Ami's AfterChat Newsletter

January 1999

WELCOME
Happy New Year and welcome back to another installment of the AfterChat Newsletter.

APOLOGIES
Forgive the multiple mailings of the newsletter to some of you. After many hours on the phone to various support techies and still more hours waiting to share my troubles with online techies, I have learned the following.....my mailing program doesn't work. No kidding. With all of you on the list, it is too big to sort. And too big to merge. So it's too big to take out dupes. When I import to it she claims her memory is full, yet accepts some of the addresses anyway. Not able to tell which ones got in and which didn't, I've been forced to send multiples to some of you. My apologies. If it annoys you beyond belief and you just can't stand getting two, please email me and I will manually scroll through until I find your name and remove one of you.

All this should change in about a month. I will then be upgrading to windows/98. And installing the new AOL 4.0 (again) and then installing the new mail program. But I am nobody's fool. No way am I doing all that until Fun Photo-Quilts & Crafts is completely finished and in my hot little hands. Please bear with me.

THE BOOK UPDATE
Both the color separator and the digital photo wizard I work with had their computers go down. First time in 12 years for each of them. I just love delays! I am waiting for the last of the color pictures to arrive on film and then we'll be all set. (This is why I'm not playing with the computer until the book is printed!)

You will be getting a special issue of the AfterChat with information about the new book and a really incredible discount shortly. (You should get SOME perks for reading this silly thing!)

POST CARDS
I think I got more mail than I have ever had in my entire on-line life in answer to my request for help with the post cards to advertise the book. I thought I'd get about 20 people who would be willing to peel and stick. To my amazement I got HUNDREDS! I was reading e-mail for HOURS! In order to be fair, I picked the first 75 people to e-mail me back and they get to experience the brain deadening joy and mindless monotony of affixing stamps and address labels to post cards for the new book. Thank you, EVERYONE!

So many of you took the opportunity to write something encouraging about the newsletter or a workshop or lecture you took with me. I feel so fortunate to have people who care so much. I was really overwhelmed. Please know that I most certainly appreciate your thoughtfulness.

Those that have volunteered to lick and stick, I hope to contact you when I know the post cards are arriving. Then you get a chance to back out. :) If you're still with me you'll get the chance to tell me if you want to do a little or a lot, and I hope I can explain the difference.

WEATHER UPDATE
Michiganians (Michiganders?!) are often lumped in the same group as Minnesotans and Alaskans when it comes to cold weather. When I say I'm from Michigan I always get this look of profound pity followed by some statement about how much snow we get. Like most in the lower peninsula, I just smile and nod, knowing full well that we don't have it so bad. In fact, the last decade of winters has been pretty pitiful. Not much snow to speak of, and the temperature rarely got below zero. Minnesotans, now they have it bad. Alaskans, I can't even imagine. But us? Your dreams are far worse than our reality. Until lately.

All those years of not fessing up to the truth have finally caught up with us. We just got dumped on with two major snow storms back to back. It's everywhere. Like Bartholemew and the Ooobleck, one of my all-time favorite books by Dr. Suess. I measured the other day and we have about 5/8 of a yard of the stuff! I might just as well live in Minnesota!

HOUSE UPDATE
The snow storm brought yet another lesson in house construction. Evidently the trim carpenter moonlights as a snow removal technician. He and the dry-waller put blades on their pick-ups and plow parking lots and driveways. Continually. Haven't seen him in 2 weeks. He's threatening to come back to work tomorrow. If it doesn't snow.

The painting is almost done and things are looking up. It's taken only 2 months (remember, she has a day job) but now we're ready for the last closet. Then she'll start staining the trim.

So what do they do to you if you continue to construct and your building permit expired 6 weeks ago?

GARAGE DOORS
We've been experiencing intermittent problems with the new garage doors. The go up, but they don't go down. But only sometimes. They have electronic eyes to prevent the doors from closing on small children and large pets and if the beam is broken, up they go. And they stay up. No about of coaxing will get them to come down again. We have to disengage the motor and pull them down manually. And that's a lot of fun. Since June we haven't been able to figure out what could possibly be breaking the beam so often, but they are sensitive little buggers. Dust? Blowing leaves? Insects? Snow?

We narrowed the occurrences down to mid-day. Between 11 and 1 we have the most problems. But only on some days. Sunny days. A couple of weeks ago, it hit me. Not the door, the reason.... It must be the angle of the sun on bright days that confuses the little electronic eyes. They blink or something and up go the doors. To test my theory I stood between the sun and the electronic eyeball, casting a shadow over the lens. Sure enough the doors worked perfectly.

We've solved the problem! One of us just stands in the precise "door closing" position if we exit the garage on sunny days between 11 and 1. Steve is so talented. He's learned to pull out of the garage and then parallel park against the door so he doesn't have to get out of the car to make the shadow. He just opens the window and sticks his hand out in a kind of garage door salute, blocking the sun's rays on their way to the electronic eye.

I'm not that good at parallel parking, so I had to devise another fool-proof method. I stuck the cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper over the one of the eyes on my door. They can still see each other, but the one facing the sun has a little hat on. Works like a charm.

The WISDOM OF UNCLE BUD
"Doing Nothing" very often is actually a viable way of solving a problem. For instance, when my children ask for advice on a difficult matter, I am sometimes stunned into muteness. They expect me to know and understand all the ramifications of some rather intricate problem that they are facing. I, on the other hand, have no idea of what they are talking about. With a certain amount of luck, the confused look on my face is mistaken for deep and serious thought. They think they are in the presence of greatness, as if I were the Oracle of Delphi. If my luck holds up, they proceed to elaborate on the problem at hand. By just standing there with a dazed look on my face, doing and saying absolutely NOTHING, certain facts are eventually brought out, and if I can stay stunned and quiet long enough, several possible solutions are leaked out. Then in a blinding flash of glory, I merely choose one of their own excellent plans for solving their problem, and I become a hero.

E-MAIL WARNING
If you receive an e-mail entitled "Badtimes," delete it immediately. Do not open it. Apparently this one is pretty nasty.

It will not only erase everything on your hard drive, but it will also delete anything on disks within 20 feet of your computer. It demagnetizes the stripes on ALL of your credit cards. It reprograms your ATM access code, screws up the tracking on your VCR and uses subspace field harmonics to scratch any CD's you attempt to play.

It will re-calibrate your refrigerator's coolness settings so all your ice cream melts and your milk curdles. It will program your phone autodial to call only your mother-in-law's number. This virus will mix antifreeze into your fish tank. It will drink all your beer. It will leave dirty socks on the coffee table when you are expecting company. Its radioactive emissions will cause your toe jam and bellybutton fuzz to migrate behind your ears. It will replace your shampoo with Nair and your Nair with Rogaine, all while dating your current boy/girlfriend behind your back and billing their hotel rendezvous to your Visa card.

It will cause you to run with scissors and throw things in a way that is only fun until someone loses an eye. It will give you Dutch Elm Disease. It will rewrite your backup files, changing all your active verbs to passive tense and incorporating undetectable misspellings which grossly change the interpretations of key sentences.

If the "Badtimes" message is opened in a Windows95 environment, it will leave the toilet seat up and leave your hair dryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub. It will not only remove the forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows, but it will also refill your skim milk with whole milk. It will replace all your luncheon meat with Spam. It will molecularly rearrange your cologne or perfume, causing it to smell like dill pickles. It is insidious and subtle. It is dangerous and terrifying to behold. It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve. (These are just a few signs of infection. BEWARE!)

Have a great and healthy new year! See you in the AOL chat room at 9 pm on January 28, 1999 for our monthly chat. Thursday's topics of interest? "UFO's, why bother." And, "Stink Bugs, The Pest of Choice."

Happy quilting,
Ami Simms

http://quilt.com/amisimms

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