altivo

Did get spinning done today, nearly done with singles in Irish linen for a skein. I'll get it done and plied tomorrow. Focus shifts then to finishing up the naalbinding piece.

Gary had to go to classes this afternoon. As usual, he finds out that he's going to have to spend more hours in meetings than was stated on the course schedule. He also finds out that a $115 text book should have been marked "optional" on the book list for one course, because they are distributing all the relevant parts in PDF files anyway. And then he comes home and tries to download those PDFs. We discover that they have used no common sense in creating the files at all. Three pages of print should not need a six MB file. There are dozens of these files, with no option to just get them all in one large ZIP or anything like that. Instead you have to keep watching the screen and download them all one at a time. Their server is also overloaded and slow, making the throughput far worse than it would be even just for our dialup connection. I repeat what I've said before: these people, state university or no, are both inconsiderate and incompetent. They have no idea how to use technology effectively, and instead are just bumbling through. They have no sense of consideration or honest responsibility toward their students either. Frankly, I think most of them need a good hard kick in the seat of their pants.

Hopefully Gary's computer is now usable. We will pick it up tomorrow.

Advantage of being on vacation: I have time to cook. Made stuffed pasta shells (vegetarian, lacto-ovo anyway) with Greek salad and garlic toast for dinner. There's enough left over for two more meals.

The Dreamwidth servers must be badly overloaded, or else their internet connection is under-rated. They've been slowing down more and more for the last two weeks, until they've become virtually unusable here.

Weather is nice, though. Flies are down for some reason. Tess was real happy today, and behaved beautifully as a consequence. Bonus. Simon seems to be feeling better too. We increased his aspirin dosage, as the vet said it wouldn't hurt him to have more. Once again he's gained energy and pep, and is playing with Sarah and bouncing around. Evidently he really does feel the arthritis that we've suspected. Right now he gets one tiny quarter size dose of aspirin twice a day (up from just once.) Vet says he can have as much as one full sized adult tablet twice a day. So at least we have some room to wiggle if he needs more after a while. She also said he can go on a prescription arthritis med if necessary. We used that for an elderly golden retriever years ago and it really did help her for a while, but I'd rather wait until it's really necessary. It's expensive and has side effects, including potential liver damage. Probably not an issue in a dog this old, as something else is going to get him first, but still goes against my idea of responsibility to use a drug that causes known damage if it can be avoided.