I am frustrated with so many things.

Long story short, I'm thinking of just turning off my computer for a few hours, days, weeks - I'm not sure how long. This means I will not be online from home much, if at all.

So -- if I don't respond to your emails in a timely manner, please bear with me. Maybe it's better to contact me by phone for the time being.

ARRRGH- Mozilla is pissing me off.

First off, the interface sucks ass. Yeah, so do the interfaces for most MS programs, but why should I switch over for more suckage?

Second, I set it up to check my mail. When I did so, I very carefully told it to "Leave Messages On Server" because I wasn't sure I wanted to tie myself down to it as a solution.

I guess it forgot.

It, in fact, set a number of options back to their default values without telling me and without me telling it to do so, sometime between Thursday and today.

Now I don't want to use it at all, but finding any other mail program is irrelevant at the moment since STUPID MOZILLA TOTALLY CLEANED OUT MY MAIL ACCOUNT.

I hate Mozilla.

I hate it when you type out a post, click "Post & Publish", and then blogger freaks out about having forgotten who you were and needing you to log in again, losing your post in the process.

Anyhow, happy Day-After-Thanksgiving, everyone.

My dog has this thing for pooping in front of people who admire him.

When we're walking, if someone stops us to tell us how beautiful a dog he is, it's nearly certain that he'll stop at the very next tree or bush and take a very large, smelly dump.

What's with that?

A rundown of my Thanksgiving so far:

• 3:45 AM: I wake up, unable to sleep any longer.


• 3:50 AM - 6:50 AM: I watch "My So Called Life" episodes on DVD, cuddled up with dog.


• 6:50 AM: Current epsiode of series is about Christmas, family, lost children, homes. As the episode winds to a close, I feel strangely nostalgic. I call my parents. (It's 7:00 AM here, but it's 9:00 AM there and I expect they will be awake. They aren't out of bed yet, but they have been awake for a while.)
  
  "What are you doing up?" asks my mother. The conversation starts out a little rocky, but as we get into talk more it turns out to be a really good call. I talk to my mother, my father. Eventually my youngest sister wakes up and I talk to her, as well. I have one of the best chats with my father that I've had in years. It's nice.


• 7:45 AM: I stick Miles' borrowed WinXP CD into the drive and start running the Windows Recovery Console. Eventually I get to a prompt where I start a CHKDSK /r up. It seems as if it will run forever.


• 8:00 AM: I have a lovely Thanksgiving breakfast of cheese and wine. Thank you, Alex Phelps, for the lovely New Zealand wine. Thank you, Mike Bell, for the cheese.
  
  CHKDSK is still running.


• 8:30 AM: CHKDSK is still running.


• 8:47 AM: CHKDSK tells me that I have "one or more unrecoverable errors". Great. I boot up linux, and here I am. I'm customizing my account a bit more, and it starts feeling a little more comfortable. Yay linux. Or something.


• 9:15 AM: I put on the extended version of the Lord of the Rings Part I. Go Tolkein.


• 10:30 AM: My aunt was sick yesterday, so Mary and I were under the impression that all Thanksgiving plans were off and we were left to our own devices. But now my aunt calls and tells me that she's feeling better, and Thanksgiving is back on! Yay, Thanksgiving.


• 10:32 AM: At the same time I am talking to my aunt, Mary calls. We touch base and both she and my aunt decide to shower, at which point Mary and I will meet up and we'll call the aunt again.


• 11:00 AM: Mary is done showering and starts walking to my place, and Louie and I start walking to meet her halfway.


• 11:12 AM: Here we are, about to "start the day". Yay holidays!

Do you ever feel abandoned by your friends, for no good reason, really? I hate when I get to feeling like that.

I got to have an MMR vaccine today. Ouch. Those things are distinctly unpleasant.

I also get to have a heart ultrasound done sometime soon! That sounds exciting, ne? I've had a small heart murmur at least since I was a teenager. Odds are that it is completely benign, but since I've never had it looked at closely my doctor thought it might be a good idea to do so now.

Exciting times.

And OH MY GOSH - some suppliers are ACTUALLY relabeling components. These terms have been industry standards for decades. Politically Correct Craziness gone overboard.

Los Angeles officials have asked that manufacturers, suppliers and contractors stop using the terms "master" and "slave" on computer equipment, saying such terms are unacceptable and offensive. Jeesh. Don't people have anything better to do with their time?

Do you have a living will?

Do you ever think about what you would want to have done for you under certain medical circumstances?

I don't know what I'd want. Difficult stuff to even think about.

By the way, for those of you who do know me and may have been wondering:

I am still female. I have never gone by "Marc". There is nothing going on that I'm not telling you about; I really don't know what's up with all of that.

I'm feeling... irritable with work lately. Irritated especially by the people I work for, but some by my co-workers, some by the cruddy products I work on, some by the lack of process here, etc, etc...

It's not unmanageable. I'm still pretty happy, for the most part.

But with unhappiness, with dissatisfaction, eventually you cross a line wherein it becomes better to move on to better things, where staying on is an exercise in frustration and is no longer the best or smartest course to take. Traditionally, I have stayed on long, long after I have crossed this line. I want not to do that anymore.

How do I not do that?

How do I know when I have crossed over?

The dance last night held several surprises for me.

• I seem to like Brenda's DJing less these days. Last night, I acually preferred Kirk's sets to Brenda's. He played some good stuff.


• I had a few awesome dances last night. I also had some crappy-ass dances. Usually, any given night seems to go one way or the other, but last night my dancing was all over the wall. I don't think I have ever before had such good dances AND such bad dances side by side.


• I got to the dance at the very start. Hardly anyone was there yet. That's just not something I do.


• I left fairly early, when the dance was just picking up. I was probably one of the first people to leave, but I didn't mind; it was time for me to go. That's not something I do, ever -- if I leave early, I always wonder what I might be missing out on. What fun might they have without me? I always close things out. Except last night, when I didn't.

When Linux becomes my primary operating system, I feel somewhat as if I've been permanently blinded and left to fend for myself in a stranger's house.

Mad crazy commenting going on around here lately! It's like several little mini-blogs hidden inside this blog. Crazy crazy crazy. Glad y'all are having fun, though.

So this weekend, the hard drive on my home PC that contains all my windows partitions stopped working.

I guess I'll have to brush up on linux a bit until I figure out what's up with that drive. I'll also have to find a decent linux pop-mailer. Anyhow, you might not see me IM from home much for a while, and I might be slow with personal email while I figure out whatever it is I'm doing. Please bear with me.

Last month, Microsoft fired a contract employee over a personal blog entry. I guess I should maybe watch what I say on here more than I have been.

Fortunately, for those of us still employed, Blogger has a FAQ entry on How Not To Get Fired Because Of Your Blog. Ha. It's a funny world we live in.