Category Archives: Work

I need a new battery

Redneck, Rural, Rustic

When I went out to leave for work this morning, the Jeep wouldn’t start.

I had to walk up and down the hill between the house and the barn several times. First to find the charger. (In the barn. Not in the garage or honey house.) Then I had to find an extension cord. (Not in the garage, house, barn, or honey house. In the yard, in a pile.) Then I hooked it all together and plugged the Jeep in, and went inside and watched half of some morning show about well-balanced, clear-skinned virgins with good morals.

The boy, a virgin, asked his friend, a virgin, to double-date with him and the cute new girl, also a virgin. The friend, I believe, was in love with the boy and was pissed at being an extra on a dumb double with some other guy who had no lines. They all looked like they were 25, yet they were playing highschoolers. Dawson’s Creek, I think it was, or some shit.

Anyway. Then I went out and started the Jeep up and drove to work. Got here a freakin’ hour late, damn it.

The reason the battery dies is that I sit in it with the door open a lot, since I’m often too lazy to go find a lawn chair. The dome light kills the battery quite rapidly. I need a new battery, but am and will be too broke to buy one for another month or so.

(After that length of time, my DH assures me, he’ll be working a nicely-paying job and has plans to BUY. A. MOTORCYCLE. He never, ever, EVER stops buying stuff. I am so serious. I’ll be struggling to get my never-to-be-sufficiently-damned credit cards back under control and he’ll be shopping for ANOTHER. FREAKING. BIKE.)

Have I mentioned I want a Mac? (A Mini. And a powerbook. Yum.) Yes, I officially hate Windows now. The opsys I use is five years old, I hate XP too much to use it, and I’m certain the next Windows entry to the opsys world will be another bloatware behemoth. (I’ll keep at least one Windows box to run all my warez on, natch.) OSX, here I come!

Er, here I will come, if my husband ever stops shopping long enough for me to buy new geek equipment!

My to-do list

Domestic Goddess

So far today:

Get up, go back to bed, get back up, herbal tea, work out, laundry, dusting, change sheets, laundry, lunch, wash blankets, dishes, make bread, think about making rhubarb pie then decide making a crust would just be too much of a pain in the ass, lie around aimlessly and read, clean the living room, take out the garbage, laundry.

Now I’m thinking about dinner, and still considering making a pie although I don’t really know if I want the world to know I’d made both bread AND pie in the same day. It seems a little like overkill.

My pits reek, BTW. Working out + housecleaning = stinky Mushlette. But the weather is fucking DIVINE! It’s breezy and balmy and downright freakin’ perfect out, and I love it.

The other day a bird got in the house, and it flapped at each and every window until it found the open door and went back out. I have a set of six tiny, delicate cordials made of Depression glass (you can even see a couple of them here) and I keep them on the kitchen window sill so I can look at them while doing the dishes. The bird knocked every single one to the counter below.

Amazingly, all but one survived.

Freakin' Paper Cuts

Work

Today a customer called wanting help “doing something to his server.” What he needed was help punching holes through his firewall for some orthodontia software he runs his business on.

Well, I haven’t set up NAT for about three years, and that only on a Sonicwall and never on a Linksys. So I grabbed a fresh Linksys out of the parts closet and opened it, and in the process got two irritating paper cuts: one on the pad of my left thumb; the other is a slice through the cuticle on my right thumb. Waah!

Anyway, I finally walked the customer through setting up remote access on his router, and I programmed it myself from the comfort of my own desk using the info he’d emailed me from the 3rd party software vendor. All’s well that ends well.

Except my cuticle really hurts. Did I say waaaah? WORKER’S COMP, DAMMIT!

I made it

Work

I’m at work now. Been solving the weird little email and DNS problems which came in the night to my inbox.

The light’s blinking on my phone but I’m not quite up to voicemail yet. I wish that little light would just fuck off.

My heart’s thumping wildly every few minutes, just to keep me on my toes.

I’m drinking a Nissan thermos full of chamomile tea. (It’s significantly more subtle than, say, Xanax, but it does help with the stress of a geeked out amygdala!) (And here is a bunch of useful info on herbal support for anxiety, should you happen to care.)

I’m wearing my pajamas, more or less, under a skirt and a massively oversized fuzzy I stold from Mr. Brett. I did manage to bathe and put my contacts in, though, so I’m not totally wretched – just mostly wretched.

All I want to do is go to sleep. I AM SO TAKING A NAP THE VERY MINUTE I GET HOME TONIGHT. If I can, that is.

Lazy Girl's Guide to Laziness

Domestic Goddess

Right now, I am not doing the following:

– sweeping the stairs
– making the bed
– putting away that massive pile of clean & folded laundry
– tidying the LR
– vacuuming the LR
– dusting the LR
– tidying the rest of the house
– doing the dishes
– going to the bank
– sweeping the entryway
– washing the throw rugs that are all utterly laden with mud from the recent wet spring weather
– cleaning the toilets

I will get most if not all of this done today, natch, but not until the last goddamn minute. I think I need to re-read that Flylady book or something (too bad Anna’s got my copy and hasn’t spoken to me in a year). I’ve developed all these bad housekeeping habits!

For instance, it’s noon and while I am dressed I haven’t brushed my hair. I have dishes soaking in the sink because I started them and then just wandered off. I’ve got piles of clean laundry all over the laundry room, and it would take all of five minutes to put it all away, but I just keep walking past it.

Weird life discovery: it’s so much harder to do routine, boring, mindless work with a good attitude than it is to do actual rocket science! Seriously. Making yourself do the endless routine crap of life with an attitude of service and gratitude is the hardest thing there is to do; the monkey mind provides all these distractions and excuses… It really is easier just to do what needs to be done, but getting to THAT reality is a never-ending lesson! I learn it and then forget it, learn it and forget it, learn it and forget it… I’m beginning to suspect I’m really not all that damned intelligent.

Except I have managed to talk myself out of resisting my chores! (Maybe I’m not so ignorant after all.) I’m off to breeze through my to-do list; then I’ll get back on the goblinbox again later, GUILT FREE.

Browser Vulnerabilities

Web

“Users who moved away from Microsoft products (to Firefox and RealPlayer) in an effort to avoid security problems are facing high risk vulnerabilities this week. Even Mac users need to install a security patch this week. Not to be outdone, users of Internet Explorer also have a critical new vulnerability to contend with. Also, because working exploit code is now circulating, Microsoft Exchange users and Oracle users should install patches on a priority basis if they haven’t already…”