Catchy Name Needed

This entry - or maybe the next one - should get me "above the line" in Holidailies, meaning averaging one entry a day. Jette and Chip have the site set up where you can only post to the portal so often, and this year it seems like you can't get above that average of one a day. So currently it's day 23, and there are a couple of people who already have 23 entries, and quite a few more with 22, and then there is the dreaded line between 22 and 21. I am mostly joking about the "dreaded" part, but I know I'm not the only person who tries to stay above that line, because I've heard other people talk about it. I should probably value quality over quantity, but let's face it, I'm not ever going to be the next Joan Didion, so I mostly settle for quantity. It's not really that hard for me to write an entry a day - when I get a blank page, I usually can ramble along and find something to say fairly easily. If I tried to demand of myself that I write a really quality entry, I would probably freeze up and never get anything written at all. Low expectations apparently help keep you from getting writer's block.

I have pictures from Christmas but I'm still working on those. I took a lot of pictures of wiggly small children and I have to sort out the good ones from the blurry ones!

We saw two movies yesterday, although they weren't the same two. Rob apparently watched Burn After Reading (is that the right name?) before I got up; then we went to see the Sherlock Holmes movie, then after he went to bed I fired up On Demand again and watched Adventureland. Adventureland was better than SH, although I liked them both. I went through an entire viewing of Adventureland without realizing that the girl love interest was Kristin Stewart, of Twilight Fame. I did know she looked familiar, but I didn't snap to who she was. Good movie, anyway. Sherlock Holmes... I dunno, I liked a lot of it, but I felt like it lagged in the middle. Good comedy bits, though - in fact they both did.

I just watched another movie, actually, because I installed Windows 7 and I needed something to distract me while it was doing its thing - it took it the whole length of the movie to install, too. So I watched "Wimbledon" which I had picked up at Tuesday Morning or someplace for really really cheap. But it turned out not to be a bad movie. I'm sort of a sucker for romantic comedies, if they're reasonably smart ones, and this one was. (Reasonably so.) It's actually a romantic comedy/sports movie, which is sort of different. And I adore Paul Bettany.

Windows 7 is so far so good - I really can't tell that much difference from Vista. I need to try out LOTRO and see how it runs - rumor is that it runs faster. I've felt like my computer was dragging lately so I'm hoping maybe it'll fix that.

I thought the new computer would look just like the old one, but it's slimmer, which is nice. And has a lot more memory, etc., so yay!

WoW is downloading. Important things first!

I got all busy at work today, or I would have posted this earlier: I, uh, bought a computer. I held out less than 18 hours after saying I wasn't going to rush, but oh well. We found a coupon in Rob's e-mail for $350 off a Dell Inspiron desktop, which expired today. And this morning columbina and I did some conferring about what I actually needed to have a system suitable for playing games, and decided that with some upgrades, the Inspiron would work. Even with a number of extras including an obscenely big widescreen monitor, it came out under $1000. (Let's put it this way... this monitor is bigger than our last TV.) I really don't think this system is likely to get much cheaper than that, anyway.

I am back online, sorta. Or rather, I am back online, but not on the computer I would like to be online with. Luckily (I suppose) we had brought my mother's two-year-old Compaq home with us over the weekend, because the Dell refuses to reboot. At all. I have no idea why, other than the fact that I'm pretty sure that a magnet - a fairly weak one, I think - does seem to have come into contact with the computer during the move. That would be bad, I suppose, right? I was too busy today to worry about it, anyway. I would really like to just buy a new computer rather than trying to fix it, but I think my husband will divorce me if I do that without convincing him it is really, really necessary first. This means I have to at least pay some pretty serious lip service to trying to fix it first. (If you're wanting to be helpful, it's not actually that it won't REboot - it won't boot at all. Nada. The power comes on, and that's it. I tried hitting F8 - that's what gets it into safe mode, right? and still nothing.)

Other than that, the move went fine. I am not blaming the movers for whatever is wrong with the computer. So when the cable guy came this morning, rather than having him try to hook up the nonfunctional computer in the living room, I had him do the one in the bedroom that actually worked. Thus, actual high-speed internet, and (forcolumbina's info) I was able to get GW up and functioning, if slightly sluggishly and with many, many pauses for downloads, just now. (We went up to Mom's house today to retrieve her microwave, which got forgotten in the press of other things yesterday, and when we passed the brand-shiny-new Best Buy on the freeway, I thought, Y'know, I shoulda just dropped the computer off with them to see what they could've made of it. But I didn't think of it then.)

Yesterday I saw my first-ever female mover. Maybe we are backwards in this part of the country, as we are in many other ways, goodness knows, but I had never ever seen a girl on a moving crew before. She was not exactly burly (not a bit) but she had some muscle somewhere because she got it done. Although admittedly I didn't really see her holding up one end of any terribly heavy furniture - the two guys on the crew seemed to be handling most of that - still, she was slinging boxes around like a pro. We had the three-pronged move going on: old apartment to new apartment to Mom's and back to new apartment, and they got it done in a bit over 5 hours, I think, which was pretty good considering there was about an hour and a half of driving in there. Everything is a mess but I do have my sewing room! Yay!

I wrote a whole incredibly long entry, and the power flickered out for about half a second and I lost the whole thing. That's what I get for not saving. (I used to be really religious about saving every 5 minutes, but I have slipped. I mean, how often does the power actually go out?) Shit. My beautiful writing will probably never see the light of day. I do good to write things once, much less twice!

(Written this afternoon, although you can probably figure that out.)

The network is down so I am taking my frustrations out on Notepad. Most of my work - at least the part of it that requires any brains at all - involves working on files stored on the campus servers, so when the network goes down, I'm screwed. As much as I hate freaking Microsoft Outlook, I can't function very well without it. I am doing a distribution right now, which is one of the more brainless things, but even for that, I need the network to print labels. I have a printed copy of the distribution list, as it happens, though, so I'm just writing the labels by hand for this one, since it's not a really big distribution anyway. But it's still kind of a pain.

Everybody's computers went down early this morning, and since then, it's been kind of hit or miss - some people were able to get into the network and some weren't. I never have, since 8:30 this morning or so. About 30 minutes ago, they finally took the entire network down and it was supposed to be down for 15 minutes. Naturally, it's not back yet. Oh, plus? I've been scheduling all these meetings - it's pretty much all I've done for the last 10 days or so - and all the ones today had to be cancelled because they need to print out these reports for the meetings, and they can't do it without, guess what, network access. I am one frustrated puppy.

It's not helping that I didn't sleep well last night, either. I'm almost always tired on Mondays but it's worse than usual today. I didn't go to sleep until about 1am, and I woke up about 4 or 4:30 and never did go back to sleep. So we're talking about trying to function on three hours of sleep or so. (Actually, I'm doing pretty well, considering. That's not a lot of sleep.) Today is quilt guild day and I'm supposed to leave early and drive up to the mainland to have dinner before the meeting, but I don't think I'm going to go. I'm going to go ahead and leave early, I think, and go up to Foley's at Mall of the Mainland - which is nearer than the other mall where we were on Saturday - and return those shoes and then come back home. Mom was already not planning on going to quilt guild anyway, because she doesn't have to go to radiation today but she does have all three therapy appointments (that would be PT, OT and speech) and she thought she'd be too tired. (Hey, how come MDAnderson gets a holiday and we don't? That sucks.) (See, that's what they get for trying to make us work on President's Day, the computers are down and nobody's going to get a damn thing done anyway.)