1. It’s storming, so I’m about to have an aneurysm.
2. This woman clearly does not understand about pens. Stealing my pens is a good way to lose a limb. Just sayin’…
3. Did I mention it’s storming? Half the computers on my floor just lost power, the lights have been flickering off and on, and the blowers have shut down. Can I go home now?
Despite the fact that I know what poison ivy looks like, and despite the fact that Ms. Lea was good enough to point out that I was about to walk through a bunch of it, I still managed to get it on me. There’s one tiny spot on my right thumb, about 10 little spots on my right arm, a little spot on the top of my left ear, and, somehow, a small patch of it on the back of my neck.
So careless of me. And now I’m itchy.
BUT!!! The coral bells I got from my awesome coworker? They had two bloom spikes sticking up last night. Wheee! And the primroses I got from her are also starting to get tiny, proto-buds. I may actually end up with a few flowers in my little garden.
This might explain why I feel like crap. That’s just what accumulated overnight on the windshield of my car. O gross.
And to make things even more fun, the cottonwoods are starting to explodiate. I’m almost as allergic to those as I am to ragweed.
It was still light out when I went to bed last night, which makes it difficult to fall asleep. It also makes it difficult to tell whether or not the aquarium light is still on. Oops! I got up this morning, and my poor little fishies had spent the whole night under interrogation lights.
In unrelated wackiness, I’m now getting Korean junk mail. Not spam, mind you, but good, old fashioned postal mail. I think the company has seriously misjudged their target audience.
I just went to the supply room to get a package of Post-its. There weren’t any, so I commented to a coworker that we’re out. Her response: “We didn’t even used to have Post-its.” Oh. Alrightythen! We didn’t used to have computers, either, and yet, life without them is now damned near unthinkable.
I wonder if she’ll forsake her car when she finds out that people used to ride in horse-drawn carriages?
Gas was $3.75/gallon this morning. That was for cheap-o 87. There’s some speculation that it could soon be up to $10/gallon, which would put it in line with European gas prices. Aieee! I mean, I know we’ve had it good in the US, in terms of gas prices, and that folks in the rest of the world are tired of hearing us whinge about it. The thing is, this gas prices here are suddenly making a quantum leap, and we do not have the infrastructure or the wage base to support such a sharp rise in fuel costs.
And it’s not just the price of the gas I put in my car, either. In the past month, prices have gone up on almost everything at the grocery store, because of the increase in transportation costs. And my heating bill nearly doubled last winter, even though my heat is electric and Duke get its electricity mainly from coal, not petroleum.
As for the gas that goes in my car, it sucks that the price is going up, but it’s not the end of the world. I use a little over a gallon of gas a week. Even at $10/gallon, it won’t kill me. The ripple effect, however, will.
Remember that Web 2.0 assignment I mentioned doing for work? The one where we had to create a fakety fake blog? Well, everyone who finished the assignment got to go to a pizza party today. I didn’t go, because spending my break time socializing with coworkers is not exactly my idea of a reward. Not that I dislike my coworkers or anything, but I’d rather not spend my time at staff parties because they–staff parties–make me cranky.
Anyway, I guess they did a brief Power Point demonstration with shots from everyone’s fakety fake blogs. One of the shots contained a still of a YouTube video of someone’s kid. The folks who did the presentation sent a follow-up e-mail later this afternoon, with a link to the actual video, suggesting that we might need “an afternoon laugh.”
I made the mistake of watching it. Since it was ostensibly work related (and humorous!), I figured it ought to be pretty benign, right? Oh my. The video was of a kid crying and whining about having to eat a green bean. And then he vomits. And then the dad says, “Oh shit!”
WTF?!!!
On the other hand, it may be the best illustration I’ve seen of why kids shouldn’t be forced to eat things they’re vehemently opposed to. I mean, really, what the hell was accomplished by trying to make the kid eat a green bean? And is that a hill you want to die on?
I just went to the kitchen to nuke my oatmeal. A coworker was heating water in the electric teakettle, so I waited until he was done before turning on the microwave, onna counta both the microwave and the electric teakettle cannot be used simultaneously, lest they open a rift in the space-time continuum. So, I’m waiting, and my coworker asks me what I’m doing. I explain. Teakettle whistles. He turns it off and makes his tea, and I pop my oatmeal in the microwave and turn it on.
So what do you think my jeenyous coworker did? He refilled the electric teakettle and turned it back on. While the microwave was running.
Calgon, take me away!
Today is National Library Workers Day, so how are we celebrating? By having a 90 minute cataloging division meeting on metadata.
Kill me now.
I’ve had this on-again, off-again problem with my computer not seeing my printer. I’ve torn my hair out over this, because it seemed so arbitrary. At first, I blamed ZoneAlarm for blocking my USB ports[1], and in temporarily disarming ZA, I ended up getting my check card information stolen. So, that didn’t end well, though I thought I had the problem narrowed down to ZA.
Not so.
I turned everything on this morning, and once again, my printer was off-line. Aaack! I tried everything I could think of, retracing my cybersteps yesterday to try to figure out what might have made my printer invisible. Bupkis. So I did a system restore to yesterday. Printer still off-line. Undid the restore and picked a point further back. Printer still off-line. Undid that restore and tore out some more hair. At this point, I’m completely out of ideas.
I finally decided that I’d better just spend the day doing a major back-up, wipe my hard drive, and reinstall everything. That’s not what I had on my agenda for the day. Ugh.
I took the lid off my spindle of discs, which sits in front of my computer tower. And, what did I see? The Compact Flash card from my camera sitting in the card reader. Hmmm. As you may have noticed, I haven’t been taking many pictures lately. Also, lately, my printer (until this morning) has been working fine. Hmmm, again.
You may or may not recall that when I first got this computer, I was extra clueless and hooked up the internal card reader before installing Windows. Windows, because it hates me, assigned drive letter C to the Compact Flash drive. This is obviously not good, and has caused minor problems over the past year. Nothing major enough, though, to motivate me to fix it.
So I got to thinking. I would bet money that my printer, when turned on, first looks for a C drive, and if it doesn’t find one, then it looks further until it finds my main drive (lettered I, which is kind of funny, dontcha think? My computer is no longer part of The Collective. Aieee!). Anyway, I had my camera out yesterday, and took a few photos. I forgot the card in the card reader, and so now I finally know what has been plaguing my printer.
I took the card out of the drive, rebooted, et voila, my printer is now visible.
Teh Enb.
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1. Which I still think it was doing, onna counta Windows could not see my scanner unless I turned it on before turning on my computer. If Windows was able to see the scanner before ZoneAlarm was up and running, then all was well. Otherwise, any new traffic through my USB ports was blocked. I did some searching on ZA’s boards, and others with HP scanners had the same problem.
red paper boat 