Another Reason I Like My Mac, and some other stuff.

There is a town called Paradise in our field. It is very small and dingy and unParadisical looking, and every time we have driven through it, I have thought that it looks just exactly like one of those towns in one of those novels about militias and white supremists tucked away in desolate and mountainous parts. It's certainly mountainous. We almost never see any people around when we are going through, and I amuse myself by watching out the window and imagining them all watching us through their curtains or something. So the other day, I learned I was right all along! Or sort of right. Someone told us that apparently, if you take a turn off the main road and wind back up behind Paradise, there is a camp of such-like folks in there.
(P.S. Dear FBI agents who have nothing better to do than wander around the internet looking for mentions of the evil words 'militia' and 'white supremist'. I don't know anything more about this than I have stated up above, so there is no use whatsoever hunting me down to ask. Fyi.)

I have an Apple story to relate for those of you who are following the slow and intermittent saga of my switch from PC to Mac. We made some bookmarks for Teresa to take to the Orient with her. I still have these lingering notions lurking in my brain that Mac software can't interact with the rest of the world, so I didn't even think to suggest that I do it on my computer instead of on Sandy's. Besides, Sandy had all the pictures. So we get it all done (in Word) and properly arranged, four to a page, for printing, and then we go to print. Ha! Sandy's computer won't recognize the printer we are borrowing. It wants an installation disk which we don't have and don't feel like trying to find. Well, fine! we think. We'll put it on a memory stick and print it from /their/ computer! Riiiiight. Their computer won't recognize Sandy's memory stick. You got it. It wants an installation disk. (Side note: whoever on earth ever heard of a memory stick coming with an installation disk???) We back off, scratching our heads in perplexion. (If that's not a word, it ought to be.)
Ohhhhh, idea! We'll put the file on an SD card and stick it directly into the printer. Unfortunately, as it's not a photo file, the printer won't print it. BUT. It can be downloaded to their computer. Bingo, we think! Download happily, hunt up file, open it and... well. They haven't got Microsoft Word on their computer. But they do have Microsoft Works. That ought to work, right? It's made by the same company, same basic program, comes with the computer so it isn't anything fancy or extra... of course you could open a Word file in Works.
Wrong.
Finally, I have the last gasping effort sort of thought - well, let's try /my/ laptop. I know I have a program that will open Word files, and maybe I'll have the right driver for the printer. This takes a little bit more work, as I need to copy each bookmark into Paint and back to Word on Sandy's computer first (don't ask me why, that's /another/ enormously long story - suffice to say that doing that somehow convinces the computer that our single bookmark is indeed one single object), but it's not very long before I'm plugging her memory stick into my laptop, and trotting over to plug the printer in too. Hooray! We have Printage!  (I leave out a long, unrelated issue with the printer itself, which was sulking because of some jammed paper from an earlier copying job.) But the hardest part about doing it from my Mac?
It was too easy.
It was funny, really. I plugged Sandy's flashdrive into my USB port and waited for something to happen. You know, like how Windows will blink a little window at you saying 'new hardware detected' or the like.
Nothing happens. I start thumbing through files and folders and programs on this crazy computer wondering where on earth you /look/ for something like a USB port plug-in. Where's my Windows Explorer??? After some time of this, I realize that the file from the flashdrive has been sitting patiently on my desktop, in plain view (or would have been if it wasn't hidden behind open windows), just waiting for me. Heh heh.