Gifts, Calories, HAPPY NEW YEAR wishes

RantWoman celebrates Gifts, to herself.

1.       Lately via Twitter feed: news that there is now a New York Times Crossword Puzzle App! RantWoman had to go to the Play Store to get it, but RantWoman is now hooked. Rantwoman has not tried to do the NYT crossword puzzle in YEARS. RantWoman is not certain the puzzle can be done entirely eyes free and RantWoman strongly suggests a number of #A11y tweaks, but RantWoman will be coming back for that one.

 

2.       The in-person shopping experience. RantWoman needed to go to REI and was thrilled to find a lot of the construction in the area is cleaning up. RantWoman wanted to replace the water bottle sling she uses to tote her smartphone. RantWoman also needed a scrunchy knitted hat for RantMom. RantMom is allergic to wool and also to the giant pompoms adorning many of the hats. It took RantWoman and the cane standing around looking befuddled enough to attract helpful humans a couple times before RantWoman registered all of the directions to find the hats but RantWoman found an awesome one.

 

3.       A hand-me-down used secondhand iPad. Look RantWoman is the oldest child. She always generated rather than received the hand-me-downs or did not fit ones that might have come from other families. So RantWoman is GLAD to use the term hand-me-down. RantWoman is happy to report that setup is going slowly.

 

a.       RantWoman has managed to create an iCloud id with a typo in what displays but not in the username.

 

b.      RantWoman has managed to turn on Voiceover, the built-in screen reader. Look up the swipe pattern to do this? Who? RantWoman?

 

c.       Rantwoman has managed to enter TWO wifi passwords.

 

d.      RantWoman has managed to get the Bluetooth keyboard to connect twice

 

e.      Stay tuned for some “how do we do this podcasts thing?” experiments and some language geek bakeoffs about content in languages RantWoman has officially studied.

 

4.       RantWoman has gotten to try out the Orbit Braille display. The Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing had money at the end of the year and consensus was that we should get an Orbit. RantWoman reads braille slowly but was once again earning her Nerd cred just reading the built-in instructions. Now RantWoman wants one of her own.

  

Holiday FOOD notes

1.       Peppermint:

a.       RantWoman is DONE with candy canes.

b.      Peppermint belongs NOWHERE near coffee. Peppermint and cocoa sound lovely but leave coffee out of it.

c.       RantWoman has scored peppermint in the Seasonal Joe’s O’s and in peppermint ice cream. That is plenty of peppermint.

 

2.       Fruit cake:

a.       RantWoman LIKES fruitcake. Scratch that. RantWoman likes GOOD fruitcake. The commercial specimen she scored this year does not qualify. The only fruit seemed to be maraschino cherries and the nuts were huge and not chopped. The batter had a bouquet about like wallpaper paste and no flavor other than sugar.

b.      Next year RantWoman will take responsibility for her taste and get on the ball early enough both to bake some fruitcake and to souse it in something worthy of the effort.

In the meantime HAPPY NEW YEAR to all.