I was chided by a friend for posting so little here. How can she have any idea what's going on in my life?

Mostly what's going on is not much. A lot of treading water and just barely making the rent. Nothing interesting or not depressing.

But here's my afternoon today anyway.

Most Saturday mornings I go to Rabbi Schaalman's study group, and for an hour and a half, we discuss part of the week's Torah portion. He's a genuine living treasure, and we pray he (and his wife!) lives to 120.

I decided to have lunch on Devon. That's the big Indo-Pak neighborhood, and there's a stretch of most of a mile which is restaurants, sari stores, electronics stores, jewelers, and groceries. It's a local landmark.
I'd forgotten it's Ramadan. I've never seen the street so relatively deserted in daylight. Many of the restaurants were simply closed; several had notices of Koran readings at 1 or 2:30 am . . .
Fortunately, my favorite place was open, and I enjoyed lunch, and the Jack Vance I had taken with.
I stopped in one of the big groceries to do some pricing, too. I ought to cook more, but I don't know how expensive it's going to be to re-start a decent spice collection. To my relief, there seems to be s standard size container of 400 grams, in addition to all the kilos I won't live long enough to use up. And the prices are an order of magnitude or more better than the supermarket prices, though that's expected.
I checked the yogurt as I went by its case. Yogurt and granola is one of my staples. I mix cheap granola with trail mix -- ”granola helper“ -- but there is an odd conviction in the American food industry that Americans cannot abide yogurt with the texture of yogurt. It is a struggle to find yogurt without pectin, agar, tapioca, modified food starch, or other "stabilizers". The yogurt in the Indian grocery was just yogurt, and reasonably priced, so I picked one up. They also had an extra large size (5 pounds, iirc).
Then, in the produce section, there were cherries. I watch the summer fruit closely, and there haven't been cherries in several weeks. I thought they were done. And these were pretty ripe. I don't much like unripe cherries. I couldn't find the sign with their price, but decided to get a bag regardless. At checkout, they turned out to be $2/lb.! That's better than any supermarket sale price this summer.
So I'll be back.

I'm well-versed in the idiosyncracies of the various bus lines, and one of the useful peculiarities I can't account for is that one of the northbound busses there (the 93 California, if you're local) goes up into downtown Evanston, by far the most convenient way to start home.
And it goes past the little Sprint store in Evanston. I'm stuck with cable from Comcast (if we could harness the suckiness of Comcast, there would have been no problem with the Gulf leak; just plug it in), and cell from Verizon. The last time I got a new phone from Verizon, I was boggled to find that it did LESS than the one two years older -- because they'd crippled the software further. I can't back up my phone. And no Verizon employee knows what a backup is. That's carrying hiring the handicapped too far. "Oh, let me install the app so you can connect to the web site!" OK, *you* have a backup of my phone numbers, but *I* don't. "You can print it out!" The phone doesn't read printouts. "You can export it into three different uneditable file formats!" uh huh. "You can edit your numbers on the web site!" It's a flash app. There's a reason that real programmers get hives when flash comes up.
So I'm shopping for my next provider. I want a USB internet antenna and probably a 4G GSM Android phone. The few spavined data plans Sprint offers are utterly inadequate, and they only connect to phones they've sold you.
So that's another brand off my list.

When I got home, my backups had all finished, so now I'm thoroughly redundantized, unless the building burns down.
The drive in my laptop (main machine) crashed a few weeks ago, and it's been ugly, even though almost everything was recoverable. I ordered two large drives and an enclosure to get ahead of it all (I've recently started torrenting, and that can eat the gigs!). And the enclosure was DOA. So I returned it for a better model, which got here a couple of days ago. Everything went together with no problems, and I've been backing and copying enormously.

And on to my Saturday evening radio programs . . .