Menage à Trois Bingo

Doesn't it just figure. I'm obliged to get up at 5:30 in the morning to do an update for a customer, so I promise myself that as a reward I'll go for a walk or a bike ride when I'm finished.

Apparently Thor thinks otherwise.

Yesterday, for possibly the first time in seven or eight years, I had to use a payphone. I'd left home without my cellphone because I couldn't find it when I was leaving and didn't have time to search (turns out Chris had plugged it in). Then I was stuck at work late and rushed out without taking time to call home. On the one night we had made dinner reservations for seven o'clock: to celebrate the assiversary¹ of our meeting ona_tangent and scottak.

So I found a functional payphone at the Shell station, dug five dimes out of my door-handle change repository, and dialed the phone on auto-pilot. Only to hear "You have reached Andy Blank of $OLD_EMPLOYER.Chris." Hang up in a hurry, run back to the car and dig around for five more dimes, start over. Sigh.

¹ One year ago this week, Chris grabbed her ass in the string store.

I got home today to be told, "You got a letter!"

"Yay! That never happens!" I bounce over to the table where the letter is and pick it up. Hmm. Don't recognize the handwriting on the envelope, and there's no return address. I tear it open. Inside, there's a sheet of printed newsprint with a postie note on it. It says something like "check this out. J" and all the articles on the newsprint are about the same thing: some so-called financial opportunity.

It's spam. Spam masquerading as personal mail, just like I get everyday in my email inbox. Now it's attacking through the letterbox.

Customer> "We don't want to upgrade, we just want the fix."

Me> "The fix and the current patch contain exactly the same things."

So of course, because it's twice as much work for me, "We don't care.
Send the fix."

"Catbert"
Bug reports that leave out essential information
Coarse black hairs on my chin
Being overdrawn
Doing one-offs
Self-righteousness
Wet clammy swimsuits
Having projects canceled after I've spent a lot of time and effort on
them
Doing data fixes for bugs that have been fixed for months but never
gotten released
Misplaced apostrophes
The present US administration
Bras
Peanut butter
Styrofoam
Auto-flush toilets
The towel dispenser in the bathroom
The basement
Being paged in supermarkets
Public humiliation
People clipping their nails at their desks
Blood and gore in movies
Insults to my competence

The sooner I get my DSL and get off AOL, the better. They're now doing evil pop-up windows when I sign out of AOLAnywhere. Useta was a really nice considerate site that just went away. Then they started having one popup-on-exit window. Now there are two! Paul recommended Pop-up Stopper, and I'm running it, but it doesn't stop any pop-ups that I can see. The only difference is that they pop-up underneath my current window instead of on top of it. Is that because I'm using IE5?

I think I get on the actual AOL service only about once every two weeks, and that only so I can download the mail I want to keep. I prefer AIM chat anyway (for one big reason: it stores the entire session buffer so that if you have to go afk you can catch up when you come back without missing anything), and now that Trillian is working with AIM again (however long that may last) I am using it instead. I'm actually connected on my Y!M id nowadays!

Anybody want to recommend a good IRC channel to try? I never had an IRC client before...

As if I needed more 'net timewasters. ;->

About every five minutes my computer keeps asking me for a password to "www.pink-eyeliner.org". I have no idea what I might have clicked on to make it do that, but it won't go away!

If there's a more frustrating way to start my day than being stuck in a traffic jam for over an hour, I don't ever want to encounter it. My already-long 30-mile commute took nearly two hours today. They're repaving Hwy 70 in front of the airport, due to a hellacious pothole problem. That's all well and good, but when I first hear the radio traffic report just after I've exited onto the fateful highway, I'm not at all happy about it. The area was already under lane restrictions because of bridge reconstructions, and now it is down to a single narrow lane. It took me over an hour to get past the construction area, less than five miles in length.

Tomorrow I'll try going north to 370 and see if that's any better. It adds at least five miles to the drive, but it's a nice highway and rarely congested; if they're still working on 70 it can't possibly take longer.

And I just read her Six-Dinner Sid. My copy just arrived. Well, actually it's my second copy. Something got confused in the shipping from Amazon, and after I complained of my order's non-arrival after three weeks, they sent me a duplicate for free. I wound up with two copies of the book, and two DVD players! I'll have to send one back.

A whole day of posting nothing but one-liners, and I feel a bit disappointed in myself. Like I should have more to say. But I really don't have much on my mind right now. I ended my reading fast completely today, with a binge of reading and posting to Wombat, and I also read Catwings and Bridge of Birds, two of the books that were recommended to me by people here a week or so ago.

What I haven't done, and I should, but will probably do in the morning, is to post a weekly checkin to the Artist's Way. I did do a few of the week's tasks, but they're in a notebook and I haven't copied them into the computer yet. I was going to do it tonight. Well, at least I read the Week 5 chapter.

I wore my hair up all day long but only one person noticed the new tragus piercing. Or at least, only one person commented. Even Ray didn't notice, when I went to pick up Rosa. She actually whacked me in the ear and I whimpered, but he didn't look at me to see why. Not that I'm surprised, he was never particularly observant. It took him about six weeks to notice that I had taken off my wedding ring last spring.

Ah yes. I finally emailed Amazon to find out what happened to my dvd player I ordered around Christmas that hasn't arrived yet, and they're sending me another one. After it had been listed as "in transit" for over two weeks past the estimated date of arrival, it seemed likely it was lost. I need that, how else am I going to watch Legolas and Aragorn every day after the movie leaves theatres?