Before and after

For the past month or so I have been having some trouble with Google mail. I was often receiving messages that read:

Delivery incomplete

There was a temporary problem delivering your message to xxx@yyy.zzz. Gmail will retry for 20 more hours. You'll be notified if the delivery fails permanently.

Not only would I receive hundreds of these messages, but I could see that the number of page views were much smaller than I had previously been receiving. Try as I did, I could simply not figure out what was causing the problem. The good news is that the problem may have fixed itself, and my most recent post clocked 93 page views yesterday. I am just happy to have everyone back!

After a number of weeks of listening to and watching almost endless political discussions, Barry and I decided we needed to take a break, so he went through an enormous pile of movies we have recorded on DVD over the years and pulled out ones included in the American Film Institute’s various lists. Among the top ten romantic comedies, we have seen (but may not remember too well) all of the ones released after 1971 but none of the earlier ones.

#	Film	Year
1	City Lights	1931
2	Annie Hall	1977
3	It Happened One Night	1934
4	Roman Holiday	1953
5	The Philadelphia Story	1940
6	When Harry Met Sally	1989
7	Adam’s Rib	1949
8	Moonstruck	1987
9	Harold and Maude	1971
10	Sleepless in Seattle	1993

One we happen to have on DVD is “Adam’s Rib,” starring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Let’s just say that this film is seriously dated. You really have to put yourself back in the past – the 1940s, before I was even born - to appreciate this story of a married professional couple, both attorneys, who find themselves representing clients on opposite sides of a messy divorce. Of course, the acting is superb and there is much witty repartee. I do have to admit that it was a welcome relief from the usual MSNBC evening line-up!

Time does fly, doesn’t it? We seem to be having some problems with our Sub-Zero refrigerator. The refrigerated food is cold and the frozen food is frozen, but it is making some very strange noises. Our regular appliance repair person does not work on Sub-Zero products, so I had to search for repairs, and we now have someone coming later today. When I called, they asked the age of the refrigerator. I wasn’t sure but I didn’t think it was more than a few years old. But as I later pondered the question, I realized I was a bit off.

I can divide most of the events of the past ten years into “before” and “after,” where the dividing line is my CNS lymphoma diagnosis in 2012. I should have realized that this was a “before” event, and I finally managed to find the receipt and owner’s manual and discovered that in 2009 we replaced the Sub-Zero that was in the kitchen when we bought the house in 1999, and had probably been installed by the previous owner around 1991 during the gut renovation she had done. So that Sub-Zero lasted about 18 years, and I just hope whatever is going on with this one is just something relatively minor, because they charge a small fortune just to come out and diagnose the problem!

Looks like the cold weather is finally starting to settle in. Stay warm!

Love,

Rebecca