Stayin' Alive, Stayin' Alive

I was driving to work on Wednesday, listening to the new Imogene Heap CD I'd picked up at Barnes and Nobles over the weekend, when my passenger door suddenly and inexplicably opened itself.

Fortunately, I was barely going 30 at the time, as I was turning on the Stockdale Mill bridge not far from my home.

I pulled over and slammed the door, then got back in the driver's side and closed that door, only to witness the passenger side door opening itself again, due to the air pressure.

Nice.

Let it be said that I have never had a good car.

You know it, I mean, you've read these blogs. You know about the deer jumping on the hood of the Honda, and how that only improved matters, as the windshield leaked already and at least I got a good story out of it if there was an enormous dent in the hood.

But my Taurus is a good car. It has working heat, a passenger side mirror, a leak-proof windshield, and things that are Power (like the windows and locks). Also, I can start my car from my front door. That way I don't have to be cold.

So a dark chill came over me when my door would not latch shut (even after I tried locking it), and I resolved that I would spend crazy money in order to get it fixed, so I would not end up driving another Suck-Mobile.

I drove home at like 5 miles per hour, inching along because I couldn't even reach the passenger door in order to hold it closed.

I switched cars with Mom and urged her to tape the door shut for the time being, informing her that I'd transport the car to the Car Guy when I got home that evening.

She called me almost the second I arrived at work, telling me that the door had nothing wrong with it except cold. The latch had frozen open the last time I'd used that door, then it had frozen shut. When the frozen door let go, I noticed the frozen latch. Or so she said.

I think that it was Carma (get it? like karma except for it's a car thing, so Car-ma? Funny, huh? Like a homophone!).

Why aren't you laughing?

I think that all my suffering before this point in history has used up some of my lifetime allotment of car-tragedy. Meaning that the years I suffered and went car-less has impacted my current happiness, allowing me to live with relative ease, at least where cars are concerned.

Now, I must say that I am in no way tempting fate here. My car luck could run out at any moment; I don't trust it. I am only hypothesizing that the door thing ended up not that big of a deal because I have had only big deals up to this point, so I got a free pass on this one.

A free pass and a bottle of D-Icer.

This didn't even cross my mind until Friday at 5:05 p.m. as I left work for the day. I stopped at the light right next to CVS, across from where my favorite Wabash house is, and I have to mention, it is for sale. So if anyone wants to hire me for a ridiculously high salary, I'll just go out and make an offer at the real estate office now...

What, no one's hiring?

Fine, I get it.

Sitting there at the light, I looked into my rear-view window.

This is where I have to confess to something. I don't know if I'm the only one who does this, and I certainly hope not. So don't mock me, I'm being open and honest with you, which is good on many levels.

When I'm stopped at boring lights, and that light qualifies as being Boring, I usually stare at the person behind me in my rear view mirror to see if they're singing, yelling at their kids, chewing with their mouths open, or swearing under their breath. This is entertaining. Sometimes you see funny things. Sometimes you see people you know.

I was doing this at that light. Which was red, so you know. I can multi-task. I have peripheral vision. If I look at my rear view mirror, I still can see the light. So there.

While I was looking at the lady behind me in her mini-van, who was presumably on her way home from work too, I heard this weird crack, and thought, "Dude, what the heck?" It sounded like someone snapped thick plastic or some...thing.....

You guessed it.

No--I so did not hit anyone! What is your problem? You really think I am that bad of a driver?

I am not a bad driver. I am a good driver. Really.

Except for that whole sense of direction thing, but that has nothing to do with the driving, just the navigation. And I only went to Ohio that one time. But we did go to Michigan lots of times...

I really am sorry about that, Jennifer.

What had happened, as I witnessed in my rear view mirror, was this: A black SUV had 1. been speeding and 2. hadn't used its breaks resulting in 3. it slamming into mini-van lady and giving her what I can only imagine would be a killer case of whiplash.

At that moment I could only think of one thing: why didn't mini-van lady hit me?

But then I realized something else.

Do you know how in your driver's manual, the one you skimmed once or twice before your written driver's exam that had all the junk in it about getting your chauffeur's license and not a whole lot about you driving a regular car? Well, somewhere in that book it tells you to give like half a car-length between your car and the person in front of you when you stop. And this lady actually had.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone do that before in my life. That's insane! This lady had read and followed directions and, as a result, had not forced me to spend my hard-earned money (or her insurance company's check) on car repair! Christmas came early last Friday, people, which was really great because I was actually on my way to make a car payment anyway, and it would have been pretty depressing to get in a (minor) accident and then go pay for my brutalized car, even if it would have been repaired for me, quite nicely, by Mr. Other Guy's Insurance Company.

So I did my civic duty and called the cops on that stupid SUV driver, so that he didn't pull a thing like that old lady did with our friend Brandon. She put her car into reverse and slammed into him, then claimed he'd slammed into her. So, that was real nice, wasn't it? What ever happened with that, Jen?

I once again evaded almost-certain death (okay, minor injury to myself or personal property). So that's a good way to end the work day.

Meanwhile, I used all the will-power I have to keep myself from buying new yarn for the Uhura tank, something I will fail to do on Friday when Mom and I head up to the knit store in Fort Wayne.

Burnt Out

I think I have reached the point of winter when all of my energy is gone after one hour of being awake in the morning.

This is why bears hibernate.

The world is cold, the roads are icy, it's dark when I leave in the morning and when I drive home from work at night. And it just saps all the happy I have keeping myself moving.

To top it all off, the project I'm knitting right now (or my reworked version of this project, has so much ribbing that it could be followed up by an ice-pick lobotomy and I wouldn't care. I might even be relieved.

Thirteen inches of 1x1 ribbing. Jen, that's like on the cuff of your socks. Knit one, purl one, knit one, purl one, question the meaning of your life, knit one...

It's going to take forever to do the front. This better darn look good when it's finished, that's all I have to say. Just because I don't want a cropped sweater showing off what an inactive lifestyle I have doesn't mean I want to find out the last two weeks have gone by with me knitting only to tear out my work at the end. That would push me over the edge, it really would.

So I am dragging myself to work, dragging myself to knit night (which will get harder after the close the chunk of 16 that both Rachael and I use to get to Coffee D'Vine--I'm serious Rachael, from the spot where you dropped your glove to County Road 300-something will be closed indefinitely), dragging myself home from knit night, back to work, back home, to Walmart, to the bank, to the post office, trudging through snow as Darcy bounds around me, urging me to be happy and to play Stick-And-Frisbee or Double-Friz or Rock, although since the rock in question is now in the river, the latter would be a short game to say the least.

Life has lost its shiny glory, and I'll be waiting until summer for it to come back. Annually, I wait for the 80+ degree weather to recharge my Laura batteries and make me peppy again.

Meanwhile, I must try to not be a downer, something I have already failed in doing for this post. Sorry, folks.

But I decided to make life happier. Forcibly.

I am going to do the Knitting Olympics--or the Ravelympics as they are called this year. And I am going to conquer something. I am going to defeat the green Patons Grace.

The Story of the Paton's Grace

One spring morning, Julie (Mom) was skipping happily past the knit store--wait a second--past?

One spring morning, Julie ran into the yarn store as fast as her twisted-sock-feet could carry her, then paused. She saw some lovely cotton yarns, all spring colors and all coordinating so well! She had to have it. But what would she make with it?

Fortunately, Kathy showed Princess Julie some glorious pattern booklets filled with the finest patterns in the land, and soon Empress Supreme Julie was knitting away. Then she discovered that she didn't purchase enough yarn, so she sent out her minions to secure her more.

Then Her Amazing Glorious Julie Divine decided to throw the top and the yarn it came from into a basket and knit something else, because she had just that moment discovered her Hatred for Cotton.

Time passed, Laura began to wonder if her mother would ever finish the tank top, intended for Laura, which was why she cared so much.

More time passed, and The Shining Sparkling One gave Laura, the Pond Scum of Humanity, the green yarn to match her algae-self, and Laura croaked her thanks before hopping back to her swamp to catch flies.

One of those flies was metaphorical, and it was the pattern for the Beaded Cami, which was the last of several attempts at knitting the green Paton's Grace. It failed. Probably because Laura's self-measurements were exact, causing the Beadless-Beaded Cami to come out like a sausage casing, destined for Laura's Sausage-Self to be packed into. Shamed, she crawled under her lily-pad and frogged the whole thing, rewound the yarn into balls, and decided to forget it was there.

Another year passed.

And a little more time.

And then it was now.

And in case you didn't know, Laura is me.

And I have decided to not start any more sentences with "and" for a while. Or with "one"...

I am going to compete against the Paton's Grace and Cotton in general at the 2010 Knitting Olympics, now called the Ravelympics because we're all using Ravelry now instead of various blogs.

My pattern? Uhura found in the Summer 2009 issue of Twist Collective, an online knitting magazine.

I am determined. I will use that Patons, and if when I am done the finished product is as ugly as the sky is blue, I will send it packing, go online, order the exact yarn the sample is knit from on Twist Collective, and knit the whole thing again. It will turn out the happy raspberry color it is in the magazine, and I will have got rid of that Patons once and for all.

This is the time when I have to break and tell you all that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Patons Grace.

This particular batch of Patons Grace, however, is cursed by heavenly forces beyond our mortal control. The failures of projects made with this yarn are legendary.

Like, for example, the original intended project. Mom bought enough skeins for the boat-necked tank she was making me, then she bought two more. But when she got to about my waist, no matter how many hours of uninterrupted knitting she put in, the sweater didn't get any longer. Even when she left it and came back hours later to measure again. Even when she switched measuring tapes.

Me? I checked my gauge four times and had my mother measure me after I had measured myself twice. So unless the pattern for a 36" sweater was actually the pattern for a 30" sweater, something went terribly, inexplicably wrong on my end.

That yarn...is cursed.

But I will break that curse this winter. It will be how I defeat the Winter Blahs. Me and that yarn is going places.

Yes, I know how terrible the grammar in that last sentence is, I'm going for a whole movie thing. Try saying it out loud in kind of a mafia way.

See?

I hope this will beat back my desire to curl up in the fetal position and wait for summer to awaken me. Spring, you see, isn't good enough. If not, it will at least give me something to do when I'm avoiding watching the Olympics...

*Note added at 3:12 p.m.--I just had to go through every post that I've made on this blog and the one I write for the library to fight the evil Spam monster and its progeny. How many ads for naked Miley Cyrus and Cialis do we need? And do the people who want to see Miley also need the Cialis, or to put it in a slightly different way, if we denied these people drugs to combat their dysfunctions, would they still seek out pictures of under aged girls nude?

Human Idiocy in Government and Media, Or Why I Now Lack Faith in Humanity

This is a rant, so get ready. It's also political, and just so you know, if you argue against me, which is totally okay, you still will not convince me to shrug off my belief in helping my fellow man, hang the expense. You have been duly warned.

Do you ever just read something and get so ticked that you just have to tell someone else about it before you start ranting at the first random stranger who crosses your path?

Here's a little something from Yahoo News today regarding the comments of one Andre Bauer, who is one of those Republicans that make us flamin' liberals wonder if the other side has lost complete touch with reality. I know that isn't true, but this man has certainly lost contact with the world at large; he clearly only sees money:

At a town hall meeting Thursday, Bauer, who is running for governor in his own right now that Sanford is term-limited, said: "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed! You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that."

I cannot begin to explain how wrong he is, and I don't want to start going off about how evil this is.

Do you guys know Jonathan Swift? Dead guy, 1667-1745, wrote Gulliver's Travels? Well, take a peek.

Are you done? Did you check out that portrait? Hilarious, right? That hair? I'm betting fake, but still!

Okay, so satirist, right? Wrote a lot about stupid arguments that other people have, so he could laugh at them, which is the most fun kind of political writing ever. Or the most depressing. Either way, he wrote a little essay called A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick which pretty much stated that the Irish, being as a number of them were in pretty bad shape financially and in want of food, should just roast up their kids and eat them, since they had so many.

Needless to say, not serious.

Except he really did need to say that, because the number of people who took him seriously and were completely appalled was staggering.

He was making fun of all the people who railed against helping the poor. While advising on how to prepare children before eating them, and recommending eating them early while they were still plenty tender.

Go read it, really. Project Gutenberg, right here.

Amazing example of sustained irony in writing. Really, this guy was good. His idea? Evil. But he knew it. That's why we can still read this essay and get a laugh out of it. Because he's totally joking about the whole thing.

Unfortunately, the Idiot--sorry the Lt. Governor of South Carolina is not joking. He's being plenty serious.

That's tragic.

It shocks me that anyone can be left in the world and be clueless about poverty. You might not be poor, you might not know anyone who is or has been poor, but with television and the internet, I would think you'd have to figure it all out eventually.

Being poor is not something people do for fun, nor by choice.

Now, you're going to argue with me about drug use and alcohol, but that's not what I'm talking about. Plenty of rich people live dependant on drugs and alcohol and don't lose their lives of luxury. Supermodels, for example. Nothing keeps you skinny like coke... But even if I were talking drug abuse, the people who struggle with addiction have children too, and those kids are left with nothing.

In today's economic climate, that's not always the case. People are being fired left and right. Families with nice cars and fantastic houses end up with nothing but debt, and it would be immoral to expect them to magically conjure up an equal income to the one they had before. When I was in school, they told us that accountants were guaranteed work, no matter what--that if you got an accounting degree you could get a job instantly and anywhere with a salary as high as you could hope for in your first year of employment. But now accountants are being shown the door--not to mention all the teachers, factory workers, and lately even Walmart associates that are out of work.

We cannot blame the poor for the mistakes of the upper 1%, the hundred-odd people whose money determines policy for investment and the actions of corporations they lead and the political figures their donations support.

If you're reading this and getting angry at Laura the Stupid Clueless Liberal, good for you! You must have come from a family with some money, enough that you were comfortable and don't remember weeks with pancakes every night because that was so much cheaper than buying meat.

You don't remember your parents being happy that your family had even that, or the times you walked through the grocery store while your mother used a calculator to figure out what she could afford that week. Or the Christmases when your parents would take you aside and tell you this year wouldn't be as nice as other years, but that they loved you and that was what was important.

I wouldn't wish that on people, though I can see how understanding what it's like to struggle to make ends meet can make you a better human being.

So if you never went through that, I'm glad. I only ask that you consider that not everyone is that lucky. Which Lt. Governor Bauer certainly doesn't understand.

Is it wrong of me to want people who serve the public to understand the public? I don't think so. Somebody in South Carolina ought to boo that guy off the stage, because really! That is the kind of messed up idea that leads to only badness. The next thing he's going to say is that Haiti deserved their troubles because of devil worship or something. Keith Olbermann has something to say about that. Maybe he should get one of these. I know I want one...

There must be a circle of Hell for this...

Maybe this is an individual peculiarity of mine, but when I am doing a menial task or suffering in some way, I often consider what circle of Hell (Dante's Inferno) that my labors might be included in.

Today, I found myself spending over an hour tearing the first page from every magazine we have at the library from 2007, then loading boxes with the bulk of the magazines while reserving the barcodes on the torn out pages.

We were doing this because our server had actually honest-to-goodness exploded with a sound resembling the shot of a 22 rifle, according to Computer Man, who was here when the shot went off. The shot appeared to be some kind of computer-y fan/cooling unit, because I observed it lying on the counter this morning when I came to work.

I came to work through roads slicked with ice, too.

But before that, I decided I ought to have additional time to drive, so I used by hair dryer and pulled back my hair, then heated up my hair straightener to control the resulting pony-tail. I grasped the pony-tail firmly and clamped the straightener over my hair.

Except I didn't really clamp it over my hair. In fact, I clamped it over my thumb.

Did I mention I had it on its highest setting?

Now I fully understand what Dobby said in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, when he alluded to having to iron his fingers. Poor Dobby.

My thumb thus seared (medium-rare), I discovered myself to be in blinding pain. I rushed to the kitchen and grabbed the Magic Anesthetic Spray, which I used to dull my growing agony, then covered the area with a non-latex band-aid to ensure that my poor exposed neurons would have some relief. Don't tell me I'm not supposed to do that. I don't care. Try feeling my pain while handling books handled by dozens of other people and all of their filth and disease (even if that is only potential) and then you'll understand my need to cover my destroyed flesh. Poor Extra-Crispy Thumb.

And since our server was down, we had no circulation computers, no internet of any sort, no ability to look up the mystery books our patrons come asking about ("that one by that guy with the girl on the cover?" which turned out to be a James Patterson novel, the bikini one. It's a talent, figuring these things out).

We were, in other words, completely unable to offer any services to the public. And we'd all driving on icy roads to get there, just to do nothing worthwhile.

So we were ripping barcodes out of magazines, because we couldn't withdraw them one by one and we wanted to get rid of them once and for all, because the art department at the city school really wanted them (or so we thought).

While we (all five of us) were employed at tearing out pages, an additional person was pulling them down from shelves and slamming them onto cart after cart, which we took and replaced continuously.

In the process of doing this the following happened: My burn, having fully appeared on the surface of my skin, had revealed itself as having been larger than the bandage employed in covering it. This being the case, part of the burn was exposed (rather painfully) and it responded with sharp jabs of pain with each page I turned in each magazine.

Once I had become accustomed to the actions and their painful consequences, I turned yet another page, and gave myself a paper cut on my horrible burn!

Eyes tearing, I clenched my teeth together and gasped, "Thumb!"

My companions looked up at me, noted the pain I was in, and advised me, "Be careful with that burn, a paper cut would be awful."

They soon realized this was what I had been dealing with just then.

This circle of Hell would have had to be the one for vanity, pride, avarice. You can envision us, I hope, with all our vast technology struck down and leaving us more useless than we could have been fifty years ago when everything we had would have been paper-based, tearing pages from discarded magazines portraying beauty now without worth, worn out images of faces now re-formed, phoenix-like, from the metaphorical ashes of anesthetic and silicone, fat pulled from one part and injected into another in an endless cycle of self-preservation.

And how had I injured myself? In an attempt at beautifying myself, harnessing wind and fire to tame my hair, damaged again and again by the daily ritual of blow-drying and straightening.

Certainly, I have learned today's lesson well:

Watch where you put your hands while you use your hair straightener.



What? Did you think I would stop using it?

Why the publishing industry is making me angry, of late, or a long list of complaints

I buy books a lot. Really a lot, as it is not only a hobby but an occupation.

Lately I have become angry, and since it is relatively effortless to move me into a rant of any sort, here we go...

1. Copyright law is annoying, though necessary, but international copyright law is enough to make one scream.

When I went to England, I noticed tons of amazing books that we hadn't had at the bookstores I'd visited while prepping for the trip. I purchased tons of these books and took them home. Months (maybe longer) passed before I found the same books in the states. This brought me humor, but I didn't think much of it. But this creates a problem.

You see, in many cases, if a publisher from another country, let's say Britain, releases a title, it comes out in that country first. Then, if the book does well, editors scour it, remove the "British" lingo ("tyre" becomes "tire", for example), and they slap a new cover on it and send it to the states.

Setting aside the fact that they have effectively dumbed down a book that readers would most likely have had no difficulty understanding, thereby changing the author's original text (meaning that you haven't really read Harry Potter, even if you think you have), this slows down the process of sending a book to us for our enjoyment and makes us wait for the book to be shockingly successful in other markets first.

I can deal with all of this.

But here's the thing...

When a book gets published in the states, our publishing industry prints off tons of copies and markets the heck out of them. In addition, booksellers like Amazon or Barnes and Nobles pop that item up first when you search for the title online, because they assume that you're looking for the US title, in American English.

We'll pretend I don't feel patronized by that, and assume that others without the family background I have, might have trouble with British slang.

That being said, there is another bigger problem this produces, because other countries have a publishing industry too, and they don't make as much money if our publishing industry sells editions of books published originally in their homeland to them, thereby making money off of their readers instead of the reverse. Maybe I could make that sentence sound better...

Say I make an apple pie, and it's amazing. It's so good, in fact, that my friend Bob from India (real guy, name changed) decides he wants to have that pie in his country, but it won't fly well, as its pastry is delicate. So I give Bob the recipe so he can make it in India, and he's all happy.

Meanwhile, I am selling that pie by the slice in my hometown, making a killing in the pie market that will allow me to retire early and knit all day long while I watch reruns of The X-Files and gripe about how every show Joss Whedon puts on television gets cancelled just as it starts to be amazing.

But Bob has since gone back to India and started selling his version of my pie too, and he's set up a little factory and the workers are churning out pie faster than my workers are churning out pie because his workers aren't used to having apple pie this good in India, due to the old adage "as American as apple pie." So people start getting really excited about it and they set up a website and start selling Bob's version of my pie all over the world--which is amazing--so Bob becomes a kagillionare and uses the funds to do amazing things for his people in India, like he is already doing in real life because he is such an amazing person. Plus his kids are cute.

The act, though, of putting the pie out to the international community has created an imaginary problem for the imaginary me with her imaginary life of sitting in front of her television with her knitting. This me with the fake-but-perfect life must now deal with her own pie competing with her pie business, and the fact that the pie is so internationally famous now due to some other person's use of the pie comes back around and destroys my pie business, leaving me with only the masses of yarn I have purchased as a memory of those perfect years of knitting round-the-clock.

The initial product competes with the international version of the product, and in publishing, the U.S. version often wins out, crushing the international competition in an evil way that comes from the sheer size of our publishing houses and the money they have invested in snapping up rights to documents and all that.

I don't know how bad this really is, because I pay so little attention to the publishing industry at large. I only know that Australia wasn't happy about it. So if an Australian author puts out a book that we want to publish for American audiences, we have to wait for a set period of time before we can make that American version available for Australian audiences.

And so I have to wait super-long to get a copy of Melina Marchetta's new book, The Piper's Son. I am blaming the international publishing industry for this.

I get why, really I do, but I am still depressed. And now I want pie.

2. And as if I didn't have to wait long enough, where have all the paperbacks gone?

It's expensive to publish a book, because of all the work of the initial investment. You've got to find the writer, get the editing and spiffing-up of the text done, pay the writer and the editors, design a cover, the text, the layout, pay all of those people, and print the books to sell them.

The huge investment, though, is all at once. You tunnel a large quantity of money into getting one book, but printing them isn't all that pricey, especially if you're doing it in China, which you are (because John Green told me so). All the books you print after the first one just keep getting cheaper.

Publishers can make more money of hardcover books, and they like making money (so do I, for that matter). So they keep the book in hardcover for as long as possible, then make it snazzy again in paperback (preferably trade paperback and not mass market).

Then they make more money. And more. If there's going to be a movie, they make even more.

But poor Laura is stuck waiting two years for her paperback edition of Pies of India, the imaginary book she made up just now because she wants pie and figures other people will too, contributing to the popularity of the imaginary book.

I think e-books and the new e-book reader boom will have some impact on all of this, but I could be wrong.

3. Some people are being snobby, and not putting out their books on e-reader.

Let me just say, you will just make more money doing this right away, because people like me who wait until a book is in paperback (for the most part) will snap up your book on its day of release in order to be certain of reading it when they want to read it. Which I do. Want to read it, that is.

Send me The Piper's Son!

4. I don't know anyone in Australia.

That's a real problem, and pretty much the root of all my complaints thus far. I could be reading that book come March if only I knew some random Australian person who would send me the book and some of those little biscuits I love so much. It would also be cheaper, I'd imagine, than trying to get it shipped myself. Especially if they wanted American things I could send them, like Oreos with double the filling.

Granted, my not knowing any Australians is really kind of my own fault, living as I do so far away from Australia and not having gone out of my way to find and meet Australians traveling in the U.S. I chose not to be a stalker. That was a good move, I think, on my part. But I have no book to show for it.

Why do I care so much? I imagine that you would ask me this, because I imagine that you will care about the price of pies in Pathanamthitta*. The reason is this: I love Melina Marchetta's books. She is amazing, a genius, and I cry every time I read Jellicoe Road, no matter how many times I read it. It's just that good.

I love her books so much that the instant I could pre-order Finnikin of the Rock, I did it. For me, and for the library collection, because I didn't want to have to share my copy of the book with other people and their grubby (they could be grubby) hands. I also wanted--want--to be able to carry it around with me and hold it, because I am just that excited about it. Really.

Why doesn't Penguin Australia want me to have The Piper's Son? Don't they like me?


*Pathanamthitta is a real-live city in real-live India, just like Bob is a real-live person (name changed) who may well make pies from time to time, in between his missionary work.

What happened to the five stitches...

Because this is my life, and nothing ever goes as one might expect, more than mere annoyance sprang from the situation with the five rogue stitches.

Sure, I did get the stitches under control, but that didn't mean my problem was solved at all. No, in fact, it just cemented the stress that was to come.

There are days when I wish I had real internet (it's on it's way) so that I could capture things on film (pixel?) so that all of you could see what I looked at last night, on the floor of my room...

To begin this tale, we must establish that I was brought coffee, a mocha, from a nearby coffee shop. This coffee was given to me during my last hour at work, and it contained extra shot(s) of expresso, something that my friends will tell you is a bad, bad idea.

You see, there's something called "stream of consciousness" that authors have used in the past, a mode of storytelling that is actually pretty similar to how I write these blogs, except the writers who use stream of consciousness aren't as focused as I am.

Usually.

But when I have too much caffiene, something happens to my brain. It starts to resemble the writings of Virginia Wolfe or even Jack Kerouac, in that there is no punctuation (in spoken language punctuation is implied by pauses or breaks in thought) or breathing or continuity of thought...

In fact, I end up interrupting myself with a new thought, because the new thought--oh wait not that one this one--is much more interesting than the one at the beginning.

So, fueled by coffee, I decided to fix the collar on my new vest, which was floppy. Also kind of too big.

This thought ended with me, a pair of sharp, sharp scissors, and my sweater.

Yes, I hacked a chunk out of that collar so fast, I didn't even fully have time to grasp the ramafications of such an action on, say, the seam that connected my collar to the sweater at large.

Envision me, kind readers, sitting on the floor of my room, surrounded by crinkly ramen noodle shaped bits of brown wool with the broken body of my sweater-collar ravaged on the ground before me. Oh, and I was watching the last episodes of Buffy, season seven.

So, the First was all being the source of all evil, and I was kicking sweater (clears throat).

No, it wasn't a tragedy, I did succeed in fixing the collar. I ripped a good chunk out of each side, took out the seam, then sewed it all back up so that the floppy went away and it looked right. And now I'm wearing it. And it looks good.

Someday, when I get fast internet...I'll show you how pretty it is. But those of you coming to Coffee D'Vine tonight won't have to wait!

Windows, A Love Story

Saturday

We have three computers at the circulation desk. Three. Two are for circulation. One is for us. It is our happy, lovely computer that we use to do such vital things as: Google-ing the numbers on the bottom of plastic products to see if they can be recycled, checking Facebook, watching the YouTube video of a new song, checking Ravelry, writing brochures for upcoming events, checking e-mail, drafting press releases, checking Facebook, checking Ravelry again, checking Facebook again, checking the Old Navy coupon page, and once again checking Facebook. This computer is a vital part of our lives.

But the computer started linking us to pages we didn't really want to see, like advertisements and what I can only imagine was pornography, but WebMarshall kindly blocked that for me, saving me from almost certain blindness.

And I knew that something had gone terribly wrong.

I ran scan after scan, update after update, to no avail.

Then our Computer Man came, and he did the same thing I had done a dozen times, only this time it worked for some reason, and we expelled the demon living in the PC tower. We were saved.

The following day, I went to lunch. When I came back, the computer had locked itself. Except, it wouldn't unlock. In fact, it wouldn't do anything. It would turn itself on, get to the happy Windows logo, the little green line would load all the way, then it would tell me that it had unexpectedly stop, and would I like to start up normally, or in safe mode?

None of those options worked.

I went home.

The weekend arrived (that's now). Computer Man came again on Friday, he left things for me to set up today (Saturday). You won't be reading this on Saturday.

He said to install service pack three. Service pack three said to install service pack one. Service pack one no longer exists.

Once this was discovered, Computer Man sent me service pack two via the glory of remote assitance. Only when I waited the requisite two hours for it to download (or for it to feel comfortable in its new surroundings?), I discovered that the only response to clicking the service pack two was for it to claim boldly, "Access Denied!" even though I was logged onto our network as Puppetmaster Supreme.

This was bad news.

I called Computer Man. Nothing.

Then our computer announced boldly that the incomplete download may have "damaged Windows" and that I should really do something about that. I turned off the monitor. Now I am going home...

Monday

I let Computer Man in, following a second, also unsuccessful, attempt at downloading the appropriate file. This attempt led to the compter turning itself off when I attempted to link up with the server. Apparently, the two entities don't like each other at all, and refuse to communicate.

Three hours passed.

Now I am typing the remainder of this blog on the now-working computer. What did Computer Man do?

Your guess is as good as mine.

For all I can tell, he did exactly what I'd tried to do, only because he was doing it, it worked. All the power to him.

While he was here, he also helped me get over my disgust blended with terror at the man on the cover of the 2010 Ripley's Believe it or Not book, the man who had done himself up as a stegasaurus/iguana man. Turns out he did it with make-up, rather than grafting spikes to his skull like the man I saw on daytime television back when I was unemployed during the summer when still in high school. I think he was on Maury...

When Windows had finally been re-installed (Where did it go? What took it from us?), Computer Man left.

At this point, I ran anti-virus and anti-malware.

Yes, there was some malware action. The same malware action there had been, in fact, prior to the attempts at repair and the amazing disappearing Windows.

I removed it.

Then I went home.

Tuesday

Now every single solitary time I open Internet Explorer, it tells me that a program has attempted to change my default search provider from Bing to something Other, and that Internet Explorer has changed the default search provider back to Bing.

The program that's trying to change search providers? Internet Explorer. Why? Because Bing is so totally not by default search provider. I don't know where it got that idea...just because I have Internet Explorer doesn't mean I like it. And why would I trust Bing to tell me what it thinks I want to search for? Maybe I don't want it to decide what I'm looking for. How about that?

Meanwhile, I have also run Windows Update, because it seemed prudent. Who even knows. I give up. Computer Man is coming back Thursday, he can do what he wants with the succession of windows popping up to tell me what's wrong with my default search provider. I give up. Stupid computer. Stupid failure of an antivirus, stupid Windows, and Stupid, STUPID Microsoft.