christmas

i hope everyone had a good christmas. scott, my sister and i went over to my mom's place to strap on the feedbag and unwrap our goodies. we had german fare for dinner, which included saurbraten, potato dumplings, applesauce, greenbeens with spaezle (i think) and upside down german chocolate cake and apple streudel for dessert.

but enough about food. here's what i got under the tree:
simpsons, season 9.
futurama, season 3 & 4.
cuisinart chopper.
simpsons cuckoo clock.
$20 joann gift card (thanks, scott, for risking your manhood by going into the superstore unaccompanied).
burt's bees gift set.
blueberry muffin/pancake/syrup set, with blueberry-covered chocolates.
wheatbran soap.
$15 from my grandma.
waterproof boots.
lounge pajamas (gray velour, baby).
pink cubs hat.
good night, gorilla.
i stink.
sheets
fleece pullover from scott's parents.
$300 amazon gift card from my lovely sister.

thank you, everyone. it was a hoot. and i get an extra day off, thanks to a floating holiday i didn't know about. woo-hoo!

sadie, take 2

ok, so i said that i would update my blog so annette could see how cute her kitty is from southern france, but i totally dropped the ball on that one. not that i didn't take pictures, i just found it daunting to send the pics to my email account and to post about it. but i'm all caught up now... now that annette is coming back tomorrow. d'oh!

now i know why they never called

ok, so i saw this on craigslist. usually the stuff there is stupid and whiney. but this is just brilliant.

Knock knock

Oh hi, how's it going? It's me! Every girl ever. I'm really looking forward to this date. I'm not nearly as attractive as you remember me being because when we met the bar was dark and you were drunk. Come on in.

Let's start off with the unavoidable tour of my incredibly typical post-college-girl apartment. You'll notice that I went ahead and purchased everything that Ikea and Pier 1 have ever produced. There's my decorative birdcage over there even though I don't have a bird, and there's my gay wicker basket with bamboo poles in it. I don't know what the hell that's thing's all about, but I bought it. Hey check it out, I have more candles in here than a Roman Catholic Church. Doesn't it smell like Hazelnut!? If I were to light all of my candles at once you could see my apartment from space! I fucking love candles!

Come on into the living room. Oh, I see you met my cat there. That's "Freddy Paws Jr." Why don't you pet him and act like you like cats even though you hate cats? There you go. Oh, he took a little swing at your eye there huh? Yeah, he'll do that. Hey, let's check out the kitchen.

Hey look at my refrigerator. There are pictures all over it! Look at all these pictures of me and my equally vacuous friends from college! We were so crazy! You can tell we're really good friends because our faces are all pressed up against each other like that. And check it out, we're holding up alcoholic beverages to the camera in every single picture. That's to prove that we were partying. College was so fun! But of course I don't talk to any of these girls anymore because now they're all bitches. Let's go back into the hallway!

Hey, before we leave I'm going to go in the bathroom for ten minutes for some mysterious reason. Why don't you sit awkwardly in my big, stupid, round papizan chair over there while you wait for me. It's like you're sitting in a hug! Be right back...Sorry that took a half an hour, I don't know what the hell I was doing in there. Let's go!

Wow! Thanks for opening my car door for me! I'm totally going to blow that meaningless gesture out of proportion and delude myself into thinking that you're a really good guy because that's what I want to believe.

Well, here we are at the restaurant. No thanks waiter, I don't need to see a menu, just bring me some expensive things. Hey I know, while we wait, I'll tell you all about my unspeakably boring job. I hate my boss. He's a jerk! I might get another job. Maybe something in pharmaceutical sales.

Now let's talk about my family. I love my family. I want you to love my family. I want my family to love you. I want you to make love to my family! I want you to go golfing with my semi-retarded brother Travis. That would be so God damned cute! Wow! I can't believe I ordered all this food! I have no intention of eating any of it. No thanks waiter, we don't need a box. Just throw it out. Hey, I've got an idea, let's go to a bar and have an after dinner drink! It'll be great, it will be just like how we're drinking here, only it will be louder and we'll have to stand up. Come on! See, isn't this better? Oh hey, what a coincidence. Look over there! It's a group of my friends that I knew was going to be here. Let's go over there so that they can judge you!

Hey, I have to go to the bathroom for a half an hour again for some reason. You can stay here and talk to my unbelievably hideous friend Christine! Christine's so ugly she scares kids! Talk to her! She has a job and a family that she wants to talk to you about too. Be right back.

I'm back! Sorry I was gone for three hours, there was a line. I want to go home now.

Well here we are at my door again. This was really fun for me and not you. You should pretend like we're going to do it again sometime! Maybe I'll see you at Target a few months from now and we can avoid eye contact because you never called me. Here, have this awkward goodnight kiss that's as empty as my soul. Good night!

cross stitch this

so, i've been cross stitching. it takes up time and i can do it in front of the tv. i also try not to tell a lot of people of my "old woman" habit, for fear of people making fun of me. knitting: in. cross stitching: out.

but i had shared my dirty little secret with a coworker. and she just dropped off a little gift: a calendar of subversive cross stitch. ah, a niche i need to fill.

ps. i was going to hang in up in my office, but upon her suggestion, i will be bringing it home.

my new laptop

i got my new laptop on friday. i'm not sure why i thought going out to the 'burbs on a friday night was a good idea, but i did it and there's nothing i can do to get those 2 hours on the Kennedy back. but i got to hang out with my mom and watch her buy gifts for my sis and my boyfriend. and that was cool. but anyway. back to the laptop.

i'm not impressed. it has sharp edges where i rest my wrists. on my iBook, those edges were smooth and comfortable. this laptop leaves huge welts on the undersides of my arms. nice. and i know it's refurbished, but i've already had to force quit the damn thing a few times, once when i woke it up and that stupid gay beach ball of death just spun and spun when i tried to use yahoo and safari. it's like my whole wireless connection just pissed it off. the other times were last night, during a vain attempt to install my printer drivers so my laser printer wouldn't run pages through itself, pretending to print. when i clicked on my driver in the drop down window, that goddamned beach ball just spun. assholes.

hey, apple, instead of coming up with witty ways to remake the desktop and update that iCal that no one ever uses, why don't you come up with a way to MAKE THAT FUCKING BEACH BALL STOP SPINNING. jesus, with my OS 8 mac, that dumb black and white beach ball didn't come out to play nearly a tenth that the rainbow one does. is this the downside of trying to become more like PC? since you guys don't make processors nearly as fast as PCs but you want to run programs like a PC, the information ends up getting backed up like... well, like the kennedy on a friday night.

if apple goes to "open-road tolling," i'm outta here.

test your accent

hey, all you people who talk. take this test and tell me how hick-ish you sound.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The Inland North
The West
The Northeast
Philadelphia
Boston
North Central
The South
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

the bad news, the good news

bad news:
so, i re-installed Tiger onto my iBook, as you all know from my previous post. it's all well and good, until sunday night, it hits me:

i didn't back up any of my digital photos.

i'll let that sink in a minute.

...
...
...

so, yeah. imagine all of those parties, those gigs, those trips, since march. all gone. i have some images up on kodakgallery, but not all of them. it hit me like a ton of bricks. i looked up online to see how much recovery costs. once, at heinemann, our server hard drive crashed. we had to send the drive to california for recovery. $1200 later, we had most of our files. but i don't have $1200. that's more than my laptop is worth. but it's not really the laptop's worth i'm gauging here: it's those photos. are those photos worth $1200?

not that i think my recovery would cost that much. i know what i'm looking for. but, at looking at these websites, it almost would have been better had my hard drive never come back to life, as i have now installed an OS over (maybe) some of my images. i'm glad i didn't update to 10.4.8 or install my adobe stuff. then i would have been totally screwed.

good news
i may have a mac savior. he's one of annette's friends that i've known a while. he used to be a mac IT guy, but now he teaches. i asked him if there was any hope and he said he'd take a look at it. tomorrow, i'm handing it off to him. cross your fingers that he can get those images off of there.

and the really stupid thing is that i have an external hard drive. how hard would it have been to plug it in, drag and drop? if i would have thought about it, not it all. but i COMPLETELY FORGOT ABOUT MY IMAGES. i am such a dumbass.

what was that forbidden fruit in eden?

oh, that's right. APPLE!

anyway, i went back to the apple store (silver lining: i work a block away) and read my book until they called my name. the dude behind the counter (said "genius") basically told me what i already knew (but didn't want to hear): my hard drive is on its last spin. he gave me several options.

1) buy a new laptop: $900-3000
2) replace the hard drive: $300
3) buy a hard drive and install it myself: $150-180 and a lot of patience
4) do a complete erase with a clean install: free, but who knows how long it will last
5) use an external drive as the start up drive, completely by-passing my internal hard drive: really cool, in a frankenstein kind of way, but my external drive is really slow, so i'm not sure how long i could take that. plus, scott is using it as a music library.

i told him i'd think about it and if i wanted the installed hard drive that i'd bring it back tomorrow. i went home, put the 10.4 CD in and decided to go ahead with the clean install. but i saw this cool erase tool that would erase your free space, which would eliminate all of those silly fragments that hang around and annoy you. so i decided to do that. what the hell, i said. if it doesn't work, what's the harm? scott said that if it didn't work, we could see how far my iBook would bounce from a third floor window.

so i clicked on said button. *whir*whir* it says it's going to take 23 minutes. i'm cross-stitching, so i lose track of time. but when a loud clicking/boinging noise comes from my computer, it gets my attention. scott thinks it's coming from my speakers, but it's coming from the inside. not a good sign. i stop the install (which (in)stalled out with 14 minutes left) and restart. i choose "clean install" and then my friend calls. i'm chatting away for about an hour. i come back and scott says, "i had to silence your computer since it was playing music." music? is that a good sign?

i went through the set-up, which is really annoying when you have to do every damn time you do a clean install. (of course, if everything were tip-top, presumably you would only have to do it once, but whatever)

but here i am! i'm blogging away on my little sketchy apple. i'm sure it's only a matter of time before i hit that dead spot on my hard drive and it all goes to shit again. but i don't have to worry long.

i bought a mac book. i couldn't resist. ;)

what's the fucking point?

i am in a foul mood today. i am surrounded by incompetent people who make me want to kill them and then myself. not only do i have to represent at a workplace that treats me like i'm 5, i have electronic malfunctions at home, no thanks to apple. i hate my job, i hate my computer, i hate everything. oh, and christmas is coming up. yay. i get to take my laptop to apple and shove my way through tons of people who can afford to buy things they'll never need to go upstairs to the "repair" department. there are quotes around repair because it's a fallacy. they don't actually repair anything. if you have a problem it's either OE (operator error) or it's a fatal flaw in your hardware, which means that they have to send it back to china, er, california and send you a new one (or you have to buy a new one.) it's never anything that they can fix right there. and after spending $140 on a software upgrade (which i've never done before in my life, but i was desperate), i don't feel like giving apple any more of my money. here is the chain of events:
1. safari, word and excel won't start. the little icon bounces, bounces, bounces, maybe a window will pop up, like a teaser, then it'll just disappear. nothing. no error message, nothing. what the fuck? i didn't realize i needed to perform felatio on my laptop to get it to work.
2. i ignore said issues and use another browser. and i never really need to use word or excel. but now firefox won't let me hear ringtones for my new phone. one more inconvienence in my life. some recommends that i run my software updater to see if there's a more recent version of that will actually work. i do this.
3. updater freezes in the middle of optimizing my harddrive. i force quit. i restart. it runs through the start up routine, but can't initialize. thanks, apple.
4. i go out and dump a chunk of change on 10.4.6. i install it. it works like a charm. safari, word and excel work. hazzah!
5. i make a spread sheet of addresses for my xmas cards. i try to print it. my printer gets stuck in a termial loop of running blank sheets through. i try another program... same thing. to get it to stop, i have to pull the paper out of the feed tray. sigh.
6. i go to HP's website to see if there's a software conflict. i get this window that says something about updating my firmware (whatever the hell that is). so i go to download page (where it claims the updater should be, but it's not), i download some installer program. it does nothing. i look back on the HP driver website. it says at the bottom, "if the driver you are looking for isn't here, then it isn't available in your language." of course. on one page they say it's available, but on the page they direct you to go, it isn't there. typical. why don't they just have the fucking uploader on that damn page? because that makes sense.
7. i print again. same thing. i look on the software updater to see if they have anything there. i guess i haven't learned my lesson yet, but i see that there is already an upgrade to 10.4.8. ooooo! i a higher number! i want it! and maybe it'll fix my printer problem.
8. i download the thing overnight. i wake up the next morning to "an error has occured during updating. we're sorry for the inconvenience." i bet you are. i restart.
9. now my computer can't even get to the start up window. the apple sits there, taunting me, the little wheel of uselessness, spinning away.
10. i grab my install CD of tiger. i put it in. i run it. it says, "cannot upgrade, as there is already a higher version on here." of course. so i do a clean install.
11. "there was an error during installation. unable to intall."

how much time have i wasted trying to fix things that should never have broken? does it matter, since my time is worthless anyway. evidently apple knows this. now i'm going to have to stand in line to have some unwashed hippie tell me that he has to send my laptop to china so some 5-year-old can get paid 5 cents an hour to put in a new . he a) won't know how long it'll take, b) won't know how much it will cost, and c) can't be sure that will fix my problem. that's when i'll slam my laptop onto the floor so i can watch it burst into millions of tiny pieces. then i'll turn to smelly hippie and say, "earn your keep. clean that up."

i hate everything right now.

Sadie, day 1

i am looking after annette's cat while she's in france for the holiday. i thought i'd post about it so she can see how cute her kitty is from 8,000 miles away. :) i have this brand-new picture phone that totally rocks and it's already come in handy for this.

let me set the scene: roger's park. 5:00pm. dark. crazy empty store fronts. some crazy woman yelling in the neighborhood somewhere. i park at a meter on clark and cross the street. the crazy woman is standing on the steps to annette's building. of course. i wander around as much as i can without looking too white then i make the decision to go in through the back. i walk through the alley, which is suprisingly empty. i find her back gate... unlatched. nice. i push it open, walk through and close is behind me. i fuck around with the keys in the back door until i figure out which ones work. there really isn't much worry about looking suspicious in this neighborhood, but i still worry that someone would call me out. nope. i get in.

and there is sadie. in all of her black, white and fuzzy glory. "meow," she says.

"i know," i reply. "i'm not annette. but i'll feed you just the same."

i notice that she still has a lot of food left in her bowl. i change her water and she slurps away. i walk into the living room and she races in before me, flinging herself on the rug and rolling over to show me her fluffy belly.

i take a few pictures and pet her for about 10 minutes. she proceeds to rub her face on every edge of the coffee table and licks herself randomly in happiness. when i get the mail and come back to drop it off, she is still sprawled on the rug, looking at me with her green eyes. "i know, i'm a heel to leave you here by yourself," i say.

"prrrr-rrr-rrr-rrr," she replies.

i leave out the front door, locking every lock i could find. i leave the neighborhood without incident. oh, wait. there was a guy driving on a flat with his flashers on. ah, you gotta love chicago traffic.