Interim

This is the slack week -- Christmas is over, but the holidays aren't.

We spent three days at my mother-in-law's home. I do like my MIL, which is fortunate, as she has a pretty small home, and it's on the barren side when it comes to stuff. For example, she does have an LCD TV, but the Comcast remote that you use with it is abysmally bad -- if Tivo is the tool you use so that you don't have to settle for what's on, the Comcast remote is the tool you use to make yourself watch what's on -- no switching channels. Reason is, the remote is complex (about a hundred buttons, I think) and hard to use -- and not just to me, but to two fifteen year old technology-fluent girls, too. Every so often, you hit the wrong button, and things start/stop/say 'no signal'. Argh. Not many books or magazines, either. If a house is the place when you keep your stuff, then her house is the place where you practice Zen. Bring your books and MP3 players.

She's of the heritage that makes food from ingredients, which is fine (my mother thought it pretty much all came from boxes and cans), but she's also of the opinion that artichokes, beets, and similar things are edible, which I'm, um, not. So, when they have a meal, they'll have that, and a tray of lasagna or manicotti (man-ah-coat, as she pronounces it, and her daughters, too); I'll have a single, small serving of the manicotti, and that's it. It took her a while to realize that this would be a full meal for me, because for me, a real meal is spaghetti and sauce, or burgers, or something like that. On the other hand, she did make an excellent breakfast yesterday - french toast, coffee, and sausage -- so that was good.

We had set up her PC with a wireless router, last time we were there, so I was able to do some surfing from the laptop, and her other daughters had set her up with high speed internet, so it was actually usable. Since then, she's bought a new PC, and I unboxed and partially configured it, but we didn't have a transfer cable to move files. I imagine we'll be popping up for a day soon to do that.

Gifties: we tried to keep to a budget for gifts, and were pretty successful -- though we learned that when we say that we'll spend no more than $100 on gifts for each of us, that means that the adults each get about $100 in gifts, but the daughter gets $200. No complaints from us, or her, either.