Hi, it's me, your slack-assed blog-buddy.
So, Soap Opera Update: the big birthday party went off beautifully; the birthday girl had a fabulous time being fussed over and sung to by (possibly) the loudest gang of miscreants assembled. I did NOT go gently into that liquid state I was dreaming of; there was too much to do, and I wanted it all to go smoothly. So no drunk hostess, which is probably for the best - less calories to work off at the gym, right?
Monday night I attempted to upgrade my browser to Windows Explorer 8, which apparently is TOTALLY incompatible with my aging, almost 5 year-old computer (and doesn't that piss you off, that expensive shit like a computer is obsolete in less than 5 years? Can you see my middle finger raised aloft, Mr. Gates? What, is it hard to see for the forest of middle fingers?). After installing the IE8, my computer promptly did it's finest James Brown Breaking Down imitation: ("I can't do no more!") there was no internets to be had, and all her inner workings were Gorilla Glue gunked-up. Neat, huh? I dragged my moronic behunkus off to bed at 1 AM, only to rise at 7:30 to escort the herd to school (well, ok, part of the herd - one calf leaves at 7:00 now - the steer sees him off. Not sure how or why I'm calling my family cows - I could be a little punchy yet.), and get back to the business of trying to fix my mess.
After 3 fruitless hours on the phone with my internet provider, Hewlett Packard, and Microsoft (where the guy hung up on me), and three System Restores which didn't restore much, I knew it was time to wipe the slate clean (oh Christ, another metaphor!), and send the computer back in a time warp to it's beginning. Also known as System Recovery, and it means a lot of re-installing headaches, because after 5 years, where have all those Registration numbers and passwords, etc. gotten to? Luckily (in this case), I'm a bit of a packrat, albeit an organized one, and the whole caboodle was tucked in a bag that I'd stuck in the desk, so not too bad of a headache, but the bundled BS that came back up on the System Recovery made up for that!
Long story short, I spent all day yesterday getting the Portal of Internet Goodness back up and looking reasonably normal. It only took 12 hours of un-installing, re-installing, re-booting, etc. to get there, but at least Santa can do his shopping for Christmas now, and the kids won't miss out on their Saturday morning "Dino Run" game. Life is good.
Tomorrow, Bea and I head for the coast, on our tri-yearly (is that right? No, more like quarterly, only maybe not that often. Are you with me?) trek to Newport to see Doc and get assorted cats their shots, meds, what have you. It's an all day thing, but we save a LOT of money on the vet bills, and the care is superior. So suck on that Academy East Animal Hospital - the people who thought it might be good idea to check a cat for FeLv when he was presented with obvious poisoning symptoms. Because god forbid they would get their "piddies" dirty looking into the scary cat's mouth. You would think with a Vet School right up the road in Raleigh, at NCSU, you could get good care around here, but nope, nopety, nope. All they want to do is run a million expensive tests, and then waffle over the diagnosis, presumably so they can run some more tests. Bastards. I can guarantee, that even if one of my cats has some surprise issue tomorrow, it will still cost me less, for both cats, than if I had take just one of them to a local vet. And it's a road trip with Bea, with a lovely lunch in either Beaufort (a very cute town), or at the Sanitary Restaurant, a horrid name for a place everyone eats at; David Sedaris talks about going there in his book, "Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim" - I'm sure you can imagine the fun he had with a name like that!
So how the hell are you guys? I'm terribly out of the loop, though HALLELUJAH!!!!! the kitchen is finally painted, and the big party is past me, so now all I have to freak out about is getting my Christmas shopping done - piece of cake, comparatively speaking!
