Talk About Tuesday

 

In Which Today Has Been Very Long

My day started at 5:30AM with the buzz of my laptop fan.

This was not a good thing to hear because it meant three things:

1. I had fallen asleep with the laptop on my lap again
2. I was awake at 5:30AM
3. Microsoft must've pushed the update and restarted my laptop...

Now, frustratingly enough, I was right about all three things, and it meant that Windows had oh-so-helpfully force-closed all the programs I was using in order to restart.

Which included the massive art project I've been working on since October first.

18 days of work were completely corrupted and unsalvageable.

So why wasn't I more than slightly annoyed?

That would be because the Project Resentment had already set in.

At a certain point in large projects, I realize that I haven't prepared thoroughly enough and my work starts to suffer. At that stage, I start to slowly come to despise the work itself, everything I've done, and everything I have left to do. The Resentment started some time last week, so as you can imagine, I was pretty pissed at every perceived mistake.

Often, if I don't finish the project quickly when I recognize the Project Resentment, I'll just destroy it myself. I'll delete the whole thing and all of my research and start over.

Now I didn't have to do that because my computer did it for me.

So instead I rolled my eyes, opened the programs I'd need and headed downstairs while things loaded up.

The cat needed her pill at 8AM, so I stayed downstairs drinking coffee and playing on my phone. Once the hour struck, I woke up the cat where she was draped over the back of a recliner and held her still while my mom jammed a pill into her mouth. She pouted for an hour, but was otherwise fine. She hasn't coughed in several days! She has the zoomies again! She played for a full 10 minutes this afternoon!

She spit her pill out tonight and we had to jam it in her face a second time and now she hates us!

Pretty sure she growled at me for the first time ever.

Sorry, lil brat, you need the pills so you will recover from this stupid infection we've known you had for years and yet the vet never wanted to do anything about it...

Anywho, it's been delightfully chilly the last couple of days - we had temps of about 51℉ (10.5℃) and while it has been drizzly and damp, it's also felt very fallish. I'm wearing a sweater, guys. A turtleneck sweater. I've got thick, fuzzy blankets on my bed.

And of course it's all going to end tomorrow and come back next weekend, but hey, we can't always get what we want, right...

I like chilly weather.

I will say there's two parts I don't enjoy about the shift from summer-to-autumn, though:

1. the effect rapidly shifting temps has on my sinuses
2. the effect rapidly shifting temps & humidity have on my window

I'm apparently allergic to change - every fall and spring I go through a phase where, around 7:30PM, I just start stuffing up and sneezing. This happens everywhere, not just at home, so it's something to do with my body and the world in general. Best guess? I inherited my mother's terrible sinuses which can't withstand anything at all and I'm super sensitive to the rapid temperature changes. The lining of my sinuses stretches and dries rapidly, triggering a sneeze.

As for the window, whenever the glass gets wet for several days and then dries out in cool temperatures, it makes these awful digestive noises. It seriously sounds like someone's having gurgling heartburn at the end of my bed with their mouth open, face pressed to the glass of the window. Wretched. Especially after mainlining all the seasons of Buzzfeed's Unsolved Supernatural shows.

Still writing that spooky ghost hunter story.

Still writing the wrestling story, too.

I think I've rambled enough, though, so I'll let you go with a warning that I may seem equally loopy and exhausted on Thursday since we're still pilling her until Friday or Saturday, so... early to rise for a few more days.

Thursday should contain art, however, and next Monday I'll have more shawl & secret project updates for Fiber Monday :)

That'll do it for me, tonight!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Fiber Monday: Cyberstruggles

 

In Which Today Was Very Difficult

This morning, I woke up before 10AM (around 8:30 I believe) and found that I'd unplugged my laptop in my sleep. I've developed something of a (not very healthy) habit of falling asleep watching YouTube videos with my laptop on my lap in bed. My poor laptop was quite old and had already had one battery fail completely. I replaced that battery with one at 76% of its life expectancy and... well...

Something went terribly wrong.

It's my partner's birthday today, by the way, so if you see them around the internet or you read their blog Attack The Stack, then please offer your congratulations! I'm dating an awesome person, so I decided to post on their Facebook wall just how I feel and offer my best wishes etc, and halfway through my deeply heartfelt message...

Everything stopped working. My laptop 100% froze - no hard drive activity, no fans, no amount of ctrl+alt+del or tapping the power button worked. I had to unplug the laptop once more and pull the battery, which if you do any IT work, you know that's a BIG NO NO. But desperate times called for desperate... what? Measures? WHO SAID THAT?!?!?! (inside joke, don't worry about it).

I pressed power again and... nothing. The internet and power lights were on, but the screen stayed black, the fans spun once and stopped, no hard drive activity.

I am not ashamed to say that I absolutely panicked. It wouldn't even be the first laptop I bricked, but it's Pandemic Times and I spend roughly 75-85% of my days on my computer, whether it's listening to music or reading or playing games or checking patterns. I freaked out. Luckily, MLK Day is a holiday for hospital IT guys (I know, it doesn't really make sense, but I'm grateful for it today) so my dad, who is the Computer God in this family, was home. Unfortunately, he was also on the phone and my family has this condition called "I'm Talking And I Can't Shut Up", so he was going to be in that conversation for... quite a while.

I tried everything I could think of while I was downstairs.

Except for the thing he suggested when he walked in and saw me struggling.

"Did you try taking the battery out, plugging it in, and trying to turn it on?"

Guys. It worked.

But! That dear old laptop has a very wobbly AC port and I knew that I couldn't function with it like that, so it was now time for an upgrade.

Which is a longwinded way of letting you know I'm typing this from a very nice not-that-new laptop. Like most things I own that I like, it's second-hand, refurbished, and my dad and I rebuilt it over the course of the afternoon. As you may have guessed, this left almost no time for crochet, so there's no progress from today to share, but I can still give you a picture of how far I've gotten since last week in general on the stocking!

Roku Remote for Scale

So there you have it - a massive, truly HUGE stocking! I have one last design band to put on and I am planning to put my nibling's name on in cross stitch. I don't put info about minors on my blog, though, so I'll show you the finished stocking sans name :)

It's gonna be so freaking huge...

The whole length of the Red Heart Super Saver skein is actually sitting in the foot right now.

Alright. I'm pretty pooped, so I'm gonna finish my last cup of tea for the day (more Meyer Lemon - I'll try to do a review some Sunday of all the teas I got for Christmas!) and get ready for my partner's birthday bash online :)

Go Enjoy Something!

FC