Wrap-Up

Quote Du Jour:
Peter: Let me ask you something. When you come in on Monday, and you’re not feelin’ real well, does anyone ever say to you, ‘Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays’?
Lawrence: No. No, man. S***, no, man. I believe you’d get you’re ass kicked sayin’ something like that, man.
–Office Space

Well, it certainly feels like Monday. Thank goodness it’s a short week.

This was a wasted weekend. Really. We didn’t do anything of note. I can barely recall Saturday. Sunday I went to visit with some of the ladies from my chapter to talk about books, websites, writing, and anything else that came up. I did finally get the new website for michellemiles.net up and running. Now I just need to tweak it.

Yesterday completely frustrated me. Sometimes, computers just make me want to put my fist through the monitor.

I was going to upgrade Office from 2000 to XP. A simple process, you’d think. But OH HO HO, nothing is ever simple when it comes to Microsoft, is it?

Here I was thinking I’ll just upgrade this real quick and then I can write for about an hour or so before we leave to go watch fireworks.

WRONG.

So I upgrade Office. It installs just fine. I open Word. And I get an error. Something about a compile error relating to Adobe. Weird. I uninstall and reinstall. Same thing. Now I’m annoyed. I uninstall everything Adobe related from Acrobat to Photoshop. I uninstall Office and reinstall. SAME ERROR. Any my ruler in Word is doing this funky thing – it looks like the numbers are in Pica for some WEIRD reason. But yet when I got to change it, it tells me it’s really in inches. Even when I change it from inches to pica to centimeters to whatever, nothing changes. Since we have XP, I log into another account on the machine and open Word. The ruler is fine, but I’m getting the weird error message.

Now I’m frustrated and cussing the computer.

As a last ditch effort before putting my foot in the computer, I run a search for the exact phrase on the Internet. It comes up through Microsoft’s online help. It tells me that I need to run a search for specific files, put them in the trash can, and then restart the computer. Surprisingly, that works. But my ruler is still fracked up. And now I have to reinstall about four different programs to get everything back the way it was.

I wasted nearly TWO HOURS OF MY LIFE on this. Two hours of precious writing time. Two hours that I’ll NEVER get back. Argh.

And the ruler is still messed up. It’s fine on other logins on the machine, but looks bizarro on mine. I don’t know why. I can’t figure it out. It’s driving me CRAZY. So I guess I can either (a) uninstall and reinstall the program (insert very loud scream here) or (b) turn off the damn ruler.

I’ll probably just turn off the ruler, even though I LIKE having the ruler. I’m a creature of habit. I want things EXACTLY the same on every computer I own. Even the one at work. I set up my desktop the same at home and work. I know. I’m anal. What can I say?

Anyhoo… went to see fireworks last night. One of the local cities has a really nice display. The local police force gives out those glow sticks free to all the kids. We ended up with four. Don’t ask me how.

The fireworks didn’t get started until about 9:45 and it was a good thirty minute display. Of course, by the time we fought the traffic home, it was nearly 11. And because I had to spray down the kiddo with Off, I had to run him through the bath. By the time he went to sleep it was nearly midnight. And me too. I finally dozed off about then.

Then at 3 am, some jackass set off fireworks behind our house. Woke us up. Here comes my kid climbing in bed with me. When it was finally over, I put him back in bed. He went right to sleep and I climbed back into bed. Needless to say when the alarm when off at 6 am, I did NOT want to get up.

There were a lot of rude-ass people on the road this morning, too. I was trying to get on the freeway and some loser wouldn’t let me on. I had plenty of room to blend in just fine at 65 mph, but this a-hole sped up. And since he was in a big truck, I figured I’d let him win. So when I got in behind him, I smiled and waved and then politely called him a bad word.

I’m just cranky. I don’t want to be here and I certainly don’t want to work. The only thing I’m happy about at the moment is that I have a very large cup of coffee. Thank goodness for that.