So you may recall I got a new netbook a while back. At the same time we bought that, we also bought additional memory for it. We were going to upgrade the memory on this and on the old laptop, which we are going to fix up to give to a friend who is having heinous computer issues. So the first problem in our clever plan came when we discovered none of the approximately fifty million screwdrivers we have around here will actually fit the screws on the back of the computers.

Well, fine. We decided to do the sensible thing and order an electronics kit from Amazon. We wait for an interminable amount of time for that to actually arrive until today, when I get a package from Amazon. Exited I open it up... very surprised to find two huge air bubbles and nothing but a packing slip and some very light object at the bottom. This can't possibly be what we ordered, can it? Why no. No it isn't. It is, in fact, a CHEESE SLICER. A steel bladed cheese slicer with a rubber handle, how fancy. How.... not what we ordered at all. Pardon me while I cheese slice the back of my computer to get at the memory inside. Yeah, that'll work.

More fucking delays. Joy.

Oh, and speaking of delays... we got our insurance cards in the mail yesterday. Good news, right? Yeah, except that coverage doesn't actually start until December 1st and their 'helpful' website shows like ten doctors in all of South Jersey who will actually take the insurance. So I have to call around to doctors and see if any of the ones I actually want to go to will take what we have. But hey, I've got a whole five weeks or so to do it in! Five whole weeks of still being sick, unless I want to give in and go to the goddamn clinic again- in which you wait three hours to be seen for five minutes and usually it doesn't do any good anyhow.

For those of you who don't know, let me preface this by saying that I am the significantly younger sibling of two older brothers (I'm 39, they're in their mid-fifties). At various times during my life, I have looked up to these guys - wanted to tag along with them, wanted to do the things that they are doing and so on. I still most of the time think they're pretty cool - Joe's a nice guy who's good at fixing all kinds of things , and Ron's really knowledgeable about local history. They're usually there for me when I need them, and they're good brother to have.

And then there's days I'd like to smack one of them.

Yesterday brother Joe called from Virginia and we had a nice conversation about Woodstock's 40th anniversary (we'd both watched the same special), his church, the political state of our country and so forth. It was really nice. We discussed things and no one got all pissy or anything- it was all pleasant conversations. Let's call this - GOOD BROTHER TIME. See, that is how I like to spend time with my brothers - talking about something pleasant, having nice calm conversation and so on.

Then today I spent time with Ron. This time included him giving me the assbackwards directions to get somewhere (No, really, I said turn RIGHT. No. No You didn't, hence why I went the other way) and trying to tell me that he should have a user account on my mom's laptop so he could 'see his computer at home and show her stuff.' IDEK how he thinks that is supposed to work, but let me tell you I was annoyed when he started telling me that I didn't know what I was talking about and that we're 'denying mom access to things' (We have her laptop set up with a limited user account with us having the admin so she can enjoy without having to worry about breaking things). Also? Aus and I BOUGHT mom that laptop for her birthday, to the tune of 500 dollars. Ron kicked in .... nothing. No, he does not get to have a user account, and even if he did ... it wouldn't work for what he was trying to do anyhow!! Argh.

He has a laundry list of things he wants me and Aus to come over and fix on his computer - and there is a reason why! Because he does not KNOW WHAT HE iS DOING when he uses it. This does not mean I am going to let him have unlimited access to do stupid things with mom's laptop. It's bad enough that kids try to hijack it every so often. The laptop is for mom, period. When my laptop broke down, I didn't even BORROW hers, because it's HER LAPTOP. Grrrr. Let's just call today BAD BROTHER TIME.

(Note that the blood pressure being all crazy means I have even-less-patience than I usually do for dealing with this, so I may be more annoyed that I would have otherwise been. But still!)

I have an adapter for the laptop again, yay! That means it'll be a lot easier for me to work on things again. Now if I could just kick this depression, I'd be back to full steam.

I'm listening to Jenny Lewis's new album, Acid Tongue. Okay stuff I guess, but I feel like I've moved on from all this so much that it's hard to make a connection with it. After all that went down, it's just hard to muster any enthusiasm for these things. I gave the last RK show in our area a miss, and I'm probably not going to the Jenny Lewis show in October either. I might have made the effort if Pierre was opening for her in our area, but he's only doing the West Coast leg. Rilo Kiley was the soundtrack for a lot of things that went on in my life for the past five years or so - but now it's pretty much just familiar pretty noise. So it goes. Working for them changed some things, brought me to some places I might not otherwise have gone, so no regrets.

I think this next chapter of my life is primarily a selfish one, anyhow. I'm focusing a lot of my energies internally, trying to work through some of this current of hopelessness that's run through me since the finances have taken this down turn. The way this world is going, man it's hard to think of what things will be like if the Republicans win this election. How can so many people be so blind to how bad the past years have been going? The downslide of our life has pretty much paralleled the downslide of the country - and no, we're not in a depression, are we? Just because everything's so damn bad with no end in sight. For all that McCain says he's about change too - the only thing he's changed are his lines.

Anyhow, other than trying to break the downward spiral, I feel that this is my time to start seriously focusing on my writing. I need to get the second comic script together, and finish the intro for this first comic. I'm definitely going to try NaNo this year - the poll seems to have Hans in the lead, but I'm pretty sure that won't be my option. Too much research needed on that one . I might work on Of Falorn, because it's a descriptive action type story and I need to work on my ability to pull that off. But I'm also thinking about the vampire novel - I really really want to revisit that, and fix a lot of the amateurish mistakes I made when writing it the first time around. Then there's the sequel to Tequila Sunset, which I've got almost all worked out in my head and just never set down. The first story pretty much wrote itself, so this one might do the same. I do want to finish What Simon Said someday, but not now I don't think. Victor Charlie is another possibility, I forgot to even put that one on the poll. More Michael is always appealing, but now with the comic - I feel like I'm giving him enough time as it is and I don't want to get too ahead of myself with the second series. Endless Summer - it would probably do me a world of good to finish that, because the events that it's based on are something I need to make some sense of anyhow.

... you know, I really don't like a couple of these songs. Godspeed, and Trying to Love you. The vocals are kind of painful. And Carpetbaggers - the part that used to be sung by Jonathan Rice in the live version, it just doesn't come through right on this version. And it's more polished and less real, if that makes sense. It's not so bad in Jack Killed Mom, but it's still a noticeable difference - it seems like in order to get the Special Guest Stars in, they cut out a lot of what made the songs good in the first place.

In roleplaying news, we're thinking about a new game, based on the Oregon Trail and using the Serenity RPG system. My WWII game is dragging like crazy, and the Buffy game is slowing down to a near standstill. Panfandom seems to be the way to go these days - but I'm not sure I could stand the crack inherent in that.

Facebook is pissing me off hardcore - they've always had some major inconveniences built into the system, like how you can't see anyone's page that isn't in your network. What the hell is up with that? Makes it very annoying. One of the things we tend to do is friend people for our musicians on Facebook - and they have this arbitrary limit to how many friends requests you can make per day. At least they tell you when you're approaching that limit, so you can stop and pick it up again tomorrow. But for some reason, even though we followed this procedure we usually do - they shut down one of our musician's pages saying that we were 'abusing a feature' or whatever. Eff you, Facebook. We wrote to them to try and straighten out the problem, but how are you supposed to network on Facebook? It's pointless to build their special 'band page' until you actually have a network of friends to try and get them to fan it - because in Facebook land you can't invite anyone you aren't friends with to fan your band page, either. It's like a vicious circle of crap-that-doesn't-really-work. Myspace isn't much better really, but at least you can SEE and FRIEND people. Grr. So far they haven't written back , but that could be because of the weekend. But I hope this doesn't turn into one of those have-to-track-down-contact situations.

In work stuff news - today, I had to set up a YouTube channel and a Flickr account/group for Terami. The youtube channel was simple, easy to understand, and took not long at all to get situated. Easy peasy.

Then we came to Flickr. First, the obnoxious thing required me to log in with a Yahoo ID to even think about creating an account. So I logged in with mine, and later had to create a seprate one to transfer it over to so it's something Terami can access too. Then I set up the group - which is supposed to contain a group photo pool, so you can see the pictures uploaded from the account into the photo pool. There's a setting to allow this to be publicly visible to all users - so if you click that, it should.. y'know.. make the pictures publicly visible, right? Wrong. No pictures.

There's also some other check buttons - safe, moderate, adult. It doesn't explain what these settings are, really. I click, I reclick... in various combinations. NOTHING will make the pictures publically visible as far as I can tell.

Yet I know it can be done, because I can see the Rilo Kiley group photo pool without being logged in.

So.. if anyone has Flickr, please explain to me what internet gods I have to make an offering to in order to configure this thing properly because it's making me CRAZY. I'm also supposed to be setting up Imeem and Gather accounts, but hell, not tonight. Flickr has pretty much run me out of patience for the internet today.


In non work-stuff news, I went to lunch with my two brothers and mom today, and then we played Super Scrabble. I kicked much ass. Unforuntely, we played it outside on the deck, and the world was full of pollen today - which is agrivating my allergies. I think that's making me grumpy too, in addition to flickr.


Edit: I also noticed that I managed to misspell 'Hirsch' in like a million places (left out the c) - fortunately in none of the urls themselves, but ugh. If anyone sees a place I assed it up, please tell me so I can fix it before it embarasses both the artist and myself. I is train professional, for realz. Grr. I think this is just not my day.

Edit x 2: Looks like the Race to National Train day is over, and green won (though in the end, they decided to give all three conductors a prize, which is cool)- so our team not only won the competition, but Aus also gets a $100 dollar AMEX gift card! Yay!

Edit x3: Apparently, Flickr needs to 'review' your account, which could take up to a week, before it lets your pictures posted to a group pool be publicly visible. I guess this is to prevent you from posting pictures of your willy or your naked granny or something. But still! They should have A BIG NOTIFICATION that this is the case. Not me trying to figure out wtf for hours, and then finally having to ask in the help forum until someone finally had the answer. MRgh. I hate you, internet. I'm going to bed.

I took mom for her computer lesson the other day - she did really well. She might be getting her own laptop someday soon.

I'm watching a movie with her right now, Blades of Glory. It's kind of stupidly funny.

Tonight I have to write my column and do some work on games.

The bank thinks I have negative thirty six dollars right now because some of our funds are tied up and haven't cleared yet. Yayyy.

A bunch of Gather-folks are still freaking out over the new upgrades.

How're you guys doing?

This 'content strike' can suck it. I don't care if they cancel basic accounts - jeebus, people- get a decent ad blocker! I never see ads on the internets.

We bought a universal adapter thingus for the laptop, so now we have laptoply goodness again, yay!

We are in Culpeper, VA getting ready to go to nikcool and jasonbeast's wedding tomorrow. Niki and Jim are both awesome in person, much like they are online. Niki's family is also really nice - we've met lots of Nikirelatives, and Jim's mom and everything.

Thursday's train trip was nice- train has lot of leg room, and we got to eat in the dining car and met a couple of nice people that were going to New Orleans and talked to them about train trips. I'd like to go on another train trip someday- it' was really sweet. Much better than flying.

Today we got up and ate complimentary breakfast (Yum) and the Budget auto guy came to pick us up. The car was a nice brand new Chrysler Sebring - only 87 miles on it. We then met Niki and Jim for lunch, and after that they had to get hair and nails done for the wedding - so we went to the Culpeper history museum. The museum was really nice - and I got a couple of cool souvenir poseable civil war generals.

We spent like a billion hours in Walmart because they didn't have the food trays ready for us to pick up. They had to make new broccoli salad, and they shorted us on the potato salad too. Grr. Then the lines were super long, and wallymart wouldn't take a visa gift card for the laptop adapter and shit we bought - so bah on that. Then we went to the rehearsal dinner and took some pictures. Niki's grandma's church is really pretty! It's very historical, and was all nicely decorated for the wedding. Jim's best man was kinda... over-the-top. And there were a lot of people and such, and it was pretty overwhelming and we were so tired so we went back to the hotel where we are now.

Have to get up early tomorrow and pick up the wedding cake and take it to the reception room, because the hotel we're staying at is right near the bakery. Eight am is wayyy too early to handle something as important as a wedding cake! I hope we don't ass it up somehow- Niki and Jim would kill us. Or at least, be sad and cakeless ={ . If the Sebring had a carseat, we'd be buckling the cake in. No wait, that would squish it. As it is, Aus is going to be holding it veryyyy carefully while we drive. We're also taking picture at the wedding! I hope they come out nice.

Tomorrow's the big day for Niki and Jim! They're such a great couple already- I know they're going to have an awesome marriage. Did you know they met through playing in one of our games? Roleplaying brings people together!

My laptop is currently in the shop, having suffered a power failure of sorts. So I am mostly on the large computer, which it is hard for me to do things on. This is why I haven't been on AIM, and I probably won't be for another few days. Also means I won't be doing gaming and the like.

So if anyone wants to say hi or anything, leave a message here or if you have IRC drop in to our usual hangout at server irc.darkmyst.org , room #the_Loft .

Good news is that we are almost all ready for the trip, and laptop should be fixed in time for that.

The IRC server is being so evil today. I'm going to hang out on AIM in addition to trying to reconnect to the server. My AIM for those who don't know and care, is OghmaCelt .

I'm back on server now - but no one else is.

Server hasn't been connecting right all freaking day. Maybe Aus can figure out what to do after I go get him..

sucks. So if your keyboard suddenly dies a painful horrible death like ours did this week, I'll save you some time and worry and tell you what we did.

1) Go to Wal-Mart.

2)Give them ten dollars.

3) Get a Mirco Inovations keyboard that was much spiffier than your old one, anyway.

4)Use old keyboard as target practice.

5)Type merrily on new one.