Mortaine’s Blog

So, and I were chatting about clothing….

In the mid-1980’s, modular clothing was kind of popular. In particular, we remembered this store that had, in various colors and sizes, a catalog consisting of tubes, squares, leggings, and tunics. You could use a tube (not necessarily the same size tubes, mind you) as:
a halter top
a skirt
a dress
a belt
a pair of fingerless gloves
a headband
a hairwrap
a mock turtleneck collar (best over a matching tunic)
a pair of legwarmers
a scarf

You could use a tunic as a shirt or a dress, leggings as, well, leggings/pants. In combination, you could come up with hundreds of outfits from these basic items.

Does anyone else remember this store and know its name?

Update: It appears we remembered “Units” or “Multiples.” Turns out the same designer, Sandra Garratt, founded both, after coming up with the idea in design school when told to “design something you wouldn’t like.” (How ironic!) She first founded Units, which was then bought by JC Penny after Garratt was forced out. Then she founded Multiples, which did very well. She was slated to open a line called “New Tee,” just before the Bust. She now works as a catering helper for $6.25 an hour and has trouble paying for train fare.

Thank you everyone for that trip down Nostalgia Lane.

So, here’s the sequence of frustration from yesterday, since you all were trying so hard to be helpful:

1. A week ago or so, I installed OSX 10.3 on my Mac, expecting that doing so would break some things.
2. 10.3, however, fixed the novel writing software I use (beta), so I was able to return to writing my Witches novel in it.
3. 10.3 did, in fact, break X11, which is the Xwindowing environment in which I can run OpenOffice.org.
4. Because of bugs in the previous version of the novel writer, I had switched to OpenOffice.org for my Witches novel last year.
5. The extended file containing about 10,000 words for the Witches story is in OpenOffice format. I am able to open it, but could not copy/paste it into another file because of the brokenness of X11, and I could not save-as because the save dialog box wouldn’t behave properly in Broken X11.
6. I wanted to combine my files so when I wrote during lunch yesterday, I wouldn’t have a source control problem.
7. I decided this was a good time to put a new version of OpenOffice on Trinity (my laptop). [This was, in retrospect, the wrong time to make that decision.]
8. Work doesn’t have a wireless connection, nor any way for me to connect to the Internet with my laptop. Therefore, when I want to transfer files, I do so through media cards, USB drives, CD-ROMs, cell phones, and prayer.
9. On my Windows computer at work, I downloaded the .dmg file of NeoOffice, which I decided would be a good version to try out. I could not, however, figure out how to get a 118 MB file from the computer onto my laptop. My USB drive is not big enough, and I normally have no removable media on my work PC.
10. Sadly, I didn’t have my card reader in my “box of things to keep with Trinity” that has all my portable cables and such. It was sitting on my desk. At home.
11. I tried using my cell phone dialup connection to download it, but since it was estimating 10 hours, I decided to cancel the download. In 10 hours, I would be home with my fast connection and the point would be moot.
12. I borrowed the company CD-R drive and burned a CD of the file from my work PC. This required me to install the Roxio CD-R software. Miraculously, I had permissions to do this.
13. In ejecting the CD-R, the Roxio software prompts how I want to eject it. This is basically how to finalize the CD: I wanted to make the CD-Rom unwritable, but readable on any computer, in any format– not just Windows (this was actually an option). As it burned and ejected, I took a quick bathroom break. When I returned, the CD had been ejected, the tray was open, and there was no error message.
14. I returned the CD-R drive and popped the CD into my Mac. The drive spun up, then eventually spun down, with no icon appearing on my desktop.
15. At this point, I was really glad I switched back to the keyboard that actually has a functioning eject key….
16. I tried reinserting the CD. No dice. I checked it on my test computer, which actually has a CD-Rom drive, but which does not have the Roxio software. Everything showed up, just fine in Windows.
17. I checked Trinity again. Nope. I tried rebooting Trinity. Nope.
18. Finally, I wrote “Bad Burn” on the disk in permanent marker, tossed it into my computer bag, and opened the file in the old, broken OpenOffice.org.
19. I printed the newer chapters (new since the last time I’d used the novel writing software) to a PDF, then opened the PDF in Preview to copy/paste. Preview would only let me select one page at a time (sigh), so I closed Preview and launched Adobe Acrobat Reader. Copy. Paste into the novel writer software. Every line break on page was a line break in the software, but at least I had my background text and my main story all in one file. At last!
20. I spent my lunch hour writing and added about 600 words to the novel.
21. Last night, after I got home, I set up my laptop and downloaded NeoOffice. Naturally, I left my charger here at work, so when I checked on the download a few hours later, the computer was asleep. I could only hope that the download had completed, but I wouldn’t know until this morning, when I got to work where the charger is. Happily, I can report that the download finished before the battery did.

Oh, and I still blame it all on Windows.