In which I *do* go on about my cute BF.
Yesterday my dorky boyfriend informed me that it was our “two-month anniversary.” (Two months. SIXTY ONE DAYS. Who counts shit like that? Six months, maybe, or a year, but two months?!)
We almost went out to dinner after work, but I was unbathed and wearing less-than-perfectly-clean clothes, and it was hot, and we still hadn’t met Becca’s new boyfriend, and we wanted drinks, so we went straight to the P&E to meet Becca and her Boy. (We liked him; he was personable and made direct eye contact and appeared to get our jokes.) (We don’t know if we totally approve, of course, because she used to be our girl, but he seemed nice enough and she looked happy.) (The heartbreaking slut! She used to be our girl! We used to take her out!)
We left after two rounds of drinks and went through the Taco Bell drive-thru, because apparently I AM A BLOATED RETARD WHO LOVES SODIUM MORE THAN ANYTHING IN THE EXTANT UNIVERSE AND WON’T STOP EATING IT AND I’LL ALWAYS HAVE CANKLES AND FOR FUCK’S SAKE WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?!?!?
*Ahem.*
Meanwhile-back-at-the-ranch, we sat on K’s bitchin’ 50’s couch in our underwear and ate our delicious salty quasi-foodz and yelled gleefully at each other in the way that we do, and then we went outside and hollered more in the shed, and then we went inside and wrecked the bed. We’re so in love it’s just stupid.
Oh: and if you drove by and happened to see some nekkid people smoking on the driveway porch? That totally wasn’t us. Srsly.
In other news, I’m playing the Ritzville Blues Festival with the Coyote Kings next weekend. TWICE! Come see me!
In other other news, happy 4th. Go blow something up!
In which the AC adapter has arrived!
Kaje and I watched an episode of Doctor Who last night while eating tostadas on his couch. I love Doctor Who. I love tostadas. (Couches are pretty cool too. Pretty much a win/win scenario, if you ask me.)
Then we slept for ten hours.
This morning when I got home to shower and change, I found that my new AC adapter had arrived. W00t! I immediately ran upstairs and plugged it into the ol’ IBM A30… and damn if it didn’t just boot right up! I’m so glad to have my laptop back again.
Maybe now I can get my iTunes library off of that damn failing IDE-drive-in-a-USB-enclosure and onto my laptop, where it fucking belongs.
In other news, payday has come and gone. After paying all my bills I have $147 to live on until the 15th. I usually pay only half of my bills per paycheck, but this month I paid everything with this check so I can buy a ticket to Vegas with my next one.
Yay! Ticket to Vegas!
In which I snivel, bitch, and moan.
I am so waterlogged today that I can barely stand being in my own body.
I gained upwards of 15 lbs. this month (guess who totally wasn’t watching her sodium intake in the past month?) and I literally cannot wait for it to go away. I’m grossly bloated and uncomfortable, my feet feel like sausages, and I’m tired and crampy. The Curse will be here any minute.
Old age sucks. I love sodium, damn it, and vodka too, and I used to be able to indulge in both with no side effects! But now? Oh hell no: a few late-night drunken trips to Shari’s and come cycle end I’m bloated up like a corpse left out in the sun.
My wrists, fingers, face, belly, legs, and feet are swollen. My fingers tingle if I hang my hands by my sides for more than a minute. I’m tired. It’s 100 degrees outside and walking over to Main street and back for a sandwich was like hanging out in an oven.
And to add insult to injury, I went to the dentist this morning and my gums are kinda sore, which is really wimpy of me but hey – I’m feeling sorry for myself so might as well be thorough with my litany of misery!
Heh.
The gig Saturday night was fun, but hot. Really hot. Really, really, really hot.
Like, 103 freaking degrees. And the stage? Was a black flatbed semi trailer in a parking lot under no cover whatsoever. KJ forced me to take a bottle of SPF 45 that probably saved my life (and the necks and ears of the rest of the band as well).
We traded sets with another band for five hours. Curtis nearly went into heat shock but was saved by a cold towel, a generous application of ice cubes to his wrists and earlobes, and an ibuprofen. I drank a lot of water and a quite possibly more vodka than one would generally drink under such conditions. My cute boyfriend and Curtis’ cute girlfriend got pretty trashed and danced with me during the other band’s sets.
Sunday I made KJ drive me around in the relentless heat so I could spend all my gig money at Walmart and Andy’s. I bought food and a floor fan and HABA items. We spent much of the day in Kaje’s basement, where it was coolest, lounging on the couch in front of the new fan. I read. He blogged. We ate chips & salsa. I napped.
For dinner, he made portabello burgers. Then I read. He blogged. Later we gossiped about people. Then I bitched about being bloated (he poked my ankles and knees and said “Oh, weird! gross! cool! your skin’s full of water!” noises). I made him take me home at midnight, because I had a dental appointment at the ass crack of dawn (9:20 am) today.
In which I check in briefly.
Today is payday! I bought an AC adapter for my laptop off of eBay! Yay!
I upgraded my eyeOS* installation and have been playing with it all day long. You can play with it too by going here; login with guest/guest, or just sign yourself up for an account!
Keep documents there! Surf for porn at work with its built-in browser without letting your IT dorks see your traffic!
Don’t blame me if you spend all day playing chess or Prince Of Persia, though.
During today’s company meeting, RB projected this onto the wall for everyone to see. (I nearly peed myself FOR THE FOURTH TIME, Keef. Thx ever so much for the link!) The Website Is Down is some of the funniest shit I have ever seen, EVAR. OMG it just totally makes me giggle OUT LOUD.
Tomorrow, my band’s doing a leukemia benefit in the Tri-cities, which is good. But we go on at 5pm and it’s an outdoor gig with no cover and the weather’s supposed to be 102 degrees, which is bad.
Yeah, one hundred and two degrees. Triple digit weather, bitches! …Um, does anybody have a white parasol I can borrow?
~+~+~+~
*eyeOS is a web-based desktop replacement. It does everything your desktop computer does, including run applications and store documents, except it’s on a web server, accessible – through a browser – from any ‘net-connected machine. It essentially represents a move back to dumb terminals, with the Internet as the mother of all mainframes.
I totally *heart* it.
In which I go off an an industry giant, maker of Norton Anti-virus and other crap.
An open letter from an ISP tech:
Dear Norton,
I hate your website.
I hate that your instructions for disabling your stupid firewalls hardly ever match the actual products out in the field.
I hate that you don’t have a fucking telephone number for your customers to call when they can’t connect to the Internet due to problems with your products.
I hate how your products block Internet connectivity when your stupid preinstalled-on-every-Windows-box trial versions expire.
I hate that more often than not, people who can connect but not surf are being blocked by their very own paid-for Norton products!
And most of all, I hate that I have to support your stupid shit because you won’t.
Argh.
Sincerely,
Mush
ISP Support Technician
Caveat: I realize that the Internet is a dangerous place and that your typical luser really does need a highly aggressive security package installed. I get all that. What pisses me off is that your customers have to be connected to the Internet in order to go to your web site and request a $9.95 call back for support but your products keep them from being able to connect.
In which I’m a domestic goddess AND a rock star IN THE SAME DAY!
Cleaning
Not too terribly long ago I was standing in the shower and saw something on the wall. I reached up above the edge of the shower shell and smeared it with my finger, and it turned out to be dust. I left a big ol’ streak on the wall (because dust storms and condensation leave streaks on your latex paint, and that’s just that) and the next time I showered I stared at it I realized that it was driving me ape-nuts-batshit-crazy. I therefore determined to use my next day off for good, and vowed to wipe the walls down.
Holy shit! That’ll teach me to NEVER TOUCH A DAMP WALL AGAIN! I spent 3 hours Saturday morning cleaning the front bathroom! I scrubbed the walls, the ceiling, the fixtures, washed the valance, cleaned the mirror, washed the windows both inside and out… When I was done you could not only eat off any surface in there, you could have safely eaten the bathroom itself.
But at least there are no longer any streaks on the walls.
Or the ceiling.
Or anything else, by God! That bitch is spotless.
G’ma said, “You’re a good kid.”
Gigging
KJ left work early Saturday afternoon and picked me up at home. We stopped at the Taj on 2nd for gas then headed for Roosevelt, WA. The Gorge was all moody and foggy, and we got rained on a few times. We talked our faces off.
After two hours in the car, we rolled into a town that looked like this and went into a ‘venue’ that looked like this. We sat around crowd-watching (if you can call 32 persons ‘a crowd’) in the beer garden, listening to Junkyard Jane finish their set.
Investigation revealed that the only food within a 50-mile radius was the pork, beans, and coleslaw laid out on the bar… a bar that only served beer and no hard alcohol.
It should be noted here that I don’t really drink beer.
So, to recap: no food, no cocktails, 35 rednecks in attendance TOTAL, and a rainstorm coming up. The scene had Hell Gig written all over it. I was reduced to drinking Coors Light, of all things, and wondering why the bar couldn’t at least sell me a freakin’ bag of potato chips. KJ, the doll, worked his charm and managed to make the bar’s kitchen open up just long enough to produce a salad for me while we were setting up our gear, but that joy was short-lived because then it started to rain.
The band was under a shell, but I was all bummed because I was in BFE and I figured that the few people who were there were going to leave and we’d be playing in the rain for no one, but the folks from Roosevelt totally surprised me and stayed ’til the bitter end – half of them even danced in the rain!
Some biker dude got KJ half-crocked on moonshine out in the parking lot, and Syl befriended the town’s lesbian couple. The bartender brought me a free beer. No one requested any Janice Joplin. It turned out to be one of the best crowds ever! I ended up having a really good time, and would have counted it a lucrative gig if gas wasn’t freakin’ four bucks a gallon!
In Other News
The AC adapter for my laptop is bad, but I can buy a brand new one off of eBay for $20. I may be laptopping again soon!
My dog really thinks running water is cool.
I actually broke into my knitting bag for the first time in half a year and worked on the Big Brown Sweater. Superfine alpaca, bitches!
Sunday I made a falafel feast for G’ma and KJ and ate myself into a very happy stupor. Yum!
In which I’m your geek, baby.
After several months of letting it sit there and collect dust, I installed that new 120Gb HDD into my A30 laptop. Then a few days went by – days during which the laptop was in its carrying case – and then I decided it was time to set the bitch up and copy my files off of my original drive, format it, and then get my iTunes library off of that failing external drive (it fails to spin up sometimes, which is uber spooky) and get my data organized.
So I set up the laptop, and plugged it in (because the battery only holds a charge for 4 minutes – I need to replace it) and…
…no power. None. Won’t light up. Damn.
So either the AC adapter has failed, or there’s a connection problem inside the laptop itself.
Fuck!
I have no laptop. I need to get the adapter on a multitester and see if it’s putting power through, and if not take the laptop itself apart and see if I can fix it.
Not having a home computer is upsetting me mightily.
It’s as if the universe doesn’t want me to have my freakin’ data in one place! I’ve been trying to get my shit organized for over two years, and can’t seem to pull it off. You have no idea how hard it is to get content off of CDs and onto my iPod! And my play stats are hosed! And no scrobbling!
In other news, I’m playing the Roosevelt Wine & Wheels Festival with the Coyote Kings tomorrow.
In which this is pretty much what I do. All day, every day.
“Okay, so, if I understand you correctly, you can’t connect to the Internet and you swear that your computer is giving you absolutely no error messages. Is that accurate?
“Well, before I can offer you any useful tech help, we need to get an error message. My records say you’re using Windows Vista, is that correct? Yes? Okay. Well, frankly, Vista’s dial-up networking implementation pretty much totally sucks, so we have to force it to give us a useful error message. To do that, we have to dial up from a particular place.
“Are you in front of your computer now? Is it booted up? Good.
“First, let me have you click on Start, and then go to Control Panel. Do you have something called Network and Internet? No? Okay, well, there do seem to be a couple of different versions of Vista. How about Network and Sharing Center, do you have that? Yes? Great. Okay, let me have you click on that for me.
“Yeah, that’ll be a left click.
“Now, on the left, under Tasks, the second-to-last item in the link list says Manage Network Connections. Do you see that? Yes? Okay. Click on that for me.
“Now, under the Dial-up header, do you have an icon labeled BMI? Yes? Good! Double-click on that.
“Double-click. …No. Double left click, please. It should open a new window called Connect BMI for you, once you do it right.
“Okay, now: are we speaking over the same like the computer uses to connect? We are? Okay, well, I’ll hang up now, and if you don’t connect to my server in 60 seconds, I’ll call you back. Remember: if you can’t connect, I need you to write down or remember the three-digit error code you’ll see, okay? Okay. Talk to you soon.”
Or if not that, then:
“So you can’t get online with your DSL. Gotcha. What brand of modem do you have?
“Uh, your modem is the little box you have plugged into both the wall jack and your computer. I need to know what brand it is.
“You don’t know where it is? Um. Okay, well, how about this: is there an Ethernet cable plugged into your computer? There is? Okay, trace it back to see what it’s plugged into.
“Yeah, see, that’s your DSL modem! Good job! What brand is it?
“It’s an Actiontec? Okay, well, do you see the Internet light on it? Is the light green, or is it red?”
And so on. Over and over, all day, five days a week. Srsly. Freaky thing is, I actually like this work. What’s wrong with me? (Wait. Don’t answer that.)
- tech support n. a service provided by a computer or technological company for aiding or advising customers of its product or service, usu. by telephone or email; see ha ha. ha.
In which my work schedule’s been changed back to M-F, so K and I only get one day off together.
I just lounged around at the house on Saturday and didn’t accomplish much of value except sweep the patio for Gramma. I played the Sapolil tasting room Saturday night with half of the band. It was fun. K bought us a bottle of the ’05 Syrah and WE DRANK IT. Yum.
Yesterday morning I woke up craving a bloody mary. K doesn’t like bloody marys and wasn’t exactly on board with the concept, but eventually he agreed to drive me somewhere in search of one. We hit the liquor store and then Loney’s for vodka, cranberry juice, bloody mary mix, celery, garlic stuffed olives, bleu cheese, spring onions…
Back at K’s we made drinks, then lounged in the shed for awhile.
We made lunch. After food and two rounds we decided we needed to go do something before we ended up wasting our day off together napping, and K made noises about hitting some little driving range or putting green or something golf-y, so we hopped in the car…
…and blew right past the golf place and ended up in the Blue mountains. We found a little place at the top of Mill Creek in the Umatilla Nat’l Forest (a little place that wasn’t bristling with KEEP OUT or PRIVATE PROPERTY signs), and we sat on rocks next to an ice-cold creek in the sun and meditated and looked at nature and breathed the pristine air for an hour. It was utterly perfect and gorgeous and restful and invigorating.
I love being back in this part of the country. Nature in the summer is supposed to be like this: clean and sweet, not muggy and infested with billions of insects.
On the drive back down, we listened to my (current) favorite album, Shri Durga, and felt all Sunday-mellow. (There’s something deeply surreal about listening to Eastern trance-remixes with sitars and ragas and shit while looking out the Buick’s window while Walla Walla rolls by.)
We hit the store again and dropped by my place. We watched the last hour and a half of the US Open with my Gramma, then snagged the blue dog and went back to K’s.
We made dinner together – chowder and insanity bread – and ate outside in the perfect weather. Later we walked through the aviary over at Pioneer Park and looked at ducks.
It was a mellow evening. We went to bed at a decent hour, I heard K’s Bloomsday Run story, was well and thoroughly ravished, and slept like a rock. This morning K got up, made coffee, packed me a lunch, put out fresh towels, and then came and woke me up. He made me breakfast and drove me to work.
I am so totally spoiled. It’s awesome.
In other news, my laptop won’t boot up because it’s not getting power and now I have a bunch of testing to do, and my dog had a seizure-like episode last night that scared the living shit out of me.
In which I’m totally thinking about you guys!
I’ve been watching the news and it looks like Iowa’s even damper than necessary.
One of my co-workers just sent me this link and said, “Looks like you got outta there just in time.”
I checked Fairfield weather and y’all don’t seem to be swimming yet, but my thoughts are with you anyway. Can I get all my babies in Iowa to check in and tell me you’re not drowning?!
VSCO
Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
