tigertoy

My power went out a few minutes ago. Will my creaking old XP box finish installing the F***ING updates that it decided it should install instead of doing what I F***ING TOLD IT TO DO and SHUT DOWN NOW? Oh, there, it finished. I don't know how long the batteries in my UPS will last; it's not as creaky and old as the computer, but it's not exactly new. Now it's really spooky quiet in here, without any fans. Well, except for the UPS, which is still beeping because the answering machine is still plugged into it. I could sit here on the laptop while it has power, but it's time I should be in bed anyway. Sure hope the power comes back on before morning.

I hate winter.

Early this week, they were predicting a snowpocalypse for this weekend.  On Wednesday I was considering going to EFRC on Friday because I might not be able to go on Sunday.  On Thursday they toned the forecast down a lot, and I decided not to.  Then Friday, they brought back their dire forebodings of horrible white doom.  On Saturday, friends had been planning some outdoor fun, but it was canceled because it was raining.  Nobody wants to go sledding on slush in the rain.  And they were posting blizzard warnings for Sunday.

I got up, not quite as early as I was supposed to, and things were OK at the time, but I had a really bad feeling about what they would be like later in the day.  I assumed that if I did go, we'd get a horrible storm that I would not want to drive through, but if I stayed home the weather would be fine.  I dithered for a while and finally decided to stay home.  Surprisingly, even though I stayed home, we're having a howling blizzard.  I can't see the lane from the garage right now, but I suspect it has drifts too deep to drive through.

ETA: I just walked around the block. The wind really is gusting at least 50 MPH. Fortunately, we appear to have very little actual snow, so the drifting isn't too bad -- as in I might be able to drive down my lane right now, but then again I might not. I was very warmly dressed, and it was actually kind of fun while I was out there -- when I had my back to the wind!

So much stuff I was supposed to get done this weekend (mainly, that meant yesterday).  It hasn't happened.  Theoretically, I could do some of it now, but I find that I just can't muster any give a damn.  Too tired.  Going to bed early.  (I got up at 5:30; I earned my tired.  My lack of give a damn, maybe not so much, but I don't give a damn.)

So there I am, in the kitchen, pouring the water off my macaroni into the colander in the sink, a task I’ve only done about 1000 times with this exact pan, colander, and sink without difficulty.  But this time, some demon of entropy causes a gout of boiling water to leap out of the sink and attack me.

Right smack in the place a man least wants to be attacked.

Lest anyone seriously panic, this is not a call-the-ambulance scale of injury.  (It wasn’t the whole pan of boiling water -- just a splash.)  But I am going to be uncomfortable for a few days.

My best hope for dog care over Windycon has failed.  My neighbor with the kennel is full for the weekend, and won't consider taking care of the dogs at my house.  And she told me to go jump in a lake in such a bright perky way that I begin to wonder if she ever thought I was anything but pond scum.

If I don't find someone I can rely on to come to my house four times over the weekend, I can't go.  I have not missed a Windycon since I started going to conventions in 1978.  Right now this has me really upset.  Next week it will probably have me really depressed.

If you know someone who'd be willing to do this, please have them get in touch.  I'm looking for someone I can pay a reasonable, or even moderately unreasonable, amount of money for it.  I don't want to beg a favor from a friend, but if a friend or a combination of friends are willing to do it, I will be grateful.  However, leaning on friends is clearly not a long-term solution; this will keep coming up, at least as long as Windy hangs on, every time I want to be away from my house for more than 12 hours.  I will be asking vets if they can recommend anyone, but in the past they haven't been any help.

Please, somebody, help me find a pet sitter.

Apologies for being whiny.  ( Click here if you want to hear about my nasty cold. )

So here I am, making my dinner, normally enough.  I put the rice on the front burner, I chopped the sausage and celery, and when I was done chopping, I moved the rice to the back burner.  The knob was oddly sticky.  After I got it lit, I tried to turn it down to a low flame to keep the rice simmering, and I had to turn it hard to get it to move, and when I did, it went all the way off.  I turned it back on, and tried to turn it down, and this time I couldn't get it to move at all.  So I got a pair of pliers to turn it, and something went snap.  Now the knob turns but the burner stays full on.  This is not good.

There is a cutoff valve in the wall where the stove plugs in.  I turned off the gas to the whole stove, as that was the only way I could turn off that burner.  But I don't have a working stove.  Admittedly, this stove has been on its last legs for a long time; the oven didn't work when I moved into the house, and two of the four burners have been non-working for years.  But I never use more than two burners at a time, and it did the job for me.  I guess it's time to bite the bullet and get a new stove.

I don't need this, period.  I don't need it all the more when I don't have a paycheck to pay for a new stove with.  But I *especially* don't need it when I don't have enough hours in the three days before I'm supposed to leave on a long trip to get half the things I need to get done before I leave done.

It doesn't especially thrill me that I don't have any real option but to leave on my trip without solving this and have to come home to a house that doesn't have a stove.

The dogs have presented me with not one but two nasty dead possums today.  Why does it seem like they're trying to tell me something about my life?

Blinkety-blank web browsewr just dropped 500 words of so of my EFRC update in the bit bucket. I think my spastic fingers hit some Ctrl+something combination that they weren't supposed to.

I'll try again in a minute if I haven't put the keyboard through the CRT.

I've been meaning to schedule a physical for a couple of weeks, but failing to get around to it. Yesterday, I finally made the call. Since I just turned 40, I think I ought to get a real physical exam, not just a quick once-over while the doctor refills the prescriptions that I need to live.

They told me that I'd have to wait until August, because my doctor only does one physical per day. When I was unhappy, they invited me to change doctors. I've been seeing this guy for 10 years; I don't want to change doctors. But I do want a doctor that thinks my physical is important, so he'll actually be thorough and make sure that if anything is wrong he finds it.

This doctor is a cancer specialist, but he was taking new general patients when I joined the health plan 10 years ago, and as far as I recall hardly anyone else was, even at the biggest hospital in almost 100 miles. It really seems to me that if a doctor is going to let someone choose him as a primary care physician, he has a responsibility to really be available for that person as a primary care physician, and being a primary care physician for a healthy person mostly means doing physical exams. It further seems to me that once he's had a patient for 10 years, he shouldn't treat seeing that patient as a sideline to his real practice with cancer patients. And finally, if he really is too busy with cancer patients, he (or his staff that work for him) should at least be able to provide some better support than "if you don't like waiting more than two months, you can pick a new doctor".

After getting some sympathetic noises but no real help from the nurse, I went ahead and scheduled the appointment, at which time she told me there had been a cancellation; would I like to have my exam on June 29? If they'd offered me that in the first place, I wouldn't have gotten all upset and gone through all of this. But maybe I wanted to know that I should be looking for a new doctor. I will be paying attention to what he actually does for me when he sees me, and if he confirms rather than easing my fears that my care is not very important to him, I'll have to start the process of trying to find another doctor.

I want to believe that the problem is not that my doctor is a jerk (he certainly doesn't seem like one; that's why I've been seeing him for 10 years), but that the system is squeezing him by making him deal with more patients than he can handle. The fact that I'm getting jerked around by the best health plan in town, at the biggest and best equipped (not necessarily best run) hospital within 100 miles, certainly doesn't bode well for people with no or second-rate health coverage.

So, having finally decided that my home PC is just too slow to live with, I ordered the parts for the new one, with Mike's help, on Tuesday. Some of it showed up Thursday, and the rest got here today (or I should say Friday since it's after midnight?) I basically watched Mike put it all together. It would have taken me at least 5 times as long as it took him. So far, life is good.

( It doesn't work. Details cut. )

Which leaves me with the frustrating choice of (a) buy a video card, even though I've already paid for built-in video, or (b) be stuck without a computer that I need for however long it takes to send the motherboard back and get a replacement. Just based on utility to me, I should clearly go with (b), but it really honks me off to let a company get away with selling me a broken product. On the other hand, it really honks me off to still be stuck with an ever-increasing backlog of photos that I haven't properly identified, organized, and done stuff with because it's just too painful on this poor old machine.