The Labor Day weekend is over.
The lawn has not been mowed for the past couple of weeks. The grass is brown and dormant because there has been almost no rain. There as been plenty of plantain, which is so conspicuous that it is easy to find and pull out.
Madre found yet another pair of shoes that Padre bought for himself, only to have left the box unopened somewhere for Madre to find on Sunday. I got me another pair of new comfortable new sneakers.
It is time to get a tombstone for Padre’s resting place. The problem here is that the tombstones available are so … vulgar. I have already gone over the tombstones I have found in the cemetery. Now I have seen, from the two brochures Madre has been reading, where the stupid things came from. Madre has shown the gravestone of Madre’s former boss to my sister the editor (who found that one of the items in the book lists on top was misspelt) and my sister the teacher.
On Saturday I was recruited by my sister the editor to help in removing the swivel base from Madre’s now-broken armchair and to install it on a new armchair she bought this morning. It was difficult doing: The chair base was cheap wood on which Vickie was proposing to fasten the metal swivel, and built such that simply attaching the swivel to it was not possible.
We had to fix the bracket, on which the swivel base rested, to the wood base of the new armchair. This involved cutting two pieces of ¾″ × 3″ to fit inside the new base, and fastening them with wood screws. Then we fastened the old swivel base on the new armchair’s base with wood screws on one end and bolts on the other. Then the swivel itself is fastened to its base with two surviving bolts (to its base) and two long wood screws (to the wood planks).
My sister insisted on using whether bolts and screws Padre had left behind. But Padre’s collection did not have the right parts for the job, and it was getting late in the afternoon. So I rushed to the local hardware store (which is only a couple of blocks from Madre’s) and bought the bolts and screws necessary to complete the job.
The newly swivel-based armchair was a couple of inches higher than it was, and it gives the feeling of sitting on a throne. Madre is pleased with the job we gave it.
The video card in my main box, Madoka, was giving up the spirit this weekend. It had reached the point where the boot text was corrupt (unless nVidia really did exist in 1916) and it worked only when Windows was in safe mode. So I went out on Labor Day morning to buy a new nVidia GeForce 9800 GT video card with a full gigabyte of video memory and PhysX® drivers for superior gaming performance. I got to admit it made playing Bioshock a lot smoother.
But all that was finished when I backed up all my data from the computer, and did a fresh install of Windows 7. Apart from all those experimental installs on Nabiki — which forced me to make a telephone call to get Windows activated — the installation worked fine.