In Which I Am Afraid of my Own Teeth

If you don't follow me on Twitter, you miss things. I'm sorry, but it's true. Here is a taste:

Fancy Phone Is Fancy

I can blog from my phone now. And I am doing that. The phone blogging, it is HAPPENING. 

Also, I am watching The Avengers. This is called multitasking.

There is still no car news. I do not imagine that there will be any car news for at least the next few weeks. This week, Dad comes home from Guatemala, if he even made it there in the first place...we have heard nothing from him at all since he arrived at the airport. He and Mom then leave almost immediately for one of the Carolinas. I keep forgetting which one. What that means is that there will be no car shopping during that time, as I decided after the last go of it that Dad's help would be of use.

I'm not upset about it. This gives me time to de-stress, get over the shock of the accident, and get started working on some of the big, exciting things I've got going on at work. By the time Dad is home, I may even be looking forward to finding a car.

Meanwhile, mobile blogging! Let me know what this looks like on a real computer screen, because I have my doubts.

Pass the Tissues: In Which I Feel Sorry for Myself and Have a Weep

Note: In this post, I am going to gripe a bit. A lot. If you don't want to read about a grown woman crying about cars and money, this isn't the post to read. Go read the post about my first attempt at the 30 Day Shred. It's actually funny. This post isn't. Unless you like laughing at me when I cry. Then I guess it is...

If you don't want to read about me crying, you can read this friendly summary about my car hunt!

Laura's Car Hunt

Today I test-drove a pretty car that worked. It was nice. It was too nice. It was Expensive.

I am too po for that car. I am so po, I cannot afford the last two letters of "poor." I cannot buy Pretty Car, which was a Ford Fusion. So, I am asking Car Guy to look for an older car that is less equipped than Pretty Car, but still the same make and model. I am hoping for the best.

And if you keep reading, you'll see what hoping for the best looks like, inside my fatalistic brain:

Goodbye Little Green Ford...

Yes, the title of this blog post should be sung a la Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road." I have no regrets.

To celebrate Father's Day properly, I took Dad out in my car and we crashed. Then I stress-cried for two hours, because that's how I solve problems, apparently. The next day, I went to visit my car, and it looked like this:

Yep.

Dad and I are unharmed, as are the people in the other car, so there's that. But fixing the little green Ford would cost far more than the car is worth...so yeah.

Let's have a moment of feeling sad for my little friend with wheels on.

...

....

...

Okay then. Dad is in Guatemala now, building things for people. I would not trust him if he were left with a hammer and nails unsupervised, even if he were building a board with nails sticking out of it and not someone's roof or house, but there you go.

He left me his car, which used to be my grandpa's car. And as I drove to work yesterday (on fumes, because he'd departed for Guatemala with no gas in his car whatsoever), I realized that I was braking Fred-Flinstone-Style, with my foot dragging on the ground underneath the car. Or at least, that's what it felt like.

"There are no brakes in this car," I thought. "It is just like my car accident, only worse because now I know what it is like to slam into something made of pain."

Luckily, the problem was low brake fluid and was quickly solved. BUT STILL.

Dad had avenged himself by staging an Agatha-Christie-esque murder plot. He is out of the country, which is the PERFECT ALIBI. Also, does Guatemala extradite? 

Well, I thwarted his plan. Next step: Finding a new(ish) car. A car that is new to me. A car that doesn't suck. This could take years. 

And when Dad gets back home, I'll have to be extra vigilant to make sure I'm not murdered while I hunt for a car. 

Father's Day

It's Father's Day, so it's time for me to tell my father how awesome he is and how lucky I am to have him as my dad.

Once, at the condo where Dad's parents live, we were out behind the house at the big pond that was the water feature the condo-owners all paid tons of money to look at out their back windows. Fish lived inside the pond, so I had taken my little cousins outside (they were visiting from Colorado), so we could all look at the fishes.

The fish ate the bread we brought, then my aunt came outside with my dad and my grandparents, and one thing led to another, and Dad picked me up and threw me into the pond with all the fish. The fish then swam all around me and nibbled at my arms and legs and it became evident to me that, given the sheer number of fish in the pond, I was sitting in a soup made of their poos, rather than water.

Worse, because the whole family was going out to eat (which was why Aunt Susie, Dad, Grandpa and Grandma all came outside in the first place--to tell us it was time to leave), Dad chucking me in the water forced everyone to wait for their food while I took a shower to remove the mud (fish poo), then because we were an hour and a half from home, I had to wear my grandmother's clothing to dinner out. And since I was maybe 12, I was mortified.

I even had to borrow shoes.

And when I was little, when Dad woke me up in the morning, he used cubes of ice. Or he grabbed the headboard and footboard of my bed and shook the bed violently, screaming "EARTHQUAKE" at the top of his lungs. This occurred often enough that when we had an actual earthquake, I woke up just enough to say, "Don't be a jerk," and then went back to sleep.

Because Dad used to slam his face against my window-screen every time he went for a walk in order to terrify me, the sound of someone breaking into my home through a window to rob and murder me will never frighten me or wake me up if I am sleeping. So that's convenient.

I bet other people's dads don't give them all these great stories they can tell on their blogs. I bet other people had boring dads who made them eat their peas and never toppled their chair over at the dinner table because they were leaning back on two legs. My dad is awesome. And I am lucky to have him.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.

I Made My NAME!

Look at this. Seriously. I made this happen. It was magic.

That's right. I made my signature a picture. Now if you don't mind, I'm off to show everyone I've ever met how clever I am, even though Candie Cooper taught me how to do this and I didn't figure it out on my own at all, even a little bit.

Isn't it nice that I can be entertained by such small things? I think so.

The End of an Era

It finally happened a few weeks ago. The beginning middle end of the end.

When I had just finished college, and I realized that I no longer had the ability to use internet with a connection that didn't involve dial-up, I decided the time had come for me to finally break down and buy a laptop. I had a bit of money, so I went to a store and picked out a mid-range HP laptop with a sizable hard drive, 4GB RAM, and a CD/DVD burner. To make matters even better, it had a spot for you to plug an SD card RIGHT INTO THE COMPUTER. This was living it up, and I was a very happy girl. I took the laptop home and promptly wrote a very crappy novel on it during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

That was nearly seven years ago.

My new laptop was running Windows Vista, though, so there were some problems. Windows Update was a nightmare, there were warnings every 30 seconds asking me If I Really Wanted to Open Internet Explorer, Was I Sure, and Just In Case, Did I Want to Change My Mind Before It Was Too Late? I found a fantastic tutorial, learned Windows Vista inside and out, turned off all those ruddy warnings, and made Vista run more like XP, which was a very functional form of Windows that I am quite fond of.

Years passed. My laptop was lovely.

Around Year 3, the cooling system of my laptop wasn't working all too well...and the battery wasn't holding a charge because the fan had to run so very hard to keep the whole computer from overheating and shutting off.

After a bit, someone on Twitter clued me in, and I saved myself a good chunk of money by not buying a cooling dealie for the laptop. Instead, I used a cooling rack from the kitchen. It worked brilliantly.

I was still using it ages later, when the inevitable happened. After five years, the laptop finally came into contact with the ground.

I didn't drop it. But I had sat down on the bed, where the laptop was sitting (on the cooling rack), and the shift in weight caused the cooling rack to tilt, and the laptop dropped off the bed and onto the floor.

That was when the DVD drive stopped working.

Also, there was an incident with buttermilk that made my speakers a bit less than ideal.

And the hard drive was full, so I'd bought an external hard drive for my photos and documents. And then I bought another for my iTunes library.

And even still, in the last two years, there developed a bit of a lag with the keyboard. I'd type a sentence, and then another sentence, and then the rest of the paragraph, and when I'd moved on to the next paragraph, the first few words would finally appear on the screen, quickly followed by the rest of the paragraph. It was only about a 30 second delay. Not that big of a deal, really.

But finally, a few weeks ago, it got much worse.

See, I had to keep the laptop plugged in, because the battery would die if I didn't, as the fan had to run as hard as possible just to keep the whole thing running. And for some reason, the plug wasn't working so well...

I mean, the cord worked. The cord was fine. It was the part of the laptop, the port in the side where the plug went in. For whatever reason, plugging in the cord, it didn't make a difference. The little blue ring around the port, it didn't light up so well anymore. I would have to turn the cord around inside the port to make the blue ring light up.

A week passed, and it wasn't just something I could solve with a little wiggle of the cable. Nope.

By last week, I had to spend 15 to 20 minutes messing with the cable to get it to connect and stay connected. And I knew the time had come.

So yesterday, I bought a new laptop. It works. I'm utterly shocked. I have no idea what to do with a working laptop. It's another HP. I read all sorts of reviews online, and this one was well liked by all. It has a massive hard drive, 6GB RAM (that can be expanded to 8GB), and it is quite an improvement. It hasn't died once, words appear as I type them, and even though I haven't tried it yet, there's a DVD drive over on the side here that seems willing to accept a DVD and maybe even play it.

I don't even know how to deal with this.