Oh, woe is me, woe is me.

Anyhoo, my planned post for today – a recipe for Apple Upside Down Cake (you’d think after last week I’d be sick of posting recipes…you’d be wrong (’cause this cake is like to DIE for)) – had to be rescheduled and I now have to finish that actual work I started, so you get this brief description of Sunday afternoon.

Beloved and I drove out and about locally, trying to get some photos of the last fall foliage here in northeast Ohio.  Alas, most of it was gone, but it was a lovely day for a drive and we still got some good pictures.  While framing this shot:

An old train depot turned into an art gallery

this drove up:

A retro ambulance

It appeared to be fully functional as an ambulance; there was a stretcher in the back and what appeared to be some modern medical equipment.

At first, I just stood there, waiting for the light to change so I could get my shot, but after a few seconds, I thought what the heck, and snapped a picture.  I waited a couple of more seconds, then snapped another one.  Then I just started snapping pictures right and left and the driver started laughing at me.

I shrugged – “Hey, it’s a cool ambulance.”

The driver gave me a thumbs-up – “That’s fine – snap away!”

Then the light changed; I mouthed the words “THANK YOU” at him and he gave me a friendly little salute as he drove away.

There are definitely some perks to this whole “small town America” stuff.

He bailed on me.

‘Tis true – he informed me that the PIA SmartCard Software was terribly out of date and no longer supported, then proceeded to tell me he didn’t know WHY I couldn’t print a test page or install the most recent version of the firmware, suggested I call the manufacturer of the printer (which is no longer under warranty so they’ll charge me through the nose to tell me to go to www.non-standardprinter.com to download the driver), and hung up.

So, I uninstalled the driver and the printer, reinstalled them, got the computer to not only recognize the printer, but allow me to install the latest version of the firmware AND print a test page, then Googled for the kind of software I needed and found – then purchased – a version that not only didn’t need the stupid SmartCard license, but could be downloaded and used immediately upon purchase.

And it only took me ALL. DAY.

But at least I’ll be ready for all the retailers who insist they need eleventy-thousand gift cards when the holiday shopping season begins the Friday after Thanksgiving…but won’t remember to order them until the Monday before Thanksgiving.

So, anyone care to join me in a cool, calming place where we can think happy thoughts about blue-eyed polar bears?

How about the creek in the park by our house?

Everyone has them.  Some people cannot live without them.  Ours are fairly boring – we are, after all, in our mid-40s.  Our idea of living on the edge is spontaneously deciding to go to the new Japanese restaurant that opened down the street after work – and that spontaneity waits for us to go home and let the dog out and feed the fish first.

Our lives will become even more routine once The Young One has returned from Texas and begins high school (yea gods!).  Which is fine – it is comforting, even.  By the time this all comes about, I’ll welcome it.  Routines are great, as long as you don’t become completely bound by them.

And therein lies the rub.   You see, my routine has been completely disrupted today by the necessary installation of a non-standard, non-plug-and-play printer and some non-standard software that requires a “smart card” software license to run on my laptop.  I’d already installed these several years ago on an old laptop that finally went up to that Big Operating System in the sky.

And I remember what a complete pain in the ass they were to install.  I remember having to call the people that sold the damn things to me and speaking to their tech support.

I hate talking to tech support.

Not because they can’t do their job, but because they do too good of a job.  You see, they have their routines, too, and their routines consist of speaking with the technically ignorant all day, every day.  And because they speak to the technically ignorant all day, every day, they don’t know what to do when they come across someone who knows what the hell they’re doing but just needs a little help.

“Hello, tech support.”

“Yeah, hi – this is Jan from That Software Company.  I’m in the process of reinstalling the Non-Standard Printer and PIA SmartCard Software y’all sold me on a different computer.  I’ve downloaded the necessary drivers and got my laptop to recognize the printer, but it won’t print a test page.  Also, when I go to run the Software, it crashes when it attempts to initialize the SmartCard license.  Can you help me out here?”

“Okay, ma’am, first you need to download the printer drivers…”

“I’ve already done that.  My computer is recognizing the printer, it just won’t print a test page – it says it’s downloading the data and just hangs there.”

“So to install the drivers, I’m going to need you to turn off your printer and go to www.non-standardprinter.com/drivers and choose your model from the drop-down menu.”

“Excuse me, but I’ve already done that.”

“Oh.  Uh…okay, to install the driver, you’ll need to find out where you saved the executable on your hard drive and have it install to the correct folder on your hard drive.”

“I’ve done that too – look, I’ve got the damn printer installed.  The computer recognizes it.  I just cannot get it to print a test page.”

“Oh.  Okay.  Well, let’s see if it’ll print a test page.  To print a test page, you’ll need to -”

“I KNOW HOW TO PRINT A TEST PAGE ALREADY!  IT WON’T PRINT THE %$#&ING TEST PAGE!  CAN WE DO A LITTLE TROUBLESHOOTING HERE???”

“Ma’am, there’s no reason to shout.  If the printer won’t print a test page, all you need to do is say so.”

It’s going to be a very long day.

For those of you who might have missed it, we have been debating on whether to buy some solid oak, hand-crafted bookshelves from some lovely Amish guy who does stuff like that or a stupidly expensive 200-pound ceramic smoker/grill.

The bookshelves won out.  So, a couple of weekends ago we toddled down to the Amish furniture store and ordered them.  They’ll take 10 – 12 weeks to be completed (these are BIG bookshelves), but that’s okay because it gives us an opportunity to decide which books we’re going to keep in the living room on our pretty new shelves and which will be relegated to the basement on our old, tired and mismatched bookshelves.

Yes, we have that many books.

So, we found ourselves in Half Price Books in Cleveland Saturday afternoon where I bee-lined it to the cookbook section and Beloved bee-lined it to the non-fiction section; I emerged with two of Julia Child’s cookbooks, a cookbook of wok recipes and The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, a fascinating compilation of articles and essays on just about everything to do with how we eat and drink in the U.S.  Beloved got a book on Oswald, one on Nixon and a couple of other things that I’m sure will put me to sleep in no time flat are equally riveting.  After that we mosied over to the “literature” section where I found both an Anya Seton and a Robert B. Parker Spenser novel I didn’t own (“I didn’t know there were such things,” observed Beloved) and he got more insomnia cures riveting material by Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal.

Then we looked up and saw…THEM.  On the top of the shelves, row upon row of classic books, in excellent condition (“I don’t think these were ever opened!” marvels Beloved) and instead of wearing jackets or dust covers, each was ensconced in the niftiest little box/case you ever saw.  We gasped as our eyes widened and we clutched each other.  Then, at the same time, we both said:

“Oh, those would look SO COOL on our new shelves!”

Because we’re nerdish like that.

So we began pulling them down.  Or rather I bellowed squeeled things like “OHMIGOD LOOK AT THAT TWO-VOLUME EDITION OF GONE WITH THE WIND” and “I MUST HAVE THOSE THREE COORDINATING VOLUMES OF ALL THE SHERLOCK HOLMES STORIES” and “HOLY COW THAT COPY OF GRIMMS FAIRY TALES IS GORGEOUS” and Beloved pulled them down, because he’s 6’1″ and I’m only 5′ tall.

All in all, we walked out of there with two huge boxes of books.  And we were just as pleased as punch, because we’re nerdish like that.  Afterward we went and checked into our hotel and then went to go see B.B. King, which was something of an adventure that I’ll write about later.  (Let’s just suffice to say that at 83, the man can still belt out a song.)  And as planned the next day we spent several hours touring the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, which was also a great deal of fun (I’ll write more about that later, too).  At one point, we strolled into the museum gift shop.

Where we saw…THEM.

A set of polished bookends made from petrified wood found on the Oregon/Nevada border.  We gasped as our eyes widened and we clutched each other.  Then, at the same time, we both said:

“Oh, those would look SO COOL on our new shelves!”

Because we’re nerdish like that.

So we spent waaaaaaaaay too much money this weekend for me to participate in anything that has to do with actually saving it.

And petrified wood is freaking heavy.

An alcoholic, drug addict father.  Abandonment.  An orphanage.  An abusive step-father.  A bad marriage.  An even worse divorce.  The death of my mother.  Poverty.  Single parenthood.  A blended family.  Teenagers.  Menopause.

Microsoft updates.

I truly believe that whatever doesn’t kill you only serves to make you stronger, and I fully intended to write this post about one of the worst things I ever survived.  Until I woke up this morning and realized that Bill Gates had done me a huge favor by installing a ton of updates and rebooting my laptop – without my knowledge or consent.

And guess which idiot had left half a dozen applications open the night before, with half-finished and unsaved work in each?

Why, yes – I would be that idiot.  So I stared at my blank screen with my eyes half-gummed shut and a mug o’ java in my hand (oh, shut up – you try giving up caffeine AND alcohol and see how well you do) and realized well, shit – yesterday was the second Tuesday after the planets all aligned in the House of Saturn coinciding with the anniversary of the end of the First Punic War and that’s when Microsoft always schedules its updates.

Silly me.

And as I began to write the post on survival, it occurred to me that everything in my life that I’ve survived has had at least one benefit – they have all ended.  Well, except teenagers and menopause, but I know those things will end.

Microsoft updates?  That shit’s FOREVER.

English Documentary

by The Young One

A study of the language.  The study branches into multiple topics.  Such topics can include grammar, which basically, to my feeble 13-year-old mind, applies to everything.  Spelling, using letters in a word correctly.  And studying the types of words, such as nouns and verbs.  Also, the study also applies heavily to writing.

How to write:

1. Get a piece of paper.
2. Get a pencil.
3. Make the pencil tip touch the paper.  No, not the eraser, you dope!  Yes, the lead!  The little gray thingy!
4. Make strokes that form a letter.  Not in the YMCA pool – the paper!
5. Congrats.  You wrote something.

You usually learn in English class how to write all sorts of things, like letters, essays, and documents such as this!  Now, before I expire from boredom in the middle of my rather boring Academic Assist class, I shall stop here and do something else, like stare at the repeating Power Point slideshow on the television screen.

Good bye.

~~~~~~

**No eighth graders were harmed in the writing of this essay, although a Mom let out a hearty guffaw and an English teacher suggested it for publication in the school’s literary magazine.  It might be suggested that the author learn the difference between a “document” and a “documentary” but hey – we’ll take what we can get.

Not only did I have a houseful of teenage boys for the better part of the last two days (The Young One was playing host to a couple of his friends and I was up to my elbows in homemade pizza and monkey bread), the hormones my doctor prescribed for my menopause symptoms were, to put it mildly, a miserable failure.  Not only was TOM over a week late, I was bloated to roughly the size and shape of the Goodyear blimp.  While I appear to be on the downside of it now – I woke up in something that resembled a good mood, my rings were loose again and I didn’t need to oil up my ass to get my pants on – to say I was less than pleasant this weekend would be an understatement of some magnitude.

Don’t get me wrong – I tried very hard not to dismember anyone, and because I didn’t want The Young One’s friends to think his mother was channeling Joan Crawford, I managed to refrain from any beatings with wire coat hangers.  So, I was merely grumpy, and poor Beloved bore the brunt of that.  He almost always does, and he deals with it exceedingly well.  Of course, he knows me exceedingly well, and for the most part just stays out of my way, while occasionally asking, “Is there anything I can do to help, dear?”  And when he just can’t bear my grumping around the house any longer, he pulls out the Sure Fire Cure for My Bad Mood.

The Incredibles.

I love this film.  I love Pixar movies anyway, and this one is by far their best (WALL*E is a close second).  I tender my sincere apologies to any die-hard Toy Story or Finding Nemo fans, but as much as I like those two movies (and Monsters, Inc. and Cars and Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille) I don’t think any of the other films can quite match The Incredibles – it never fails to make me laugh, cry and cheer.  The writing and voice acting is inspired, and the character of Edna Mode alone makes the movie worth watching; Wally Shawn as the downtrodden Mr. Incredible’s boss at InsuraCare is another gem of a performance.  The movie is also smart and perceptive, taking not-so-subtle jabs at our affinity for frivolous lawsuits, suburban conformity and increasing need to celebrate everyone as “special,” regardless of an individual’s talents or abilities.

Every time I watch this film, I end up scouring the internet, searching for some bit of news heralding a sequel, and I am always disappointed – with the exception of Toy Story, Pixar has yet to make a sequel to one of its films, although there is apparently a Cars 2 in the works (which puzzles me, frankly – Cars is the least of Pixar’s offerings to date).  So, I content myself with snuggling on the sofa with a cup of hot chocolate when I’m feeling out-of-sorts and watching this wonderful film.  It always turns the trick.

What’s your sure fire cure for the blues, menopausal or otherwise?

The party for my inlaws was fun, if you go for that sort of thing.  Which we do as long as it’s, oh, once every 50 years or so.    The best part was spending a little time with Beloved’s niece and nephew, whom we don’t see much of simply because they’re all caught up in school and activities and such.  The highlight of that whole experience was listening to Beloved’s 18-year-old nephew tell us about his little “grass-league football team”  – i.e. a bunch of kids got together, formed 3 or 4 “football teams” and play out in any field they can find as often as they can get together.  They’ve even named their teams, and Nephew absolutely had me on the floor when he told me the name of his team:  The Yoder Dane Fighting Amish.

See, now, this is whay I love teenagers.  Babies are okay and little kids are great and all, but I really love older kids, especially teenagers; despite their angst and hormones and attitudes, they are becoming interesting, fun people with opinions and ideas and senses of humor.  Then they move away from home…if you’re lucky.

Last weekend I bought the video game Spore for my laptop, and while I haven’t had the kind of time I’d like to be able to devote to playing it, I can say that it is a great deal of fun.  For the uninitiated, it’s a game developed by the creators of SimCity and The Sims, where you start with a single-cell organism and guide it through an evolutionary process until it becomes the dominant species of the planet it lives on – you can even have it become advanced enough for space travel and then, via the internet, visit other player’s planets.  The most most interesting thing about the game, though, is the fact that it has managed to piss off both the hard-core Atheists, who are up in arms because they feel the game promotes the theory of Intelligent Design, and the hard-core Creationists, who are against the idea of evolution at all, intelligent or otherwise.

I just love me some good controversy.

Another thing about the game?  It’s taught me a thing or two about myself.  You see, my first species is carnivorous, and as such is supposed to hunt other, lesser, speciies into extinction and eat them while it goes down the path of sentience.  My problem is that I just want to run around and make friends with all of the other inhabitants of my little planet (that I have no control over, incidentally), which you can also do, but you die of starvation if you don’t hunt down, kill and eat those critters designed for just that purpose.  So, I’m thinking of starting a new game with a new species of herbivores who have a much more abundant food supply and just have to learn to run really fast from the carnivores.  If I do that, I’m simply going to kill off the carnivores I’ve created, because I certainly don’t have time to evolve two species.

I apparently have no problem playing God, I just don’t want quite that much responsibility.

And on that note, I will leave you with my Top Ten Favorite Search Terms used to find my site this month so far.  Some of them are doozies and the last one absolutely had me in stitches.  I can only imagine the disappointment of those visitors looking for, well, purty pitchers.  Ahem.

10.  How to make sanitary napkins

9.  Wear Crocs to the bar

8.  Nude men gay pictures

7.  Young nudists

6.  Naturist pictures

5.  Nude sushi in Hawaii

4.  S and M sushi

3.  Tequila perimenopause

2. Undisputed ruler of the universe

And the Number One Inexplicable Search Term used to find my blog:

1. Will you have your stomach pumped this weekend?

My first experience with them was in my mid-teens; my grandfather, who loved gadgets and technology of all sorts, bought one of the first home computers – a Radio Shack TRS-80 – when I was 16.

Sixteen, folks. In 1979.

It included it’s own monitor and a full-stroke QWERTY keyboard, was compact, supported Floating Point BASIC programming language (absurdly easy to learn) and was reasonably affordable at $600.

Okay, okay, I’m leaving the land of Nerd-dom now.

Anyhoo, best of all, you could buy Scott Adams’ text adventure games for it. And my grandfather did; lots and lots of them. I played them all obsessively, mostly while he looked on and encouraged me, without interfering in my playing. (He was a rare man.)

I’ve been hooked on computerized gaming ever since.  Bioshock or Portal, anyone?

Recently, to my delight, I found Mr. Adams’ old text adventure games online.  For free. I was tickled pink.  Then I saw that he developed a new game around 2000, as a second sequel to one of his more popular games, Pirate Adventure.  (If you’ve never played a text adventure game, you should really go play this one; you don’t need quick reflexes – there are no graphics – just good puzzle-solving skills, and this has the bonus of being the simplest of them, so it won’t take you three months to solve and finish.)  The new game, though, required payment.  Okay, I thought, it’s really cheap, so why not?

Well, because it wouldn’t install on my laptop is why not.  The self-extracting file extracted, but it never launched the installer.  Nor could I find the executable anywhere on my hard drive that would launch the installer.  Grumbling words like “dirty jip” and “archaic piece of crap” I clicked the link to send an email and proceeded to get snarky with him.

“Excuse me, Mr. Adams, but just WHERE on my system did the game get installed?  Because I can’t find it ANYWHERE.”

And you know what happened?  He emailed me back. In less than half an hour.  In fact, he was extremely pleasant as well as helpful and when, after several email exchanges, he saw we weren’t going to be able to solve the problem any other way, emailed me the game.  He also invited me to join his Yahoo groups and gave me his IM username.

Then it occurred to me – I’ve been exchanging emails with the Father of PC Gaming.  The Guy Who Started It All.

Uh-huh.  Go ahead – you can touch me.  You know you want to.