Thursday, October 31, 2002
This was one of those holidays that Vanessa has been waiting for most of the year. Long ago she decided to dress up as a Princess, and more recently she modified that and wanted to be Rapunzel (one of her favourite stories). Erika found some lengths of straw-coloured yarn and fashioned a way of adding it to her hair in order to get the required lengthy locks.
Unfortunately Erika wouldn't be witness to any of it. She would be working on her current film, and was thoroughly bummed-out about not being there for the fun. So I was asked to take plenty of pictures.
The fun started in the morning when Vanessa had to get dressed up in order to go to a party being held at her Kindergarten. The little Princess joined a few other Princesses who were waiting to get in, along with various monsters, a Spiderman or two, plus various other creatures and beings.
Another dilemma had developed, as Irene, the kid's nanny, developed a full-blown cold, caught from little Annie. When dinner-time came around she was in rough shape, and obviously in need of a break. We had planned that she was going to stay in the house and hand out treats while looking after Annie, while I would take Vanessa around the neighbourhood trick-or-treating. Vanessa was very tearful at the thought that her Dad wasn't going to be taking her around after all, but thankfully one of our neighbours (Wendy) offered to take her around with her little boy. So at around 6pm Vanessa ventured out with Irene to Wendy's while poor Irene headed home.
Little Annie still had her cold, but was cheery enough despite that. Soon after 6pm the kids started arriving at the door looking for treats. Annie was intrigued by all of this. She would invariably be waiting with me in the living room when thee would be a knock at the door. After a few times of doling out treats, she became fascinated, and opted to stay by the front door to get a better seat in the middle of the action. She got truly spooked at one point when a kid no older than Vanessa dressed up as a skeleton shined a flashlight in her face, which made her run as fast as she could in the other direction, but quickly returned upon hearing the excited kid's voices outside.
I recognized a bunch of the kids from our street. Maxime from down the road dressed as a Ninja, the twins from next door, one dressed as a cat, the other a motorcycle driver, Marlot also dressed as a princess, and the local radio DJ's son dressed as rock star (I asked him if he was a Ramone. He said he was dressed up as Slash from Guns 'n' Roses. I said "Same difference". He said, "Yeah". ;-)
Most interesting moment: having to change Annie just after the first wave of kids had started coming. Thankfully, I managed to finish the whole operation prior to the next batch of kids arriving.
Things started dying off at around 7:30pm, by which time I plunked an exhausted Annie into her crib. A highly excited Vanessa came back soon after, with two bags of candy and treats, on completely full. She had had a great time, and enjoyed taking up position at the front door, handing out treats to the few remaining kids who came by while I put Annie down for the night.
Afterwards she showed me her haul: we spread everything out on the front carpet and I took a couple of pictures of her in her costume in front of her voluminous haul of treats. I removed the very few packages of bubble gum, put the bulky bags of potato chips to one side and filled up her "treat bag", which is where we keep all of Vanessa's treats. Last year, her Halloween haul lasted until around Easter time, and I imagine that this one will easily do the same.
Soon after we blew out the candles in the Jack-o-lantern, shut the doors and help Vanessa get ready for bed. She was happy and wiped out.
I left the digital camera in a prominent place so that Erika could review the pics when she eventually got home.
I announced my intention to buy an iMac months ago, but today I finally went through with it. Primary reason for the purchase is to have an iMac of my own for testing purposes: checking my Web page and the CSS code I've been writing for the book (up 'til now I've been borrowing other people's machines to do this). But I'm also curious about OS X, and I just want to know how current Macs "tick".
Earlier in the week I ran across an online ad announcing a special offer on older models. I can't readily afford the newer models (I was tempted to buy an eMac, but I find it hard to justify paying almost $2K -- including taxes -- just to buy a computer. My high-end Dell desktop cost just over $1K by comparison). For my purposes, all I needed was a decent G3-based system, sufficient enough to run OS X. The price being offered was a couple hundred dollars cheaper than a comparable system that had gone on sale at a competitor I had been tracking and was cheaper even than some slower, used systems I had seen, so I decided to take the plunge. I placed a couple of calls to Andy at SimmplyMacs and decided upon a 500Mhz G3 iMac with a DVD drive and a Firewire connection (Graphite model). I also bought a copy of Mac OS X to go with it (version 10.1 -- will see if I can persuade Apple Canada to send me a copy of the new 10.2 "Jaguar" OS as a reviewer for The Computer Paper).
I got it set up in our bedroom -- one of the few remaining places to put a computer in the house. After getting it started I installed OS X. I couldn't get the Internet connection to work, which I suspect is do to a mislabeled CAT-5 cable running from the data switch in the basement, but it gave me a chance to "look under the hood" a bit and play with some of the iMac's settings. First impression: the iMac doesn’t really lend itself to tinkering. I started playing with some of its Network settings and got a bit frustrated at the lack of options.
Early days yet though. Am looking forward to "playing" with it and finding out what it's really made of.
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