Cruelty, Children, and Others

Mine, specifically. We had told her that we would have her laptop repaired again, which is happening now, and that we would consider getting a netbook from HP, which my wife can do at something of a discount. After looking at the machine in a local store, I realized that it's not intended for videos -- that screen's pretty small -- and that when the other laptop returns, the likelihood of my daughter using the netbook would drop significantly. I love my daughter, but spending three hundred dollars so that she would not be without a laptop, when we have a perfectly adequate but not in her room desktop PC, seems too much to me, so we're not going to do it. My daughter told me that she's going through 'laptop withdrawal', and while I believe her, I don't believe her enough to spend the money. Heartless.

Last night, we went to a funeral home for a 'viewing' of a woman that we'd both worked with, who died abruptly of cancer. Not actually a viewing, as she'd been cremated, so all there was to see was an urn under a cloth. Okay with me. Once again, there were a lot of EDS people there. It's getting to be like the old persons joke about not seeing anyone except at a funeral. I was startled when a flock of girls arrived in soccer uniforms, but it turned out they were friends of the woman's daughters, as were the two girls who'd shown up in quite attractive black dresses. I told my wife that this was giving me a whole new appreciation of the problems that libido-driven teenage boys have. Not to mention certain neighbors -- we learned last night that the guy who'd been sentenced for five years was actually sentenced for five to ten years, which I assume extends the period before he can get parole. I still think he is being punished excessively. Of course, if it'd been my daughter, I wouldn't think so.

My tour at the primary was uneventful. Boring, too. I spent a great deal of it going through my notes, trying to find anything that could be done early, before the polls closed, so as to limit the amount that was done afterward. The biggest single time-saver, though, was that we didn't have absentee ballots to count. Last time, that took us forty-five minutes, all by itself. Why it has to be done by us, and at the end of a day when you're brain fried and just want to get out of there, still eludes me.