Another Christmas In Cadillac, Michigan
We drove to Cadillac, Michigan again this year for a family Christmas. The weather for the most part cooperated. It's about an 11 hour drive from Alexandria, Virginia the way my wife pushes it (she's the driver) and we hit nothing more serious than a few showers on the way.
We started out at 4am the morning of Dec. 23 and drove straight through with only a few stops. One stop was at Phantom Fireworks in Boardman, Ohio. The manager was kind enough to open 1/2 hour early.
Our trip this year was not what I would call "high tech." We did borrow a grab bag of books-on-CD from the Alexandria Public Library to take up the road time. I did try to use a $20 FM transmitter to transmit from my iPod to the CD-only audio system of our Ford Explorer, but that failed miserably. All the nifty podcasts I had downloaded were mine to hear alone. (My favorite: the interview with the guy who collects Chinese restaurant menus.)
Number One Daughter in the back seat tried to sync up her new itty-bitty iPod Shuffle to her laptop's Windows version of iTunes but it insisted that she needed to download a new version of iTunes. "What version of iTunes are you running?" I asked. "Version Four," she answered. "Um, it looks like you'll have to wait," I responded, and she answered, "Yeah, there's no wireless on the Ohio Turnpike."
I thought to myself, "I wonder how many years it will be till we DO have wireless Internet here on the Ohio Turnpike?" Whatever the number, I thought, it's probably Sooner Than We Think.
One complaint: the Ohio Turnpike doesn't use EZ-Pass, the electronic toll payment system that negates the need to pay cash to an attendant. I wonder if politics played a hand in that decision? (The EZ-Pass system is very useful during holiday times when there are backups on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.)
We arrived in Cadillac at my wife's sister's house mid-afternoon while it was still light out. As usual, chaos reigned with all the cousins (my two and my wife's two sisters' kids) present, even though they have long since departed the Rug Rats stage. After dinner we headed back to my mother in law's condo where we fell fast asleep.
Christmas Eve Morning I got my marching orders; my mother-in-law's classic iMac needed attention. She had recently switched from satellite TV to cable TV with Internet service and still needed some software tweaking to accompany her new Yahoo email account.
Ah, the glories of Macintosh System 9. I got the printer working (it just needed new cartridges) and I proceeded to set up the email as her home page. First problem: her old email had been Compuserve and that required clearing out a rat's nest of stuff, along with the piles of AOL and Microsoft software and files littering her desktop. That cleaned up I fired up an old copy of Netscape (version 4.5, I think) I located on her disk and found some memory issues. I tried cleaning up her Extensions. It had been years since I had used Extensions manager on System 9 and found her machine wouldn't restart.
My wife stuck her head in the bedroom and asked her stock question, "How long is this going to take?" I gave her my stock answer, "I have absolutely no idea," and she went back to her knitting.
I got Netscape running and found it wouldn't handle many of my mother in law's bookmarked web pages. "FireFox!" I thought but, going to the download page I was told it wouldn't run on System 9. So I ended up locating Netscape version 7, downloaded it, and found it would do just about everything that, I thought, my mother in law would need. (The fact that I could not run Yahoo! Mail Beta on this machine was not a problem; I think that would have been a bit too much of a culture shock.)
By now it was time to go back to my sister-in-law's house where cooking for the Christmas Eve meal was not in full swing; the tradition here is Chinese Food with vast quantities of beer, wine, and jello-vodka shots (courtesy of the younger folks). But before then we went to a local indoor ice skating rink. I held back while everyone else skated so I could take pictures, some of which you can see here.
copyright 2008 by Dennis D. McDonald