beach hacks
I was so hurried trying to write about my meeting with Aunt Cyndi on Wednesday in yesterday's entry, I've been trying to think of what I might have left out. We were only together about an hour, and right now I can't think of much else.
Well, except maybe this: her daughter, Megan, the one I was a snail-mail pen pal with for a few years when we were much younger, does nails for a living. Cyndi mentioned that when I complimented her on her nails, which were painted a very pretty semi-sparkly blue color. It also made me think about how my mom has never, ever worn that kind of stuff. I've seen her with any kind of face makeup on maybe two or three times in my life -- at very special occasions like, say, high school graduation. I don't think I've ever once seen her with nail polish on. My mother has really never been a very particularly girly woman. Maybe I was girly to make up for it!
This kind of stuff does make me think a lot about nature vs. nurture. It was interesting to see similarities in both appearance and mannerisms to Mom when visiting with Cyndi. And you know what else? This did not occur to me until literally just now, as I was writing this: Cyndi is the one and only sister of any kind Mom has ever known. In the family she was adopted into, the only sibling she had was Uncle David. And once she found her three biological siblings, the first two she met were brothers.
I think Mom may be meeting Cyndi in person for the first time today. I should call her this weekend to hear about it. Even though she never met Cyndi in person before now, she has had several phone conversations with her, and thus has kept more in touch with her than either Uncle Chris or Uncle Terry have kept in touch -- they both pretty much disappeared years ago. No one knows what became of them, which is odd to consider in the age of social media. I should find out their last names and see if I can do any digging on them.
As for last night, it mostly consisted of two major things.
First, a movie: I left work at 4:25 to give me the twenty minutes needed to bike as far as the Egyptian Theatre on Capitol Hill, where I took myself to see Beach Rats, which I quite liked, until its disappointingly abrupt ending. I thought about seeing the 7:00 showing and suggesting Shobhit join me -- he would likely have been swayed by being told it was a gay story with potential male nudity (and there was plenty of that, actually). But, in the end, I decided I preferred seeing the earlier show, so I could write the review at home afterwords and not have to wait until I was at work this morning.
Shobhit waited to eat for as long as he could -- I thought I might beat him home but he was home a few minutes before I was and already fixing a dinner made of potatoes, broccoli, and one of our veggie sausages. Once I finished my review I went out to dish myself some, and just carefully kept the huge broccoli chunks out of the serving spoon. Broccoli is so gross, especially in large chunks. Just smelling it cooked literally makes me gag a little. But, without the broccoli chunks, the dish was fine.
But then, later in the evening, at least an hour during which I would have preferred to be sleeping, I was online chatting live with Apple customer service -- for an issue which, in the end, had nothing to do with Apple. Specific websites would not load -- LiveJournal; CNN; MSNBC; even Apple.com -- while most others loaded fine, including FOX News. Shobhit's paranoia went into high gear and he was convinced our computers had all been compromised by Russian hackers. (Why that would also block LiveJournal, which is a Russian-owned site, makes no sense.) In fact he was not satisfied that a security system update from Apple was not suspect until the chat agent confirmed his own computer got the very same update at the same time -- which did not happen until we had been chatting for upwards of an hour.
It turned out to be an issue with the wireless router. It was the only explanation for the same issue occurring on all our Apple devices and Shobhit's PC laptop -- and the fact that these sites all loaded fine on my phone once I took it off wifi and just used the LTE network. And I should have thought to reboot the wireless router much earlier in this process, because once I did that, the sites started loading again -- slowly at first, but after several minutes, just as fast again as any other site.
But, Shobhit always assumes the worst. He seriously would not take any logical argument from me, or believe the chat agent that they really did not think we had been hacked. It was genuinely ridiculous.
I hope I don't ever become the major victim of a genuine hardware hack. Shobhit will be fucking smug about it for the rest of our lives.
