Independence

I must have had some weird attachment of finger to lens while I was in Pennsylvania.

Arabella enjoyed riding the old rope swing this year. Daddy pushed her quite high (there is a launching pad, but its about 10' off the ground, and I felt it was a bit too much even for a daredevil 3 year-old. When she discovers roller coasters, we're in alot of trouble.

We bought a dryer yesterday, an electric by Frigidaire. We started at the high end and worked our way down, reminding the salesman that we are the people who were perfectly happy with a free dryer for 2 years. The old dryer had two heat settings, but only one worked. The new has three heat settings. The old dryer only did timed dry, the new has both the timed dry and the "smart" settings. The new dryer has a buzzer, and a light inside. As far as we're concerned, its a Cadillac of dryers. The bad news is that we won't be getting it until Saturday.

Thinking of "smart" settings, I don't consider myself a Luddite, but I really dislike machines that think they are smarter than I am. My greatest peeve is copiers which copy what they think I want copied, instead of what is placed on the one page side of the glass. For example, I was trying to copy a knit pattern for one of the women in my church knit group, and instead of copying one page (full-size) at a time, it copied two facing pages but shrunk them down to fit on an 8.5 x 11" sheet. Even with my very good close-up vision, it was like trying to read the small text on a credit card application. I had to do a little book gymnastics to trick the copier, since just telling it I wanted a standard 1=1 copy wasn't working. Obviously the copier thinks I am a cretin incapable of making copying decisions without its help.