Catching UP

There's been rather a gap, occasioned [mostly] my the cruise my husband and I took at the beginning of November, and then, we returned to a "war", and my granddaughter decided to stop holding on to things and we haven't caught up with her yet...and more routine things like cleaning a house which had been shut up for two weeks, shopping, doing two weeks' worth of laundry, doctors' appointments, and so on.

Friar Yid has made a number of interesting posts on his blog, which deserve longer comments than one usually puts on a blog, FY, you're not forgotten!

I've got a bit to write about our cruise, and what impressed me most, and of course, the recent outbreak of hostilities with Hamas.  Going back a bit, I think the US elections deserve a certain amount of attention, especially since I think the reason Hamas was more antsy than usual was because they thought Obama wouldn't support Israel any more than he has done previously.

It just happened that my computer went blooey two days before we went on vacation, and I didn't get it back from the "computer hospital", where it underwent a total reinstall of Windows, until about a week after we returned.  The new install required reinstallation of a lot of programs [fortunately most data was stored on an external hard drive, but I had to completely rebuild my iTunes library, and I have about 200 GB of music and audiobooks, all lovingly categorized into playlists, and that vanished with the program].  Moreover the nice guys who repaired my computer installed Office 2007 -- I'd previously had Office 2003 -- and that took some getting used to.  I'm still wrestling with Excell.  The old version allowed me to simply enter number series; this version tries to turn any combination of numbers into a two decimal number as if it was money.  There must be a way around this, but I haven't discovered it yet.

So bear with me, eventually I'll have some uninterrupted time to pontificate on the state of the world, or at least Antigonos' part of it.