I’m this peaceful tonight? I’m more gracious than I knew. Good for me.
January 22nd, 2005 | by Scott Jennings |Ever had one of those days where life just kept pissing on your forehead? Yes, that’s the metaphor I’m going with.
The heat in my duplex has been really terrible the past few days, so I finally got around to telling my landlady about it, and the technician came by this morning. (I camped out last night in front of the woodstove.) After a brief lecture on air filters, he found the problem to be a component underneath the house that was, as he put it, “rotted.” So we’re shooting for Tuesday on that.
I gouged my face with my razor this morning. I bled for an hour and a half.
I went to the car dealership to finally finish this deal. The test drive went really well, most all of my concerns about this ‘98 Ford Contour were smoothly accelerated away headed north on the Durham Freeway. We agreed on a price that was a few hundred dollars more than fair, but as this process continues to remind me, I don’t get to negotiate. (I’ll bust out my haggle-fu when I have better credit, I suppose.) So it’s finally time to sign and drive, and all they need is my North Carolina driver’s license, and — wait, I don’t have one of those. Still holding on to the old Virginia license, since I never registered the T-bird here (that’s a story), I never got the license switched over. No good, they say, come back some other time. Fuck. My future consists of two trips to the DMV.
Katy didn’t manage much better. Her poor little iBook froze up while FileVault was doing some work, and all her encrypted files and settings got stuck in limbo. The Apple Store lets you get in the support queue from the comfort of your girlfriend’s bonus room — we signed up at 5pm, they said to be there at 5:40pm, they saw us shortly before 6pm. Not bad. The “Genius” at the “Genius Bar” (their terms, they’re in quotes to convey my special blend of indignance, sarcasm, and envy) poked away fairly compentently for an hour or so, but didn’t have much luck. Katy hasn’t accepted her fate — all her documents and settings and bookmarks and iTunes are GONE — she sees the encrypted disk image, she believes someone somewhere can get it done. I’m willing to accept the fact that her little tiny computer hung at just the wrong time, fucked the encrypted image, and it’s not coming back. She, like most of America, didn’t keep backups.
In Good Company was wholly unsatisfying in that way when the Jell-O brand gelatin dessert doesn’t congeal: you tear open the packet and it smells great, you carefully measure the proportions of the warm and the cold water, mix thorougly, and settle in for everything to come together. And then some asshole throws in some sliced kiwi fruit (here, in the form of Malcolm McDowall in Generic Villian Mode), the chemical reaction stops, the credits roll, and you can’t believe you waited that long for a vat of useless cold red soup.
A Walk To Remember was also very bad.
Today, I check off nothing; I’m officially a day behind in my life. Please step aside: I’m trying make up time in the air.
