Blessed by the Potato

Back from Vacation! I wrote this entry on the second leg (after leaving Ottawa and arriving at my parents’ cottage), but didn’t post it at the time. I think “today” refers to last Thursday.

It hasn’t been a great vacation so far. Ottawa was ok, but we were both so busy with work that we just weren’t having a great time there, and left a night early. The cottage was better, fairly relaxing, though again we each had at least a full day of work to do after we got here. Today was going to be our first day of sleeping in and not checking email or anything… when the cleaning lady (who my parents hired to come on Monday and clean the place up *before* we got here) decided to show up at 8 in the morning and ruin our lay-in. Ugh. Especially disappointing as we were actually awake early on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (when she was 4 days late, we wrote her off as a no-show… ugh).

The dial-up has been fairly painful, especially when trying to send email attachments. I know having high speed for about a decade now has ruined me to dial-up, but it isn’t helped by all the “content-rich” websites out there that are useless if you turn the graphics off. Which is actually one thing that’s been bugging me about Firefox 2 – I can turn picture loading off to save on bandwidth (and then surfing is slow but not excruciating), but when I do so I just get the alt-text (if any is coded) and no option to load individual images that I can find – old Internet Exploder and Netscrape used to put an empty frame in as a placeholder for an image and then let me click on it (or right-click and select load) to get the image…