Everyday Stupidities

Even pharaohs turn to sand like a drop in the ocean.

[Subject line from a Styx song.] Greetings, blog fans. Things took a turn for the stupid -- neither of my plans worked out -- and as you could have predicted, I'm gonna tell you all about it. But first, something that did go mostly right: I was driving down Yakima Avenue a few days ago and this house near a corner (which may have been a business at one time, and has icicle lights up year 'round) had put a bunch of stuff on the curb, including a complete computer system. I parked in the lot next door and grabbed the computer. Upon checking it out and giving it a good cleaning (dust and maybe a little smoking had grubbed things up in there) I found out it was a Pentium 166 with 128 megs of RAM and a 2.3 gig hard drive. And it worked; it booted into Windows 95 and ran nicely. So I decided this would be a suitable replacement for my wife's computer, which predates this machine. My method of system replacement is to take the hard drives and cards out of the old machine and put them into the new one, so there's less work to transition and no need to reinstall Windows 98 or any applications. (Try doing THAT with XP or Vista!) Most everything went smoothly. There were only two hitches: first, that I couldn't get a floppy drive to be recognised, and I tried a couple drives and cables so I think it's an issue with the motherboard (and could be why the machine was set aside at some point); second, that despite the fact that the old setup had recognised the network card fine and could get online, the new setup didn't want to accept that the drivers already installed or that I was reinstalling were the right ones. The fixes were more or less "okay, have it your way" moves: following Macintosh's lead I took out the CDROM and replaced it with a CD burner, so now there is a way to get data off the computer (and my bride has okayed getting a USB card so that memory sticks will also be an option); the network card was produced by HP with parts by Accton and I'd been using Accton's drivers, so I picked up HP's drivers and they were accepted (though they were the *exact same drivers*, just named slightly different on some files). So my wife got a free upgrade, and I had fun doing it for a majority of Wednesday!

Saturday in Hillsboro: I left the house at noon and arrived at the party at 2:30 p.m. Three people that I've gone to these events with before who are from Portland were in attendance. We ate barbecued burgers. Hmm, and an hour later 3p0ch and his girlfriend left. And an hour after that, 0bie99 left. Five minutes after that (5:30 p.m.) I headed out, to the host's chagrin. PolarCoyote and his crew departed about an hour later, and that extra time was also to the host's chagrin because he brought his two little girls who (being typical kids) were in and out constantly, looking for something to do. [She doesn't like kids, though since she was pregnant and miscarried recently one has to wonder if her mind would have changed had things gone differently.] I just didn't feel like staying once there, and I was the only one who didn't live within a half-hour drive so would have been the only guest... and we weren't really clicking so neither of us would have been happy had I stayed. I joked to her the next day at work [grr!] that she could have flirted a little to encourage me to stick around and make me feel welcome, but she said she'd never demean herself that way. Ahem. Demean? If that's what she thought of me, I made the right choice in leaving. Told you we didn't click.

Tuesday in Ellensburg Spanaway: Later, after that demeaning conversation, I checked my email and the following note was in there from Bertie...
Okay, a snag. [My sister] Alex and I were supposed to be moved into Grandma Dona's home last week, but a flooded basement slowed us down. Our dad tried to use a shop-vac to get out most of the water and a commercial fan to dry it as much as possible before hauling it out. So that took a couple of days. Then Alex goes in to cut it out but discovers that our Uncle Chris, who had installed the carpet to begin with, had glued the padding to the original floor. Twit. Well, of course that made it more difficult, along with the fact that within those couple of days mold had started. With that mold came along a nice big asthmatic attack for Aunty Alex. She had already began the week with a stressful hearing at the courthouse to keep the restraining order against her loser ex-boyfriend. So let's just say this has not been a productive week. We are now on a deadline because we need to be out of this house that Alex is renting by the end of next week. So meeting next week is not going to work. How about the first week of August? Let me know.
Life happens when we have other plans, ugh... I can wait. August is going to be odd for scheduling for me due to a couple people taking vacation, so I sent her a list of what days I'm available (at that writing) for the first couple weeks of the month but have not yet heard back from her. That's a pet peeve of mine, when people ask a pressing question in email or you're trying to make plans with them, and they don't respond so expediently. (I inherited that from my mother; on a couple occasions she asked "I need the information immediately!" questions in email, I answered within a couple hours, then the next day she calls to find out the answer because she hadn't bothered checking her email.)

The stupidity of today, Thursday, didn't happen: I was awaken at 8:30 a.m. by someone at work, telling me that one of the guys got sick and went home, so they might be calling me in to work. Might. Now, the person who got sick is an 8am-6pm trainee... the usual two people who are there from morning until 4pm were there, the usual two people who are there from 2pm to night were there, and this guy being a trainee has no actual responsibilities except to learn. Struck me as rather pointless/extrenious of them to consider bringing me in. But they didn't; it's nearly 7 p.m. right now. Happy, happy... and here I sit. Shifting gears before shutting this thing off: The August update to Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul has been posted so go check it out.