Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Vacation II: Firmung in der Kirche

(Light posting until July 12 or so.) Oh, this doesn't look good.  I'm posting for the first time using a Mac.  Or am I supposed to say iMac?  In any case, I don't see my usual format menu.  On the bright side, though, the format looks okay so far.

German keyboard, exotic iMac technology.  This could get ugly!

Why do Mac fans love these machine so much?  Don't answer that - I know that particular brand of enlightenment will be forever denied me.  I can only figure out how to open one Explorer window on this thing.  I usually have three or four open at once.  So it would be hard to post links.  That is, if I could see a menu that would let me post links...

Anyway, I've been hanging out in Upper Austria for the last couple of days.  The big event Sunday was the confirmation of one of my nieces-in-law (is that a word?), which took place in the village of Lambrechten, where they live.  My wife is the godmother, so she was part of the ceremony.  

This event involved about 50 "Firmlings", or confirmation candidates.  They all gathered in the street in front a couple of blocks from the front of the church.  It was raining lightly, but that didn't seem to bother anyone very much.  Well, except when my umbrella folded up prematurely and dumped water on my sister-in-law.  Anyway, the procession was headed by a street orchestra with about half men and half women, with a  female marshal conducting, all dressed in green jackets, Tyrolian hats and black skirts for the women and black Lederhosen for the men, with drums and horns for the musical instruments.  This is what we Americans would call an "oom-pah" band.

So, the oom-pah band led the procession with the bishop and the local priest and a deacon or two following,  then the Firmlings and their godparents, followed by everyone else.  I thought this was pretty cool.  But then, I can be easy to please at times.  (When I don't have to use an iMac, especially.   Don't German Macs allow you to do brackets?)

Okay, the iMac seems to be seriously freaking out.  So I'm going to finish this later.

(Continued in next entry)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ahh, the power of a Mac. If you use netscapes webbrowser to post on a Mac you get the same formatting that you are used too. the default AOL browser doesn't format for the Mac. at least it didn't when i was an AOL user.

Anonymous said...

The "enlightenment" I suppose will always be denied me is why PC users have anything bad to say about Macs to begin with.  Their much-loved Windows platform is almost a rip-off of Mac's operating system.  We had drag and drop and simple double-clicks when PC users were still stuck with MS-DOS.

Plus, since almost all of the viruses are written to deal with PC platforms, Mac users generally escape most of the virus attacks unaffected.  The same goes for most of that nasty spyware that PC users must constantly fight to rid themselves of.

I still wonder why people love PC's so much!!

Patrick

Anonymous said...

Patrick, you're probably right.  But when you get used to something, I guess it becomes "normal." - Bruce