Namaste, Bitches

I scored a new computer today.

Rob's graphic accelerator crashed in his laptop, and of course, being a laptop, it had onboard graphics, which means if we wanted to salvage it, we'd have to replace the entire motherboard. He's pissed off about it, but oh well. He's got my computer now, which has replaceable components & Windows XP.

We're deeper in debt now, but I got an offbrand monster. It's an Asus Essentia, with an Intel Core2 QUAD CORE Q8300 Yorkfield processor - I've moved up to 64-Bit processing, 8G of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce GT220 with 512MB of dedicated onboard RAM, and an 800G hard drive. The only downside to it is Windows Vista, blegh. I get a free upgrade to Windows 7, but I figure I'll hang onto Vista until I get more familiar with it. The tower is huge & the front is slanted - it wouldn't fit in my desk until we took the door off. I need to get a sticker or something for it that says 'TARDIS'.

Of course, now comes the joy of re-installation & copying all my crap from my backup drive onto the new monster. Yay!

( News of a More Delicate Nature )

Went to Office Depot to check out some external hard drives. I brought home a new baby thanks to the in-laws Christmas/Birthday gifts... A 1 Terabyte (that's 1000 Gigs) external hard drive. That's a lot of mp3s! It's not exactly portable, being 6"X7", but I could still fit it in my purse if I wanted. So now, whenever I give my computer a virus, I can just format it back to factory :P

Schweet!

It also turns out that my work computer did not have a virus - the MS installer thingie was corrupted by me futzing around trying to get Pandora streaming radio. Apparently, if you uninstall & reinstall IE7 a bazillion times, it does stuff to the O/S. All to find out that the only way I could get Pandora radio on my work computer is if I had a different image. I should have asked Robert in the first place instead of relying on Tina's shrugs.

Got our high-speed internet to work today. I don't know exactly what I did to get it to work, but it finally kicked in. Rob's connected thru my computer, so even though I can't 'see' his files & he can't 'see' mine, the network router is working. I can always fiddle w/the network settings at my own pace.

I was getting so incredibly frustrated, and I've just been so tired this past two weeks. I get to this point of exhaustion & I still try to work on things til I'm ready to cry, scream and break things. I need to make myself GO TO BED before I get to that point. Nothing has been working for me lately - I struggled to get my math class' ActiveX controls to kick in, I struggled w/the Java developer kit, it was a hassle just to get the freakin' Cox modem from FedEx. It was like the universe was anticipating Steve Irwin's death & started punishing me in advance for my nasty attitude. I don't care, though - I'm a bad karma magnet anyway and will probably come back in my next few lives as a cockroach.

We need to come up w/a short, easily spelled e-mail address for Rob to give to people, some kind of anonymous one. I'm just relieved I got this thing to do something right. Now that I have all this speed at my disposal I have no idea what to do - I guess I can download my first history movie.

Speaking of my history class - the instructor gave us a reading list. We have to pick a book & do a book report on it. My choice?

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.

The list he had was sorely lacking in anything by or about turn-of-the-century Native Americans, but once I saw Acid Test on there, I decided not to rock the boat.

I am fucking tired. And my knees hurt.

I have a job interview over at Mandalay Bay tomorrow - non-gaming audit. Rob's already whining about the possibility of me changing jobs, says I still like my co-workers & it's not a 'bad' job, per se, and moving into non-gaming might mean I'd be stuck in a little room all day with people I can't stand. I try to tell him what it's like, how much I hate my job, how I can barely stand putting on the uniform, how my skin crawls, how night after night I just want to lay my head on my desk and sob... how I can't even get away from my job in my sleep because my subconscious replays my day in my dreams. I think I may just be one of those people who needs to switch jobs often. I think I've just plain been at the Excalibur too long. Moving to Mandalay Bay might not be better, but it would be different. There's still a lot of chances that I won't get the job - I expect to NOT get it more than I expect to get it. And that's ok too.

Filed taxes the other day, actually had to break down & go to H & R Block because of the whole tuition/loan thingie. I guess they don't count the loan as income because I have to pay it back. We paid the extra hundred bucks for the rapid refund. It's always nice to have $2k in hand. Can't do anything with it because, well, we need a new car. It's already starting to overheat if we're out during the day. No a/c, no heater... it sounds like a creaky ship when Rob cranks it past 50mph. It makes ghostly 'hooooo'ing noises when it's low on gas & we go around a corner.

Let's see... Got Clive Barker's art book, 'Visions of Heaven & Hell'. Mostly work from his Abarat books, intermixed with a lot of ink splotches & phalli. It's primitive stuff, but full of color and movement. Read Stephen King's 'Cell' yesterday. It was ok, too - just a good, ol' fashioned zombie story. Telepathic zombies. Now I'm working on Miranda & Stephen Aldhouse-Green's 'The Quest for the Shaman'. Sometimes I think archaeologists read too much into things. There's this whole debate over a petroglyph from the Iberian peninsula about feetprints painted on a cave wall. Some are obviously where a barefooted person stepped in paint & stuck their foot on the wall... others are where paint was blown over the foot. The big debate is over images of shoed feet (or probably sandaled or mocassined feet) that have a horizontal line separating the heel from the rest of the foot. All these archaeologists say it may indicate someone who was hobbled or deformed & therefore considered a person of power. When I look at this rock painting, it makes me think of the painted dance steps on the floors of Arthur Miller Dance School or something. It looks like a stylized shoe print. And another thing was carved with the 'head of an elk' according to the archaeologists. Rob saw a giraffe, I saw a horse. It's clearly a horse head. One of the takhi horses with the high, stiff manes. Wonder what that would do to all the archaeologists' symbology of the area if one of those Neolithic people came along & said, "It's a horse."

Wargh. Formatted my computer the other day & now I'm downloading 184MB worth of WoW. But my monster does seem to be running better since I gave it the almighty digital enema.

Got to mention K. T. Tunstall. I'm so in love with her!

Rob has determined that John Cusack is his conscience... so somewhere, out there, John Cusack is walking around w/Rob's voice in his head. Rob even noticed (since he's sitting here watching Cusack in some comedy) that they dress alike. Cusack is better looking, tho, so Rob must be John Cusack's Evil Twin Skippy & not the other way around.

I'm going to an acupuncturist tomorrow. First time in a long time I get poked w/needles & no ink! Maybe if I brought him a bottle of India Ink, he'd remedy that. This particular doctor is 72 years old. He was born 2 yrs. before my dad... Sheesh. Weirdly enough, this procedure is covered by my insurance.

Watched 'I, Robot' tonight. (I almost want to pick up Asimov's book... I just can't stand the man's writing. Agh! He writes like Stephen King's movies come out.) It was a better than 'Hero', and about as good as the last Harry Potter flick.

I learned the shortcut for subscript - it's Ctrl+=. Trying to figure out how to make something not be subscripted took thought. I didn't think, at first, to bring something out of subscript the same way you take it out of bold or italics, tho... Duh. Subscript is useful for chemical formulae, like N2O (nitrous oxide).

I think a part of my brain is seeking some sort of entheogenic experience because, for the most part, I have no great escapes. I've been having a pretty constant craving for opium - I've only smoked opium once, but my mouth has been watering for want of it. I probably smoked it quite a bit in my past life... 12 hrs. of blissful wandering... My stomach has been hurting pretty bad lately, so alcohol isn't very appealing. Every waking moment of my day is reality, and even most of my sleeping time. Even when I read, I'm still with the here & now. Even when I sleep - I told Rob 'just put your work on my desk' the other morning. Some people carry on torrid affairs in their dreams, others have a continual fight for survival... me? "Just put your work on my desk."

My happy friendly LiveJournal format looks all funky for some reason... Oh well. I've decided that, aside from being a confirmed meat-eater, the only thing stopping me from becoming a Zen Buddhist is the fact that I like stuff. I particularly like my new computer. I decided, after 4 years of struggling w/that already-useless-when-I-bought-it Dell, that I not only wanted a new computer, not only needed a new computer, but I deserved a new computer. I love it. It's beautiful and powerful, like a sleek muscled racehorse... Well, ok, so it's a bulky silver box with the word "VAIO" in glowing blue on it (which currently has a Coop devil-girl sticker taped over it so the blue shows through in a strategic & amusing spot), but if I want to compare it with a sleek muscled racehorse, that's my metaphoric problem. So tonight's been the second night I've really gotten to break it in.

I can't win health-wise. Go to the OB/GYN, find out that my pussy's broken. "How can this be?!" I exclaim, "I haven't had unprotected sex w/anyone but Rob!!! And he hasn't had unprotected sex w/anyone but me in years!!!" So the nurse says, "Oh, it's not that kind of problem; it's stress, not sleeping or not drinking enough water or eating too much yogurt. Me, stress? Nah, can't be the stress ;) And we all know I get plenty of sleep, all 4 hrs a day. Problem: Every time I drink more water my blood pressure goes up - it was the cardiologist who told me I'd be better off heartwise if I was slightly dehydrated all the time... and I've been taking the doxycycline yogurt-free for 2 days & all I want to do is puke my guts up. So now I've got to call the dermatologist & see if he can get me a different antibiotic. Oh well, I probably will have to change my follow up appointment anyway. It's stopped working - I'm all spotty again. But last week I had no pimples whatsoever.

Finally finished writing to the Hula Rat... Rob's going back to work tomorrow night - finally!!! Maybe in a few months I can quit the day job! Of course, everything's changing there anyway, so I may be out of a job sooner than I think or want - I might get moved to a different department that can't swing the hours I can/can't work. Just have to wait & see.

I let Shirla do the audit all by herself Friday night - of course, she didn't get the system down til 4am & Molly didn't get her report til 6:40am. I told Molly that Shirla can do the audit, but she's slooooooooowwwww, and Molly said that's not my problem - as long as Shirla knows what she's doing, she'll get tired of getting nagged for taking too long & she'll pick up her speed. I just get the feeling that it's her passive-aggressive response of choice in reaction to my nagging - the more I remind her of the time, the slower she goes. Saturday I took an EO & let Alea babysit her for the rest of the night. I didn't get any phonecalls, so I guess they did ok... of course, I have no idea what time the system went down. I'll hear about all of it on Weds. I suppose.

Firmly entrenched in the mundane I muddle my way from day to day. I did get Ariadne the first pomegranate of the season on Mabon... and the second one is sitting on my kitchen counter like a huge barbarian ruby.