Category: Blips

Tiny bits, late June edition

My lower back’s been killing me since last Thursday, and I exacerbated it by sitting in front of my computer for several hours last night playing through most of the original Creeper World again.  I woke up this morning with a realization that I had better move very, very carefully today, or I will be laid up for days.

I’ve been on hold with the USPS for an hour now.  They destroyed a package sent from Germany and are supposedly sending me paperwork to file a claim for insurance… but it’s been two weeks and they haven’t yet.  Their website is horribly broken, too.  Putting in my claim number causes it to have a server error.  Confidence level of me actually getting my insurance claim: near zero.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a great book, but I can only read it a chapter or so at a time.  What was meant to read as a dark parable at the time of publication comes off much more dire in today’s political clime.  I haven’t even touched the second season of the show on Hulu, partly because I want it to finish airing, partly because I’m not sure I can handle it right now.

I’m on my second day of a fast.  I had two Atkins shakes this morning (along with a multivitamin and an Advil), and I don’t plan on having calories again until Thursday.  I’m not happy with how much my appetite has grown over the last couple of months, and fasting is the best way I know to reset that… but while it’s happening I find myself occasionally thinking longingly of the taste of paper towels.

Reading back over this, it sure seems like a big bucket of negativity, but that’s just a consequence of the moment.  A positive: I placed another order for Japanese puzzle books yesterday, and it’s coming in tomorrow, because Japan has their stuff seriously together when it comes to international shipping.  I even got a dot-to-dot magazine, because apparently those are okay for adults to do now, and I’ve always secretly loved them.  My lines aren’t very straight, but there’s something deeply satisfying about connecting things in numerical order.  A tiny ordering of the universe, a pushing back of entropy.  And you get a pretty picture as a side bonus.

It will never be that year

I just spent over two hours fighting to be able to use my Linux desktop again.  The graphical environment, Xorg, crashed upon starting every time.  I went down a long “it’s the drivers” path, got sidetracked with “it’s the new kernel” path, and finally it turned out to be a nasty interaction between the latest version of Xorg-server and the desktop environment I use, XFCE.

While I love Linux most of the time, it’s things like this that make me realize that it will not be something that Person Average can use on their own any time soon.  Chromebooks are as close as most people will get, and the fact that they run Linux is pretty hidden to the standard user.  I’ve been running Linux as my primary OS for over sixteen years now, and it still trips me up several times a year.  And I used to do this for a living!

Bears, naturally

Just a quick note that I made it to Arkansas safe and sound yesterday and am enjoying myself quite a bit in the company of old friends and new acquaintances.  Other than the obligatory Friday post, I likely won’t be resuming the more-regular posting schedule until I make it back to Lenoir sometime early next week.