Today I crawled out of bed before 6 AM. I don't voluntarily do this, but I had to work - I'm going over the 69-hour page limit at work and they're short-handed this month, so I've been picking up all sorts of extra hours. The downside is the early wake-up on days I normally get to sleep in; I'll see the upside when I get the paycheck.
Despite the Great Machine pitching the occasional fit, we finished the load early, but we didn't get to go home early, as is the usual drill; we instead filled out the time chiseling away at the deleted-book backlog. (This is where old library books go to die, or at least be removed from the system.)
I came home and intended to do Something Productive with my day. After all, I have a car that, after our ongoing dry streak, seriously needs washing. I have stories that need editing, and sketchbooks that need filling. I have web stuff to study and sites to plot overhauls on. I have a workbench that needs cleaning up, and projects that need starting once said workbench is cleaned up.
I forgot about family.
I forgot that my mother just got a freebie used laptop, and - because I bought a wireless router - I've apparently been elected Tech Support Person, charged with getting an overloaded third-hand Pentium II dinosaur to play nice with our network.
I forgot about the various yard projects my sister's working on, that occupy the front yard hoses and hose attachments and make getting a hose to my car difficult.
I forgot that I'm evidently the only person capable of making dinner, let alone washing the dishes afterwards and putting them away.
I forgot that Dad tends to let recycling pile up in inconvenient places (like, say, the dish drying rack.)
I forgot that the neighbors' idea of weekend fun is to blast old whiny country music as loud as their stereo will go, until it can be clearly heard all around our property and nearly through closed doors. (I can't seem to gain support for my plan to retaliate with a boom box and a CD of the Wicked Tinkers...)
So, no, I cannot say I filled a single sketchbook page today. I didn't get to work on my websites, nor did I get near my workbench.
But I washed that car, dang it.
And I vacuumed it, too. Just to prove they couldn't stop me.
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4 comments:
Just keep thinking of the paycheck.
And, frankly, *I* support your boombox/Wicked Tinkers idea! Of course, I'm not around to hear the even louder, twangier revenge of the neighbors, so you probably want to take that with a grain of salt...
smorine: a chorus line member dressed as a marshmallow with a "chocolate slab" hat.
One of these days, I'm gonna do it... but I expect I'll catch heck from relatives, who seem to prefer complaining about the problem.
At least today was marginally better, though I'm about ready to throw that Pentium II brick through a window. (How bad is it? On a 9ish gig hard drive, it had less than a gig free; I barely got it up to two gigs, but the rest is eaten up with a bunch of useless junk programs - including folders for three separate antivirus programs, none of which appear to be active - that it won't let me erase. The original owner fancied himself a programmer, so we think there's some sort of weird admin-lockup thing going on. Heck, I can't even get into Setup because it's got a password on it. I don't think we can take it into a shop if the shop guys can't get into Setup, either... assuming Mom would even consider taking it in to a shop. As for getting it online, she claims it did so at work when she "pressed a bunch of things and went through some windows and clicked Okay and then it was online," or words to that effect. Ergh....)
moler - A person who digs under homes and streets to create sinkholes, usually employed by insurance companies or news stations on slow news days.
If you take it to a shop, they should have the ability to wipe the entire laptop clean and start fresh- so long as there is absolutely nothing your mom wants to save on it.
Or they should at least be able to hack around the password stuff and turn it off for you.
curesse: words of a cursing nature uttered under the breath of a reluctant tech support person
Jade - All Mom wants on this computer is an OS and some sort of websurfing software (and maybe a word processor or something simple), so, no, we wouldn't miss any data. We may actually break down and see what a shop would charge. The problem is, since it's a 10-year-old third-hand laptop, it has no disks at all with it, and since it was free we have no real proof of ownership. But at this point it's pretty much an electronic brick with a bad battery. (It's not worth replacing the battery if we can't even get it working right...) I think Mom should just save up a bit and get something newer - I've seen refurbished laptops for under five hundred, and netbooks for less than that.
thingst - angst caused by things in one's life.
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