4-22-08

So, it was fairly early on Saturday that I knew the day – if not the entire weekend – was going to go to shit. I was taking a break from cleaning the house (just a surface clean, mind you, not anything fancy), when I found that the toilet in the small bathroom off the computer room wouldn’t flush. I tried plunging it, it didn’t work, and so I asked Fred to come inside and take a look at it.

When I tried flushing the toilet in the hallway bathroom, it flushed but it made a scary gurgling sound, and that’s when we realized there was going to be some kind of issue.

Luckily, Fred had the business card of the guy who’d run water lines to the chicken and pig yards, and he’s a guy who deals with all kinds of outdoor plumbing, so Fred called him to ask for advice. He said it sounded like a septic tank issue, that he needed to get his truck, and he’d be over as soon as he could.

In the meantime, Fred told me, I needed to stop the washer and dishwasher, use the toilet if I had to, but NO flushing. I think you can imagine my heartfelt joy when I heard those words. I finished cleaning the house, spent some time with the various foster kitties (and non-foster kitties), and then sat down in front of my computer to look at some of the pictures I’d taken.

I’d looked at a few when my computer slowed down considerably, and I shut down PaintShop Pro and reopened it, things slowed down even more, so I rebooted.

I should say “ATTEMPTED to reboot”, actually. Because my goddamn computer would not reboot. No matter what I tried, it wouldn’t reboot. Finally, after several temper tantrums, I had to summon Fred inside to try to figure out what the fucking fuck was going on.

What the fucking fuck was going on, apparently, is that my motherboard was fried. Gone. GONE. GODDAMN IT. And me with ten million pictures on my computer, and not having backed anything up in, oh, about a year. I tried to get Fred to promise me that we’d be able to get all my stuff off my hard drive, but he is a cautious man and would promise me nothing.

Bastard.

Meantime, the outside plumbing guy had shown up, looked at our septic tank, said that it needed to be pumped out, but hey – guess what? Apparently the septic tank had three covers, and when the Banks’ (the previous owners) had the septic tank pumped out a couple of years ago, they just uncovered one of the covers and pumped that part of the tank out. The other two covers needed to be uncovered (they were under a few feet of dirt) and the entire tank needed to be pumped out. The plumbing guy had to go get his backhoe to dig out the rest of the septic tank, and would be back in a few hours.

He’d just shown up to do so, when Fred finished up what he was doing outside, and decided it was time to go get dinner and maybe stop at St@ples to look for new computers.

“New computerS?” you’re saying. “Did Fred’s computer die also?”

Why, no. Fred’s computer didn’t die also, it’s just that I was going to need a new computer, so he decided he needed to get himself a new computer as well. NO FAIR, I say. I wasn’t going to argue, though, because if I’d even tried, no doubt he would have been all “Well, you have a LAPTOP, you should just use that!”, and I’d have no good comeback to that.

So we stopped at St@ples, and not only did they not have much to choose from, they didn’t have any computers other than laptops, and so we shrugged and went along our way and Fred was all “Should we stop at W@l-Mart and look?” and I was all “Ugh. I do NOT want to stop at Wal-Mart on a Saturday evening, because there will be too many people there, and you will act like a bitchy princess.” He promised not to act like a bitchy princess, so we stopped.

Fred pumped the guy working in the electronics department about one of the computers and the guy had to go look up the information, and I wandered off to the fabric department to look at (obv.) fabric, and was just walking back to the electronics department when Fred called me on my cell phone and told me to hurry along, he was checking out.

So we got brand-spanking-new computers, Hewlett Packard something-or-other, with the blah blah blah and the blah blah gigs of blah and RAM and blah. Alls I know is that when we got home and Fred hooked up my new computer, he said “It said it would take about 20 minutes to run through the first time” and I said impatiently “Well, are you going to turn it ON?” and he told me it was on, only it was so amazingly quieter than my old computer that I couldn’t even tell it was ON.

The best thing we did when we bought those computers was to buy a Seagate Free Agent Go 160GB Portable External Drive, and Fred put my old hard drive in his old computer and booted it up, and all I had to do was copy everything from my hard drive to the external drive, and it took a couple of hours to copy (due to all the pictures, music, movies, crap, etc.), but if I’d had to burn everything to DVD, I’d still be sitting there doing that. Once my stuff was copied, I started copying it to the hard drive of my new computer, and then Fred copied stuff from his old hard drive, and the external drive is big enough that it could hold all our stuff on it with no problem whatsoever.

And now I’m going to leave the external hard drive hooked up to my computer, and I’m going to schedule a hard drive backup once a week so that when this computer shits the bed (and I have no doubt that it will), I won’t have to have a hissy fit about MY PICTURES! and MY MUSIC! and MY DOCUMENTS!, because it will have been backed up.

Regarding the septic tank, the guy got the septic tank pumped out with no problems. He told Fred that in his opinion the septic tank was too small for the house, and Fred and I talked about having it replaced and we decided that we’re going to put that off ’til we absolutely have to deal with it (you are WELCOME, Future Robyn and Fred! Suck it!) and the guy left the septic tank uncovered and said he’d check on it in a few days and then cover it back up.

For the record, an uncovered septic tank (and I mean that it’s got lids on it, it’s just that the lids are meant to be covered. Septic tanks are not meant to be uncovered, they belong under a couple of feet of dirt!) FUCKING REEKS. If you stand outside the computer room door and take a deep breath, you will swear that the wind is blowing from the pig yard. Septic tank = pig yard stank. In case you were wondering.

Oh, and the other thing that happened Saturday regards the coverlet I ordered from JC Penney for my bed (this one, in Smoke Blue Solid). I ordered this coverlet in Queen size (since my bed is Queen size) and I liked the look of it a lot, but the Queen size wasn’t quite long enough on the sides for me. I’d rather have the sides hang a little too long than a little too short, y’know? So I sent it back and ordered a King size instead. The replacement came on Thursday and I put the package on my dresser, because obviously one cannot put a brand-spanking-new coverlet on top of DIRTY sheets. Saturday morning I changed my sheets and took the coverlet out and shook it out onto my bed, and then I paused and thought “Oh, I’ve got that on there wrong”, and I moved it around the other way, and still it wasn’t working, and then I looked at the tag, and those fuckers had CHARGED me for a King size, had put a shipping sticker on the outside of the package the coverlet came in that said it was King size, but in actuality it was Queen size.

I was FURIOUS. Because all I fucking want is my new coverlet for my bed, one that will go with the bedroom and not show the grimy cat prints, and here I was going to have to wait EVEN LONGER.

Now might be the time to mention that I was feeling a wee bit premenstrual over the weekend. If you must know.

So I stomped down to my computer (before it died on me. Maybe the hatred I sent at JC Penny while I was (nicely) asking the customer service people what the fuck I was supposed to do now BECAUSE I AM NOT PAYING POSTAGE TO RETURN THIS GODDAMN THING AND I AM NOT PAYING POSTAGE FOR YOU TO SEND ME THE CORRECT ONE, MOTHERFUCKERS caused my computer to die. Who knows?) and I filled out a form on the JC Penney page, and eventually I got an email back from them saying they’d send me a UPS label to affix to the package and I could either request a refund or ask for the correct item to be sent to me.

Good enough, I suppose.

Sunday’s bout of fuming and irrational anger centered around Fred and I going up to the foster kitty room specifically so I could take pictures of each of their little faces and I got a bunch of really good pictures aside from those, and then when I sat down at my computer to look at the pictures, I found that the memory stick hadn’t been in the camera so none of those pictures had really been taken GODDAMN IT. I don’t know WHY this fucking expensive, fancy fucking camera can’t give you an error message if you try to take a picture without the memory stick in it. I also don’t know WHY my fucking husband can NEVER put the fucking memory stick back in the fucking camera when he’s DONE WITH IT.

Also, he’d decided that he was going to make Splash the Feral Kitty love him no damn matter what, so he dumped her out of her kitty pyramid and tried to pet her, and she ran under the sewing desk and hunched there, looking terrified. I talked to the woman Splash belonged to (who came and picked her up on Monday) and arranged to have her come pick Splash up, and then I wondered how the holy fucking hell I was going to get that damn cat in the carrier. Because if she was in the kitty pyramid, it had been my plan to hold the pyramid with the opening matching up to the cat carrier opening and gently coax her to move into the carrier. Coax her with a little force, if necessary. But since Fred had dumped her out, she’d apparently decided the pyramid wasn’t safe, and so she’d taken to hiding under the desk or the bed or the dresser, but not anywhere where she could be cornered. We tried to coax her back into the pyramid, but she wasn’t having it, so I decided to take her food away, put the carrier in the room, put some food in the back of the carrier, and hope she’d decide that was a good place to be. At bedtime, she was still hiding under the bed and my general plan for catching her on Monday was to put on heavy clothes and heavy gloves, and just basically chase her around the room until I caught her HA HA HA AS IF.

And, let’s see. Monday’s bout of irrational, over-the-top anger centered around the hour when I couldn’t connect to the internet because our phone and internet service had gone down for no apparent reason AS IT LIKES TO DO FROM TIME TO TIME GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

I think, let’s see… Yeah, that’s about it. That’s what my weekend was like.

The two good things that happened yesterday were:

1. Fred looked in the guest bedroom before he left for work, but Splash was still hiding under the bed. By the time I got up an hour later, she’d decided to move into the pyramid, which I hoped would make it easier to put her in the carrier. When her owner called to let me know she’d be on her way soon, I went into the guest bedroom, put a heavy denim shirt over the sweatshirt I was wearing and put on some heavy gloves because I absolutely knew that she was going to escape from the pyramid and I was going to have to grab her and I didn’t want to have my hand shredded in the process. So I held the carrier up to the pyramid, pulled the little cushion she was hiding under out of the way, and she looked up at me and casually moseyed into the carrier and settled in with no problems at all.

Giving Mister Boogers and his hetred a run for his money.

2. Upon reading the email instructions for returning the coverlet to JC Penny, I saw that after affixing the label to the package, I was to drop it off at a UPS store to be sent back to JC Penny. This PISSED ME OFF because I wasn’t the one who fucked this up and I didn’t think I should have to drive to a drop off center (did I mention that there’s recently been some irrational anger in my life the past few days?) and I couldn’t schedule a UPS pickup without a UPS account of my own EVEN IF IT WAS TO BE BILLED TO THE RECIPIENT OF THE PACKAGE and even after I signed up for a UPS account, I couldn’t schedule a UPS pickup without the recipient’s account number, which did not appear to be anywhere on the goddamn label. I’d finally given up and accepted that I was going to have to drive the goddamn package to the UPS dropoff center when the doorbell rang. I went to the door to find a package left for me by UPS. And the UPS man hadn’t crossed the street to his truck yet, due to traffic, and I was able to wave him down and give him the package with the coverlet in it, and I was (briefly) happy. ‘Til my internet went down and I dove into that Pool o’ Irrational Anger.

The irrational anger might be gone. But it might not. I advise you not to piss me off and find out, if you know what’s good for you.

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Momma Kitty and the babies continue to do just fine. I spent a lot of time in there yesterday afternoon and got to see the whole nursing process from beginning to end (ie, the part where the babies are done nursing and fall asleep with nipples in their mouths. Too seriously cute.). The gray tabby started jerking and shaking and I was freaking out trying to figure out what was wrong, when I realized she was hiccuping.

I think they’ve all lost their umbilical cords, which is not as gross as it sounds. The dried up umbilical cords look exactly like dried-up stalks off a plant and if I hadn’t found them in the box where the kittens are, I probably would have thought that’s what they were.

Time for an after-nursing nap.

Pile o’ monkehs.

“Momma! We is HUNGREE.”

(Over to the right) “This is not a nipple! This is a TOE!”

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Joe Bob in the daffodils, where you cannot see him. No you can’t. No you can’t. NO. YOU CANNOT.

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Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: Annoying.
2003: Holy FUCK, look what JUST wandered across my front yard!
2002: The big flies make a very satisfying THWOOMP! sound as they fly down the attachment tube.
2001: No entry.
2000: Aren’t they, um, AMERICANS?