Give us this day our daily power outage
At around 5:30 this morning I awoke to an ominous thunderous sound. It wasn’t actually thunder, but Xena thunderously knocking on the front door wanting to be let in before the actual thunder got here. I let her in and then shut down the Avid, which I had left on all night to render some stuff, and then we got yet another monsoon, and more flooding (hey, maybe we’ll get more Gamera!) and what’s becoming an almost daily tradition: the storm-induced power outage. I’m sure with storms rolling through just about every other day that there isn’t a chance to do a really comprehensive repair job on substations and whatnot, but it’s getting kind of silly.
Please Squeeze. I’d have something insanely cool to show you video-wise right now, except that all of a sudden, I can’t get Sorenson Squeeze to run on a single machine in my house. I’ll admit that I haven’t tried my wife’s laptop yet (though it has other issues that make me hesitant to even try, such as rolling over, powering down and playing dead with no warning), but it’s incredibly frustrating – this also means no new site video for stuff like Phosphor Dot Fossils (this has also held up a promo video that I’ve put together for the PDF DVD, which I’m sure is probably helping sales to drop off significantly, which they have). So maybe “incredibly frustrating” is being a bit on the charitable side. I’ve submitted a trouble ticket, though I have the feeling the fix will be “Upgrade to our new version for $XX!” I really don’t seem to be having much luck on the computer end these days, which is a surprise, because normally it’s purely mechanical problems that give me massive headaches. Which makes this next bit all the more surprising…
Holy #$%&, I fixed the air conditioner! Okay, maybe fix is too strong a work, because it wasn’t really broken, just frozen over, and this “fix” involved pointing a hair dryer on full heat at the ice until it melted away, and then taking a bucket full of warm soapy water and cleaning the intake vent, and then changing the filter that I should’ve changed probably a month or two back, which, if I’d done it then, this probably would never have happened. So on the balance of it, purely mechanical things still caused a massive headache. But I actually fixed it – if you want to call it that – without calling anyone out to do it, which I couldn’t afford anyway, which surprises me as much as it does anyone else. Still, I doubt the high-priced HVAC techs of the world have anything to fear from me. There are still plenty of people who are willing to pay them big bucks to aim a hair dryer on full heat at their iced-over intake.
More fun with Globat. Welcome back to Globat.com, fine web hosting and the home of Internal Server Errors galore! Today’s issue: “Server shutdown in progress.” Repeatedly. Sometimes you can actually get what you want from theLogBook’s databases…and just as often you can’t. The really fun part of this is on Scribblings, where each server shutdown forces me to go in and reconfigure my anti-spam plugin from scratch. If Globat sucked any more, they’d be off the Suck Scale on my suckometer. I can’t get the site moved away from these bozos fast enough.
Here’s hoping I can get some good Sorenson Squeeze lovin’ soon, because I’m eager to show off this…thing…that I want to show off. He said vaguely.… Read more
Okay, so maybe we didn’t skate out of the bad weather as unscathed as I thought. Apparently there was some roof damage, nothing big but also not the sort of thing you want to allow to get big over time, and – to my total slackjawed amazement – the insurance adjuster decided both vehicles were totalled. 😯 I really didn’t think they were that bad – yeah, a few dings and dents here and there, especially on the driver’s side of my wife’s vehicle which she uses to deliver the mail – but apparently the insurance company feels like spending money. So…I guess the check’s in the mail, so to speak. In the meantime, either hail or wind or both apparently managed to push our sliding door off its track, something I had to fix tonight.
The winner of the Really Bad Visual Pun post yesterday is…well, there are two winners, since I posted it here and on MySpace. The blawg winner was Ubik, while the MySpace winner was Kati (as I said in the comments over there, dudes, you guys just got beat by a girl on a Star Wars gag. C’mon!). The answer, of course, was “Jar Jar Binks”. (Actually, even that’s a bit of a cheat – there’s only one jar of binks, but I just turned it around 180 degrees, moved it over a bit, and glued the two photos together.) Stay tuned for even more cheesy-ass puns constructed out of ordinary household items. (Or, as Ubik pointed out, cheesy items in my household. Not everyone’s got a jar o’ binkies sitting around. But they should.)
through me, that something needs to be done with the pasture. Tactical nukes spring immediately to mind, but maybe just bulldozing the damn thing might be more realistic – pave the whole thing over, turn it into a giant solar panel, with big windmills at one end and a couple of greenhouses for growing food. What a sight that would be. But as ridiculous as it sounds, it’d be a damn sight better than the Absolutely Nothing that we’re doing with 3+ acres right now. It’s such a jungle out there that I half expect the Smoke Monster to pop out from behind the barn or something. Hey, there’s an idea. I could cut those guys such a better deal than Hawaii could.… 
I’ve had a couple of train wreck days here lately, and Friday was definitely the icing on the cake. Evan was more temperamental than he’s been since he was born, and it was just because he’s been such a good kid, not prone to tantrums or other big displays without a reason, that it caught me off guard. And I know he’s still a good kid – I don’t believe there’s really “misbehavior” at the almost-four-month mark, just reactions to stimuli that I’m just not picking up on. (It doesn’t really help that I’m worn out at the moment.) It just alarmed me to feel like he was testing my patience, even though he wasn’t. It wasn’t him, just all in my head. 
Let it never be said that I don’t know how to party. I left 2007 behind and rang in 2008 with a big bottle in my hand and getting kisses from a sassy young female.