Quick trip to Duluth
Mar. 23rd, 2007 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sraunWe went up to Duluth yesterday, to finally deliver Mom's Christmas present. It was a sound card for her computer, and a new-to-her 17" monitor (Thanks, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mrissa, she likes it!). I turned it on, the old monitor did this shimmery thing, I turned it off to swap monitors, and ... you guessed it, it didn't turn back on. That was the point at which she told me that she'd been having to power-cycle it two or three times to get it to boot recently. :-( OK, it's time for a new computer. She's buying, the major limit is that it has to be up and running, with most of her software reinstalled, before I came home. My first thought was to get her a new new computer - that survived about 3 minutes once I hit Best Buy. Windows Vista. There was no way I was going to give my mother a new computer with an operating system that I'm not either currently running, or have been running relatively recently. Let alone one that I'm unlikely to be touching for a year, minimum! OK, off to the local Computer Renaissance. They didn't have anything I could take away with me Thursday late afternoon, but did have a bunch of Dell desktops running Win2K Pro that they' have available soon. Soon ended up being about 1:30 Friday afternoon. Dashed home with the new computer, installed Quicken, WordPerfect, Wheel of Fortune, and a MahJongg program. Now she has a working system, all I have to do is get the data off the old hard-drive. There's this box that won't power up sitting on my dining room table right now...
Other than that, she took us out to dinner Thursday and lunch Friday. Dinner was at a newish restaurant in Superior, WI, called Le Bistro. Total bill for the three of us was about $85 - mom had scallops in lemon butter,iraunink had broiled walleye, I had cioppino, and then iraunink and I split a serving of Raspberry Chambord Cheesecake for dessert. It was a good dinner!
Lunch was the Nokomis Cafe, which was about 20 minutes up the north shore. (Yes, I found the thought of a Nokomis anything that far north a little bit set destructive.) Appetizers were a salad with blueberry vinaigrette dressing for mom, and a smoked whitefish cake foriraunink and me. Entrees were a walleye cake po-boy for mom, iraunink and I split the meatloaf with herb polenta, and then had a Meyer Lemon curd creme brulee for dessert. We didn't like the ratatouille side dish that came with the entree, and the sauce that came with the smoked whitefish cake had a touch too much mayo in it for my taste, but it was still a pretty good meal. I'd go back there in a few months, after they change from their winter menu to their spring or summer menu.
We also came home with some silver serving pieces that mom wanted to get rid of. I think we'll get reasonably use out of them - after we get the tarnish off.
mrissa, she likes it!). I turned it on, the old monitor did this shimmery thing, I turned it off to swap monitors, and ... you guessed it, it didn't turn back on. That was the point at which she told me that she'd been having to power-cycle it two or three times to get it to boot recently. :-( OK, it's time for a new computer. She's buying, the major limit is that it has to be up and running, with most of her software reinstalled, before I came home. My first thought was to get her a new new computer - that survived about 3 minutes once I hit Best Buy. Windows Vista. There was no way I was going to give my mother a new computer with an operating system that I'm not either currently running, or have been running relatively recently. Let alone one that I'm unlikely to be touching for a year, minimum! OK, off to the local Computer Renaissance. They didn't have anything I could take away with me Thursday late afternoon, but did have a bunch of Dell desktops running Win2K Pro that they' have available soon. Soon ended up being about 1:30 Friday afternoon. Dashed home with the new computer, installed Quicken, WordPerfect, Wheel of Fortune, and a MahJongg program. Now she has a working system, all I have to do is get the data off the old hard-drive. There's this box that won't power up sitting on my dining room table right now...Other than that, she took us out to dinner Thursday and lunch Friday. Dinner was at a newish restaurant in Superior, WI, called Le Bistro. Total bill for the three of us was about $85 - mom had scallops in lemon butter,
iraunink had broiled walleye, I had cioppino, and then iraunink and I split a serving of Raspberry Chambord Cheesecake for dessert. It was a good dinner!Lunch was the Nokomis Cafe, which was about 20 minutes up the north shore. (Yes, I found the thought of a Nokomis anything that far north a little bit set destructive.) Appetizers were a salad with blueberry vinaigrette dressing for mom, and a smoked whitefish cake for
iraunink and me. Entrees were a walleye cake po-boy for mom, iraunink and I split the meatloaf with herb polenta, and then had a Meyer Lemon curd creme brulee for dessert. We didn't like the ratatouille side dish that came with the entree, and the sauce that came with the smoked whitefish cake had a touch too much mayo in it for my taste, but it was still a pretty good meal. I'd go back there in a few months, after they change from their winter menu to their spring or summer menu.We also came home with some silver serving pieces that mom wanted to get rid of. I think we'll get reasonably use out of them - after we get the tarnish off.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-24 06:53 pm (UTC)I liked Duluth. It has a wonderful maritime museum and a Really Cool Lighthouse. Not to mention the other RCL fifty miles up the road...
I could have done without landing there the same weekend as the inline skating championship, though.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-25 02:28 am (UTC)There was one vacation where we did the 'circumnavigate Lake Superior' trip - that's actually quite a bit of fun if you take your time doing it.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-25 11:32 pm (UTC)I love the Great Lakes on principle. I lived on the shore of Lake Erie for a while back in the late 80s (after they cleaned the lake up some) and thought it was wonderful. One thing I noticed while I was visiting Split Rock lighthouse on my trip that included Duluth was that it disoriented me. There was this little sign pointing down a path that said "To Lakeshore." My coastal brain (I grew up in California) immediately thought, oh, is there a little lake nearby? Not realizing that by "lake," they meant that huge body of water that looked like an ocean from my POV...
no subject
Date: 2007-03-26 01:32 am (UTC)Duluth can do an excellent job of screwing up your sense of direction - the compass directions are 45 degrees off standard - east is going up the North Shore, west is going down, north is away from the lake, and south is towards it.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-26 02:33 am (UTC)I wasn't otherwise directionally confused while I was in Duluth, but I might have been if someone had given me those directions.
That's almost as bad as moving from Denver to Seattle or vice versa. One gets used to thinking that west is always towards the mountains, and in Seattle, the mountains are in the opposite direction [g].