Home Hardware rocks.

If Home Hardware made a commercial out of my recent trip, they wouldn't be unhappy, I think.

5:05: we realize we need a few things from the hardware store, including, if they have it, a wood citrus-reamer to replace the one that's gone AWOL.

5:15: I call, they're open to 5:30.

5:20: I get there (Park Street store, for locals). I walk to the shower faucets aisle. An employee asks if I need help. I tell her what I need. She takes me to the next aisle and hands me both items I asked for.

5:22: I go over to the housewares section, look around a bit for the citrus reamer, don't see it. An employee asks if I need help. She shows me the most likely aisle, making chit-chat. She helps me look and we find a glass reamer, which isn't what Dan asked for, so I'm not buying it. Oh well, long shot anyway. A bit more chit-chat, as we both head back to the front.

5:25, I'm just about to pay for my stuff, and the same employee comes up and says "Is this what you were looking for?" Sure enough, a wood citrus-reamer, just like the one we lost.

5:32, I'm home again, with: 40kg water-softener salt, batteries, a faucet shut-off valve, pipe tape, and a citrus reamer. Mission accomplished.

The thing I like most about this particular Home Hardware is the size of the store, even though they just doubled in size and added tons of housewares. It's human-scale, not warehouse sized like Home Despot. Also the employees are quite helpful, especially if you hit a non-busy time.

Dan is convinced I'm having an affair with one or more of the Home Hardware employees, since I go there not-infrequently. But I don't, really. Once a month tops. Well, maybe twice a month. Tops. Really.

Yay! my computer's not broken!

An alarming ailment has hit my new mac laptop. Every once in a while, it has frozen when I had it sitting overnight w/o putting it to sleep; this morning I got a "Your laptop needs to be restarted now." message, and again, this afternoon. It looked sort of bad.

( Google said... )

( So I experimented. )

Then I put it to sleep while I went out to the hardware store. When I came back, the cpu was nice and cool, 32 ºC.

( What would bats22 do? )

Problem solved, I think. Yay, my new laptop's not broke!

Right now I've got a background job checking the temp every minute, just in case I missed something, but it's holding steady at 31-32, even at 100% load.

Scrabble Thought

I'm sure I'm not the first to say so, but: the English language never seems quite so much like it's made entirely of borrowed words, as it does when I'm playing Scrabble and all the words I can think of are not valid English words. Valid words, yes. But not in the dictionary.

Final score: melted_snowball 344, da_lj 223. I remember the last time I won a Scrabble game... it didn't involve melted_snowball ;-)