In which I take a whole day and totally girl out with myself.

Sunday I gave myself a pedicure. And a manicure, too. I painted all 20 of my nails frosty pink while sitting on the front porch in the breeze and sun, drinking a beer and talking with Bghead and Truck and AmmZon as they came and went. Bindu slept under the porch swing, her legs squaring off her cute little stocky body, black pointy bat-ears flicking lazily.

Later, I dyed my hair with the second of the three boxes she sent me last winter. I walked around the house smelling of chemicals with my hair ‘piled loosely’ atop my head per the instructions, waiting for 35 minutes to pass. Truck and Bghead were playing darts in the front room — Truck had been hanging the dart board as I’d put dye in my hair — and saying things like, “Okay, motherfucker, let’s make this a bettin’ game!”

AmmZon said, “I would have done that for you, you know,” indicating my dripping head and pointing out that I had a big glob of dye on the back of my neck. I wiped the dye off with toilet paper and thanked her for the offer. I thought I’d actually gotten pretty even coverage, though, for applying it myself, even if I did have dye all over my neck and shoulders.

In the kitchen Truck said, “I don’t think women should dye their hair. I think they should make it look like they’re dyeing it and go out like that, because you look hot.”

“Yeah, you love the smell, right?” I said, putting a pinch of salt into my drink.

“Actually, not at all,” he replied. “It reminds me of when I dyed my own hair. Ick.”

When my 35 minutes had passed, I stepped into the shower and rinsed and conditioned. I love the conditioner that comes with hair color, I truly do.

I don’t think I’ve ever spent that much time on personal beauty in one day in my whole life.

In which if it weren’t so boring, it’d be shocking how boring it is.

Today I accomplished the following:

1. Slept in.
2. Made lunch.
3. Made coffee.
4. Ate.
5. Dipped Bindu (because fleas are evil and deserve to die).
6. Took a nap.
7. Walked to the Dead Cock for a veggie burger and some drinks.
8. Walked home.
9. Read several chapters of a good book.
10. Started a sleeve on the big brown sweater I’ve been knitting since last winter.
11. Wrote this post.

It’s true. I really am this bland sometimes. I know you all think of me as a rock star and all, but honestly it’s hard to rock out when you’re broke and have no car.

Don’t look at me! It makes me shy!

In which I’m sad. And inconvenienced.

On the way to work yesterday, the jeep started coughing and huffing as if it were running out of gas but I’d just put gas in it. I pulled off onto 6th street. The jeep died. I put it in neutral and tried to get it into a parking slot but it was too heavy.

I called Truck and he got a ride over with a neighbor (thanks, P!) and they helped me park it in front of Norm’s storage place. Then I walked to work.

Last night, bghead drove me around. First to the gas station to get more gas, then to the jeep, then to buy injector cleaner… Truck and AmmZon joined us. Our whole household hung out in front of Norm’s storage while Truck looked at my jeep.

Today I walked to work. I was sticky when I arrived because Iowa’s all about the humidity.

Truck just called. He went over and looked at the jeep a little more. It turns out that the problem is not any of the relays or fuses we’d hoped it would be. So it’s probably the fuel pump, which is inside the gas tank, which means it’ll be at least a few hundred bucks to fix because the tank will have to come out. Which means that I will have to save all of my income for the next month in order to get the jeep fixed, and be car-less in the meanwhile.

Tonight I have to figure out who I can ask to trailer it for me (rope-towing is illegal, which SUCKS), because it can’t stay where it is much longer. Maybe I can park it here at work, because this location is between two car shops and I wouldn’t have to tow it a second time when I’m ready to have it worked on.

Sometimes, poverty is not so fun.

In which there’s really nothing worth reporting and you shouldn’t even be reading this because you’re far too cool a person to waste time on an entry like this.

Friday evening I went over to hang out with Raybo and Tsunami, but after visiting with them for only a bit The Curse arrived, and I had to run home before I bled on any of their innocent furniture. In bed by eleven thirty on a Friday!

The rest of the weekend involved finishing a book, starting another, and doing two loads of laundry. I did not do anything more exciting than eat two chocolate candy bars and sleep a lot.

Monday, I thought uncharitable thoughts about my uterus. Uncharitable because it’s really not my uterus’s fault; it’s the glands that produce – or don’t produce – various hormones in unreliable quantities that are causing my uterus to behave the way it does. It’s just following orders.

Yeah, following orders like those Nuremburg dudes.

Today at work, I edited 119 invoices individually before sending them out because the accounting software used by my employer is, to coin a phrase, totally stupid omgwtfbbq!!1!1!!.

However, I did meet a cute girl (with dimples!) today who offered to take me for a ride on the back of her motorcycle sometime, and she’s a massage therapist. So I guess getting up this morning wasn’t a total wash. Did I mention the dimples? *swoon*

In which it’s not where I thought it was.

When I went to The Ex’s earlier this week, I got my external USB HD and pulled my other drive right out of my old computer. Today I settled down with Truck’s laptop, my enclosure, the hard drives, and a screwdriver to reunite myself with my long-lost data.

Well, most of what I thought was on those drives isn’t there. The partitioned drive that usually lives in the USB enclosure has files from Indianapolis on it, mainly – all stuff I absolutely do not need ever again – and the drive out of my tower seems to be conspicuously lacking all of the graphics files I was hoping were there.

Which means most of the data I was hoping for was on my work machine when I got laid off last year. I thought I’d backed up the important stuff, but I can’t find it now.

In other news, The Curse is here so I went to Walmart and bought chocolate and a nightgown, and I will be in my room for the rest of the weekend.

In which I do some maintenance. For the good of the household.

When I got on the laptop today, there was a new icon in the systray and every few minutes it would launch a popup to tell me that the machine is infested with spyware. I think it came bundled with a codec I downloaded when I got online, which makes me feel like an asshole – even though the codec appeared to be from a reliable source, and I even scanned with AVG it before I opened it.

Ah crap.

I force-quit out of everything I didn’t recognize, went through Add/Remove Programs, disabled the IE toolbar it had installed, and then manually cleaned up the Programs Folder.

Then I rebooted. And the pop-up is still running. I have no idea what it’s called, so I can’t figure out how to kill it! Which pisses me right the hell off.

So I go to the web site the damn pop-up wants me to go to, and there are no removal instructions for their piece of shit little adware. I began surfing for info: is it known adware, did it come with the codec or not, how do I remove it, etc.

An hour later and I’ve settled on an ad-, mal-, and spyware remover and am running it now. At 13% complete, it’s already found 56 instances of malicious software on the machine. This freaks me out because spyware, as you know, often contains keystroke loggers, which is how people lose their passwords. I am feeling the itch to change all of my passwords, even though I no longer have any sensitive or financial information on the web.

The scanner hasn’t even gotten to my pr0n folder yet. *bangs head on desk*

Update: 119 instances were removed. Gah. (I’m so ashamed. I know better.) But the problem is still there… turns out it’s a little beaut called Spydawn or maybe Spylocked, and removing it doth sux0r mightily.

Update: All clean. SmitfraudFix rocks.

In other news, the wire in my iPod headphones broke last night, so now I can only listen to the right channel.

In which there was an electronic exchange between myself and my bro-there.

Jayrob 7:03 pm: These are the ducks at my work telling me about the day.

Mush 7:08pm: Egad! Quackers! Where’s the soup?

Jayrob 9:23pm: Every day those lil fuckers waddle right up to me on my break and try to control my mind.

Or get free bread.

Hard to tell.

Mush 9:43am: *lol*

In which Vuboq thinks I’m crazy.

I say watermelon is sold by the pound. Vuboq says they’re sold by the piece. What do you think?

Fifteen of the first 17 votes were Vuboq, btw.

RESULTS ARE IN!: 4 to 20, in favor of by the pound.

In which I babble about a few unrelated things – mostly technical, some travel.

Three days ago I installed a WP plugin called Bad Behavior. It stops bots from leaving comments on the site, and therefore reduces bandwidth usage. In the brief time Bad Behavior’s been installed, it’s stopped 1680 access attempts. Which makes me very happy, of course.

I did receive an email from a real person who wasn’t allowed to comment, however, and that makes me unhappy, of course. Is anybody else having any problems leaving comments?

Yesterday was net radio silence day. It was considered a huge success but net radio’s still in danger, folks.

Today I’m listening to a last.fm station based on Fear of Pop, which I’m super into this week. It’s freakin’ hawt.

Also, the latest last.fm client now scrobbles iPod plays! I’m so pleased!

Today’s beloved Firefox plugins are FoxyTunes and TwittyTunes.

In other news, I’ll be seeing Amma next week, all week – Monday & Tuesday in Coralville, IA and then Thursday & Friday in Chicago, IL. I’m so excited. Bghead even said he’d feed my dog.

In which we talk about comments spam and ID3 tags.

We’ve been getting utterly hammered here at goblinbox by spam comment bots for lo, these past 12 hours, and Askimet isn’t catching them because they don’t have any links and they’re not from known IPs! It’s crazy! Bandwidth-eatin’ mofos, a pox upon you all: I’ve just installed Bad Behavior.

While I can very nearly understand the spam for ‘tranny hunters,’ ‘pee clips,’ ‘black cheerleader sex,’ ‘phentermine,’ ‘farm sex,’ ‘pictures of gay men using their dildos,’ and ‘amateur sex,’ what the hell is ‘anal bondage’? I honestly can’t even imagine the device one would need to purchase for that particular kink, and I’ve got an active imagination.

Heh.

On a completely different topic, I’ve been thinking about organizing my MP3s better and I wanted to ask y’all how you tag your tunes. I sometimes want to listen to a class of music – say, disco or R&B or jazz – but since my genre tags are so crap I can’t do so without creating a playlist, an activity that requires me to scroll through my entire library to find the stuff I’m in the mood for.

The vast majority of the files in my music library were already tagged by the Gracenote db or by the person I got the files from, and I have really no idea how to classify music anyway, so I haven’t messed with them much. (And some of the tags are just terrifying. I once downloaded Etta James’ Tell It Like It Is, and the genre was – I shit you not – “jungle music.” I have three other tracks under the jungle tag, but they’re actually jungle beat tracks so the tag’s not a racial slur. I have many hundreds of tunes tagged “rock” that are only tangentially related to one another. Songs that should be tagged jazz are tagged rock or fusion or swing or whatever.

Plus, how do you determine genre? By the artist, or by the song itself? Because nearly every artist belongs in more than one genre, but most albums have all the songs in the same genre. Which means you can end up with a country song in your ‘rock’ genre, or a baroque piece in your Gregorian chant genre, or the Basie Band and Maroon 5 in the same genre (which is clearly just plain WRONG, even though both tunes may technically be swing).

The point is, there are too many damned genres to be of any use, and it will probably be awhile before someone figures out how to code for a tag cloud. So I’m thinking of simplifying everything into the broadest categories possible: rock, dance, R&B/soul, jazz, classical, and world. But then I think that would just piss me off because if I selected a shuffle in the jazz genre and ended up with a 1930’s blues track right next to a Paul Simon track, I’d explode. So then I was thinking of using subcategories, like rock_classic, rock_soft, rock_arena and jazz_modern, jazz_fusion, jazz_classic, but that sounds like a clusterfuck, too.

Anyway, I want to know how you organize your music: do you even bother to organize by genre? If so, how? Do you use other ID3 fields for your own information? Do you ignore genre altogether and simply listen to a particular artist or album as the mood strikes? Or do you just shuffle your library and hope for the best?