minor improvements

Have system. Have... some of the programs I lost; still tracking down a couple others, but all the essentials are in. thank goodness for troyfish and tchnmncr, whose combined efforts have kept me from going completely batty. I now have something I can work with... and I can start dealing with the novel. Soon, anyway. Maybe not today; I'm not sure. Camilla (the computer incarnation-- my car is fine, thank goodness) is dead, but john barleycorn lives on.

Spent yesterday wandering DC with heuchera where we got free stuff from the festival of the book (I got a real book, even), stared at the white house and congratulated ourselves on not having jobs that make us live somewhere that tourists gawk at from the far end of the lawn, observed beads and many statues & fountains, ate green tea and ginger ice creams, and read about "the ultimate act of stenographic piety" at the Folger's exhibit on early printing age books. (would it ever occurr to you to write out the bible in shorthand?)

heuchera has also decided she is a fish. (that makes three, if she doesn't change her mind) I told her she was mistaken. There was some argument to this effect. heuchera: I have lots of bones, so I must be a fish. There also still remains the faint possibility that we'll both decide that the world as we know it is a horrible place and move to outer mongolia (or at least boston) in hopes that this will help, but it's probably unlikely.

"wheat that in dark earth like the dead has lain"

So, um, apparently it takes me a long time to pay attention to these things. But when I got the computer, it was one week beyond absolutely-top-of-the-line, and the biggest hard drive they had was 40 GB. Now it's got an 80 in it.

Pity they took away all the stuff I wanted to fill it up with.

And... we just had half an hour of total lack of network, as opposed to the usual off&on flakeyness. My father is yelling at verizon now. [ok, it's back on. but with no particular resolution or reasoning on why it wasn't before]

Also for some reason I can't get one (of four! with exactly the same protocols!) of my e-mail accounts to send. And I've triple-checked the settings, and changed and re-typed the password, and it's still being freakish and not behaving. It still gets mail just fine...

But I find that in the wealth of lost information on my novel, there are a couple minor pleasant surprises-- I'd forgotten that I did a complete character list of all the ungodly (well, and godly-- deities are underlined) many incidental characters, in order of apperance. But I'm still here with no clear recollection of how all I got here. Except that it involved mockingbird, spider grandmother, and the Hopi god (more or less) of the dead. damnit.

Though I suppose it's strangely appropriate that the novel that got killed off was about folk tradition and death/afterlife/eventual resurrection... I don't suppose the afterlife bit is intended to be pleasant. maybe I should be counting my blessings? Inanna got flayed & hung up to rot...

Airborne apoptotic prokaryotes ("This is new information." --Miles)

Finally got in touch with Jaime out at the oakland apple store. Apparently according to the secret in-system apple version of the work order notes, when the computer got to them neither the power plug connection (soldered to the motherboard) nor booting from the hard drive actually worked, hence why they replaced both. And apparently the flat rate repair service authorizes the tech people to replace any and everything they can that might possibly be faulty. Which the guy who processed the work order should have told me, right before asking me if I wanted them to do a backup, as a standard part of the work order process. So I'm supposed to go in and explain all this to a manager and cry at people and see if they're going to be nice to me, since according to apple I have no right to complain about anything else. Which I really want to deal with, ever so much...

Oh, and the old drive definitely was processed to whatever repair/trash place it went the day after the service, so before I even had the computer back to know what was going on.

...and why is it that I seem totally able to remember all the plot points of my novel that I was dissatisfied with, while the ones I was happy with are all blurred in my mind?

sigh. I'm sure everyone is terribly interested to be reading all of this. sorry.

"I'm not the one who makes my income selling things to me."

ha, ha! I have defeated the evil auto-correct! (auto-fill is bad enough... there are a lot of places where I am horrified by the notion of the computer trying to do my thinking for me, and then when it takes over and doesn't make me fix my own spelling mistakes, either? Totally unacceptable... and then of course every time I have to break in a new version/install of Word I've forgotten where to go to turn it off.)

Meanwhile, I have rewritten only a few paragraphs. Although I'm past the first hardest bit (there will be more hardest bits later on, I'm sure. Like in the next chapter when I have to re-invent all the torrid royal politics and the student lives of the younger generation...) and actually writing. Despite a nearly two-hour interruption from Grace who wanted to complain about not wanting to buy a bed... and I haven't spoken to her in maybe six months (or more?) but for some reason I feel like she always calls at just the wrong moment. I mean, there are plenty of times it would be great to talk to someone (despite the fact I never call anyone) but she always seems to call at times when I'm, say, trying to start rewriting my lost brains & stuff. Even if totally unproductively...

Grace: I think the bed is the most useless piece of furniture in the world.
me: But... you can sleep on it!

In fact, sleep seems like an excellent idea. And I have a bed.

[only the stupid modem is going blinkey-blinkey again, so I can't post this.... sigh. Perhaps I should become a Luddite.]