories: Blog.

 
[Gertrude Hawk’s Dinosaur Egg: filled with Baby Dinosaurs!]

This is the mark of a man who understands me well: for Easter, I got a chocolate dinosaur egg filled with chocolate baby dinosaurs (it was that or the chocolate flying saucer with the four chocolate aliens riding on top…but there’s always next year…I guess dinosaur egg just fit the Easter theme better.)

 
[A parade of chocolate baby dinosaurs, marching out of their egg.  Three species, one egg - don’t ask.]

And no, there are no pictures from Easter dinner…we forgot to take any.  We fail.  Or I fail, at least.  I think mostly I was just grateful that we were all healthy enough to enjoy the meal.  Even I have spent most of the semester ill - the weight loss evident in the picture below speaks volumes.

[Myself, early morning, clutching a chocolate dinosaur egg.]

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Blog: Does Your Pet Fear the Roomba?

Posted on April 16th, 2009 by Anna Zhan.
Categories: Blog.

I hear reports of people with dogs that absolutely fear the roomba, but I had never known a cat owner who had a roomba.  It was a risk, but one that, with my laziness, I was willing to take.

Tarzan is pretty mellow and easy-going, but I know that he DOES fear the hair dryer.

The roomba, however, he’s OK with.  I observed Tarzan to be slightly apprehensive, perhaps, but he also regards the roomba with a healthy dose of curiosity.  Never before, however, did I ever see him bonding so affectionately with our floor-cleaning robotic minion.  If he ever starts giving it a bath, I’ll have to rename the roomba Jane.

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Blog: My Day Without the Interwebs

Posted on April 16th, 2009 by Anna Zhan.
Categories: Blog.

I was on vacation: Spring Break.  I woke up.  I showered.  I filled a bowl with milk and grabbed a box of cereal, and armed with these two items, I sat down in front of the computer: no interwebs.

I turned the wireless modem off and then on: no interwebs.

I turned the computer off and then on: no interwebs.

I troubleshooted the problem, which led me to turn both the modem and the wireless router off and then on: still no interwebs.

I even plugged the computer into the modem directly via a cable – a low point of the day – but I was still left stranded, unconnected, in my Brooklyn apartment.

The interwebs had died.

Oh, I had my suspicions about my 3.5-year-old laptop.  The battery last 15 minutes, the DVD-RW drive reads but does not write, and the P key is missing.  More alarming are the computer’s tendencies to occasionally give me an electric shock, or randomly freeze and reboot.  (And though I promised myself I’d replace the machine upon graduation in May, the truth is that the 2008 tax season dealt me a heavy blow, and my aspirations may have to be put on hold temporarily.)

Still, I had my doubts that I could fault my not-so-trusty laptop with my troubles, for throughout it all, my computer maintained that it was connected to the Internet via my wireless network, the Ninja News Network (NNN).

Time Warner had failed before.  It’d be back up within the hour, I told myself.  (At the time of writing I did not realize that, in my current apartment, I actually have Cable Vision.)

But it wasn’t back up in an hour.

In desperation, I issue the following text message: “My interwebs is broken. I am doomed.” 

Response?  “can you ping out?”  I know not what this is, nor how it is related to the end of my world, and it is never explained to me.

I go to get my hair cut at a salon school.  I doze off during the three hours it taken the aspiring stylist to cut my hair.  When I return home at 5pm, the interwebs are still broken.  Somewhere, there is an ethereal spider that has fallen asleep.  It needs to wake up and patch the interwebs.

What to do?

Use an hour’s worth of daytime minutes to express how my world is collapsing.

Play a round of Scrabble against – with? – myself.

Play four rounds of single-player Ingenious.

Play three rounds of Risk against the computer.

I could clean.

I could work on a paper for grad school.

I could do my lesson planning.

But I don’t.

I can’t concentrate, because the interwebs is broken, and I am doomed.

I know I am doomed because at Death + 12 hours, my computer loses connectivity to the interwebs.  After more than twelve hours of internet deprivation, even my laptop is giving up on life.  In this, our fourth year together, it knows its purpose.  If it can’t get me online, it might as well take a nose-dive off the fire escape.  I’ll write my paper s by hand, like I did before the fifth grade, or perhaps I can bring the typewriter back into fashion.

Without the internet, I have no television service.  For while my friends gave me a set of rabbit ears last fall, which they made me hook up in January, I think we all know that, barring a second 9/11, I’ll likely never attempt to view the contents of any one of the four fuzzy channels it provides me with.

Without the Internet, I have no way to communicate with friends or family.  Most of my communication is done through chat clients and Facebook, which I affectionately refer to as Facecrack.  Half my friends I wouldn’t even know how to reach if not for Facebook (or gmail’s amazing memory for e-mail addresses and their associated names.)

Without the internet, I have no radio.  I don’t have one in my house.  Between my iPod and Pandora, who needs a conventional radio?

Without the internet, I can’t pay my bills or do my banking.

Without the internet, I can’t bake, because all my recipies are online or stored in my e-mail account.

Without the internet, I have no Chinese dictionary.

Without the internet, I am doomed.

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