Dear Internets,
I love you. In fact, it's fair to say I'm addicted to you. But — forgive me — I'm beginning to wonder whether even you are worth wading through the mires of the Australian telephone infrastructure system, not to mention all the accompanying so-called service providers feeding on its carcass.
Additionally, I cannot help but contemplate the irony that is the communications industry being the epitome of communications failure.
Regretfully
Me
Objective: Drive. Until the battery is sufficiently charged.
Secondary Objective: Stickybeak around a few suburbs, to see if there's any I fall in love with.
Method: Me. Behind the wheel. Sharing the road with trams. At speed. (Praying I don't stall because there's no way this sucker is restarting short of a jumpstart at this point.)
Outcome: Thoroughly lost? ACHIEVED.
Dear Melbourne: Not big on informative road signs that can be seen at any speed faster than perambulatory, huh? No thanks, Me.
Also, let it be known that mothers are made of win. Mothers who insist you EAT THAT SCHNITZEL AND CHASE IT DOWN WITH GELATO NOW transcend even that.
The signing sheets for Postscripts #18 have come and gone on their merry way and I can say this with certainty: I have no signature. Truly, every single one of those sheets is unique.
I am currently sitting in my car, which is at the moment a very expensive sculpture, on account of the battery going to sleep sometime in the past two weeks and now declining to emerge from its coma. Given that I need the car today in order to find a place to live, my previous plans having exploded in rather spectacular and last-minute fashion, I am, needless to say, a little peeved with life right about now. For values of a little roughly approximate to I think the world can just go ahead and burn, what do I care any more?
So, my apologies, but sporadic and unfocussed (and haphazardly abandoned) is going to be a feature of this site until life JUST SETTLES DOWN, DAMMIT.
In the meantime, have a snippet of awesome to entertain you: Predator X (link courtesy of splinister)
PS: Comments are not turned off, but please be aware that I may be a little distracted and unable to get around to answering any of them for a bit.
The reformat has hit a snag. Of the "machine won't boot at all any more" variety. Er…oops?
It was all going so well, until I made the apparently foolish mistake of updating the system drivers, as microsoft requested. I should have known better, eh? I didn't realise it was possible to achieve the blue screen of death on a fresh, uncorrupted install. Not only did I achieve the blue screen of death, I've taken it a step further and trapped the desktop in a pre-boot failing cycle. I suspect this is because XP triggered an automatic restart after installing one driver, not quite realising it had simultaneously moved on to installing the next driver and wasn't finished that yet.
So I have admitted defeat: a new computer it is.
And because I don't want to fight with Microsoft any more (Vista? No thanks!), and because I don't quite trust myself with Linux yet (I'd probably spend all my time tweaking system configurations instead of, you know, writing)… there is a brand new MacBook on her way to me.
Apologies for the extended silence; it was unavoidable.
I've not been idle while I wasn't here, but madly revising a novel and crying out "What was I thinking?! No, really, can you read this sentence and make a guess at what I might have been thinking? It doesn't seem to have a verb in it, so it's not conveying much in the way of information"… well, it doesn't make for exciting micro-blogging, really.
One thing I did discover was that my camera has a sepia setting, among other customisable settings.1 So of course I spent some time running around, taking photos on random settings. Naturally, a large percentage of these photos were of the cats.
Sometimes the delay on a digital camera gives you that perfect moment's capture
Max was a little (okay a lot) more boring, but gee sepia suits brown cats
The coloured tags mark out the pages which were too tricksome to fix on the first pass. Tricksome could mean the fix involved multiple pages, or finding a more elegant phrase which refused to come to mind at the time, or even that the fix simply required more from me than inserting a missed comma and thus was more than my sleep-deprived brain could handle that particular night. In other words, some will not actually be tricksome. Here's to hoping the latter form the majority of the fixes remaining!
But I do not think I will be working on the manuscript today. For today I came home to a smashed pane on the front door, and a ransacked house.
So far as I can see, they've only taken my jewellery, some loose cash, my old iPod, my chargers (ipod, mobile phone, and digital camera — I'll miss those until I can replace them!), and my backpack to carry it all out in. The jewellery is a blow, not because it was worth all that much but because of the sentimental value: every piece I had was a gift from someone precious to me. I'm somewhat astonished that they didn't take the laptop, which was sitting in plain view, or the LCD monitor of the desktop. It's possible, however, that I surprised them and they were still in the house when I came home — which is not a particularly pleasant thought.
I have spent the afternoon cleaning up after their mess, and the police forensic fellow's dust, and tonight I plan to enjoy a hot shower and some TV watching. Preferably involving crims getting their comeuppance.
Max thought the forensic police officer had placed all that lovely dust on the table in the sunshine just for him to loll about in. Helpful critter.
© 2005 - 2010 Deborah Kalin
