I Don't Tell You How To Do Your Job . . . .

. . . Okay, maybe I do, but this isn't about that. It's about a work-related conversation:

Me: Where do you keep that policy template I sent you?

Someone completely unimportant: Oh! I hid it! Click on this icon in the taskbar, and then you should see it.

Holy crap! You have like a billion things crammed in here!

Well, yeah. I like my desktop clean.

But it makes working impossible.

Just a little . . . harder . . . I guess. I just hate a cluttered desktop.

How is anyone supposed to find anything?

Look at your desktop! It's a wreck!

My icons are sorted by date, file type and project.

But you can't see the background picture!

Cramming everything into this little double arrow icon isn't cleaning. When you tell your child to clean their room and they just push everything into the closet and wedge the door closed, do you call the room clean? Is that how you parent?

I'm having the network team kill your internet radio.

Family Time

NetFlix was hooking us up very well, actually, until season five.
Most afternoons we'd gather around the television in the living room under a too dense mat of cats and watch, together, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I had watched the entire series on my own while I waited on Shana and Gwynyth to finalize our move and rescue me from the horrible hotel I was living in.
But this was different. This viewing prompted discussion not only on the proper method for dispatching a vampire but on human relations and the role of women in society and the correct verbing of nouns. That is what most Joss Whedon works are about, after all.
And then, after we'd slogged through the first couple of seasons with their hyena people and preying mantis monsters, NetFlix failed.
Season 5, disk two, LONG WAIT.
But we couldn't skip it, right? I mean, I know everyone was in a hurry to get to the musical episode and everything but even the preying mantis episode gets mentioned again. Watching episodes out of order is just bad form.
So, after gazing at our suddenly unsatisfying DVD collection and dreading even a brief break in what had become a family ritual over the course of about a month, I did the reasonable thing.
Amazon.com delivered the Complete Chosen Collection of seasons 1-7 the following day, and balance was restored.
We have since started watching Angel, the Buffy spin-off, since none of us had seen it and Firefly was disturbing and complicated and difficult to explain, not to mention really, really dark at points.
But Angel is only five seasons, and on the other side of that is a glaring abyss of non-Whedon. Bad TV is way worse than no TV.
We aren't the type of family that sits around and puts together quilts, really, but sharing an experience, especially with discussion, has become a needed part of our evening.
I'm not hooking cable back up, though.
There is entirely too much crap television.
Maybe I should pick up some fabric squares and thread, just in case.