Blowing the Mind with Memory Gain

I just purchased some new memory for my computer (256 mb) and although I've done it before and am comfortable with installing it, it is an amazingly complicated pain in the ass to find out which kind to buy! I mean, everybody obviously knows the difference between DDR PC2700 and DDR PC3200 memory (duh), right? Oh good, I hoped not.

I woke up to 6 inches of snow tonight. Yes, I woke up tonight - I worked a midnight shift last night, and tomorrow I work at 9:30am. This means that I had a day off, but not a FULL day off, because I had to come home and sleep some, and tonight I have to sleep before going back to work. The problem is this - I went to bed at 8:30 this morning, set the alarm for 2:00; woke up at 2:30pm (2 snoozes); snuggled with the dog and cat(s) for a bit, and fell back asleep. So then I woke up at 6pm. A whole day wasted. Anyway, there was snow when I woke up - quite a bit of it - and I don't have a shovel yet. The average kitchen broom doesn't do a very good job on sidewalks.

Okay, so this is basically a crabby entry. We've all stepped in dogshit, right? Is there anything worse? I'm not talking about stepping BAREFOOT in dogshit. I mean, that's bad too - but a foot is easily washed. But when you step in canine fecal matter with a heavy-soled shoe, life is a bitch. Because I did it right before work last night, and I wanted to wear those shoes because they are my best ones, so I had to clean the shit off. And that is no easy process, no matter which way you cut it!

Anyway I had a quick discussion with Eddie (my dog) and told him to shit somewhere out of the walkway area. Yes, I should clean it up better, and I do clean it up. But this was fresh dog poo, obviously, because otherwise it would have been at least semi-frozen and wouldn't have squished its way so beautifully into the tread of my shoe.

Another blurb about snowstorms - I don't like them, in general. The only kind of snowstorm I really enjoy is one that is a whopper - 12 inches or more. And I have to be able to watch it snow. I slept through today's mini-blizzard, and so I didn't enjoy it. And any kind of snowstorm that is 3 inches or less is not fun - it's just an unpleasant pain in the ass.

I do have some fond memories of snowstorms. There is not much in life more pleasant than going outside at night, during a snowstorm that involves heavy snow but not a heavy wind or cold, cold temperatures. The gently falling snow, the darkness offset by the reflection of white snow, and the mysterious calm and silence of that kind of snowstorm - it's just so tranquil and, for lack of a better word, cool.

And of course, those heavy snowstorms cover up all that dogshit, so you can't step in it. One more plus...............

A photomentary of my house in progress......


Here it is, as I first saw it......notice the missing siding around the window.



After some patching and scraping, ready for some paint......



The primer goes on...............



And on.........finally starting to look like, well, something.............


Next step - priming the other 3 sides! And the paint itself, which is a soft grey, with darker grey trim and a deep red accent (door).

So...

If you have read my previous posts, you may remember my mentioning a guy named Pat, who lives just across the way. He's an older guy (I thought he was about seventy, but it turns out he is 59. Ooops) and he's been very good to me since I moved into my new house. He cut my grass, has told me alll about the neighbors, and the other day we talked for about an hour and he offered to haul my garbage, because he was going to the dump the next day. So he pulled his truck up, and we threw my bags of trash in the back. Pat is just an all-around good guy, it seems to me..

Anyway, the other night I was sitting on the computer, and I noticed a diesel engine running outside - just running in one spot, like it was sitting right outside my house. Anyway, I looked out my window to see an ambulance pulled up at Pat's, and Pat being wheeled out of his house on a cot. Anyway, I did some investigating through my sister (who works at the hospital) and he is in intensive care, although she couldn't get details on what's wrong. I feel horrible for him, because he seems like the type of guy who doesn't have anyone to look out for him. His house is constantly overrun by young punk-ish kids, driving in and out and hanging out around that house. "Rose" lives there too, whoever she is. She is on oxygen and has diabetes, so she apparently doesn't leave the house. But every since Pat has been gone, which is about 3 days now, those punks just keep coming in and out over there, and there's no sense of anything amiss, even though this poor old man is in the hospital. I would like to visit him, but I would feel a bit strange about it - plus you can't visit in ICU if you're not family.

And, my garbage is all loaded up in the back of his truck, which hasn't moved in three days. Must be stinky. I feel like doing something, but don't know what yet. Hopefully he's okay, or will be soon.

Another day off, and another day of rain. I planned on painting, but I worked last night, so I slept in, and when I got up, it was raining. And I'm off tomorrow, and it's supposed to rain all day. I have never seen a September like this! Not much of a transition into fall - just a WHAM! HERE'S SOME COLD SHITTY WEATHER FOR YA!

I've never liked fall. It's a pleasant-enough time of year, generally, because it usually seems like things are going to slow down and be a little less hectic that time of year (I'm talking early fall, not holiday time.) But I don't like the fact that everything outside is dying and summer is over, and we have nothing to look forward to up here but snow, cold, and misery for the next 6 months. God, I'm cynical tonight. Smack!

Oh, and if you haven't heard - George W. Bush officially became a fascist dictator yesterday, because now he has the right to jail any one of us without a trial, for as long as he likes. And torture us. That's what the conservative, neo-christian majority wants this country to be like, and that's what they're getting. Really depressing - more reason to go vote.

I have an interview on wednesday for a job in the emergency department at the hospital, in registration. It would be 3-11pm, union job, full free benefits, and good pay. My status as an EMT gives me the edge in getting in. However, I just started a new job, and already had one, so I'm just really numb right now on what to do. It's pretty much a guaranteed job - they've already done a reference check, and I passed all the tests with flying colors (back in August). We'll see what happens.

I just really need some time to do what I need to do - paint the house and SLEEP, among others. So the prospect of starting a new job doesn't help with that picture. I don't mean one day off to sleep and paint - I need like a week to get this place in order. Insulating, painting, cleaning, tiling, painting, cleaning, painting, sleeping...........

Grrrrr. Love you.

p.s. If you need a little humor, go to this site. It gave me a good 20 minutes of giggles this afternoon.......

Disturbances

Not much of a post here, but.......just a few things that disturb me lately....

1. I keep getting myspace "Friend Requests" from middle-aged women in far-off places. I was getting used to receiving requests from chicks named "LatinoBabe" and shit like that, advertising porn sites. That was fine - I just deleted them. But these profiles are of seemingly innocent, post-soccer-mom types with no detail. I delete them right away, because I just don't trust that they are genuine. One of these ladies has sent me two messages, saying nothing but "hello." I have a feeling that if I were to reply, my computer might crash or start sending out ads for free gift certificates for Texas Roadhouse or something.

2. Totally unrelated, but there was just an advertisement for new countertops that actually resist bacteria or something like that. How do they do this, I wonder? I remember buying socks once that supposedly resisted odor. My feet aren't actually that stinky, so I never really judged whether these socks worked. But I look into the future and I can see products coming such as "bacteria-resistant ground beef" and I feel frightened. Because humankind has co-existed with bacteria for thousands of years, but suddenly we are to live in fear of them, despite the fact that there are several million of them per square inch on your body. And of course, news stories like the big "Spinach Scare of 2006" don't do any good to ease people's anxiety. I work with several people who seem to live in fear that their skin will rot away if they don't immediately sanitize it after touching something potentially "infested." If the news bureaus get their way, we will all have that fear soon.

(I am now worried that those of you reading will think that I am a filthy beast who cares not about the germs crawling on his bodice. YES, I do wash my hands. Very frequently.)

3. Not really disturbing - but I have moved into a neighborhood with a lot of neighboring dogs, and they like to bark at EVERYTHING. They don't bark all day, or hours on end, like some dogs do. They just bark at anything that moves, for a minute or so, then stop. So every time I hear one of these dogs bark, I wonder if someone has pulled up to my house, or if there is some commotion outside that I should be aware of, and it makes me want to look out the window cautiously. I have to strive to get used to it, I guess. One of these dogs is "Mr. Beefy", who lives with 70-year-old Pat across the way. He's not very beefy, but I guess he came with that name.

I have been working at it for 2 weeks, and I am only about 25 percent finished with the scraping of my house, in order to remove the chipped paint so that I can prime/paint. Every time I get motivated to go out and climb the ladder and get to work, it rains, or something comes up, or I lose my motivation. I need a kick in the ass, or I need to organize a "let's scrape paint for fun" party. BYOB - lead poisoning is supplied. Behr Paints (a brand sold at Home Depot - very premium) has this website where you can choose paint colors and apply them to various "cyberhomes" on their website, so that you can see the colors in action. Kind of cool - but of course the houses they show are very nice, albeit of many different styles. It's a nice feature, but not very realistic - I mean, the paint will make my house look better, but there will still be blemishes and ugly windows and a bad roof. I wish they had homes like mine on the Behr website, so that I could realistically see what their paints look like on a banged-up, weather-beaten old stick-built house.

Or I should just give up on any type of technology and just mix up some whitewash, buy some oil lamps and a woodstove, and live off the grid. It is so tempting sometimes! Wow, I just got off subject, but I have always had it in my "life plan" that I would live some sort of simple existence along the way, someday, where I was self-sufficient and lived simply. Of course, that simplicity would have to include a computer though. And a fan, because I have to have that "noise" when I sleep. Enough. Good night!

Matin

Sometimes I wish that MySpace was a little more complete. For example, yesterday I looked at my home page, and noticed that I had one less friend! Well, I wanted to know who had dumped me, but there is really no easy way to find out, unless you do a process of elimination, which is hard when you have 104 (pseudo)friends.

I started my new job yesterday, which as always is a nerve-wracking experience. I had to attend a weekly meeting, which is at 9am each monday, and it was about 2 hours long. It's basically a meeting of all the LSTs (Life Skills Technicians, which is what I am) with the behavioral psychologists and therapists, and they discuss each client (called a "consumer" in the neuro-medical world.) After all the input, then there is a scheduling session when the LSTs decide their schedules for the coming week. Of course all I could really do was listen, but they did a good job of describing to us (there is another new LST - she started yesterday too) each client and their sometimes-difficult families. Then we were basically given our gear - backpacks with locks on them, full of goodies, and our scheduling calendars. So basically I have a job now where I carry a "briefcase" and I have to keep a calendar of appointments. It may sound dumb, but I actually like that - makes me feel important, hee hee.

Of course, I had mixed feelings all the way through all this, because I also love my existing job, and since I've been there now for 2 1/2 years, I am quite established. Although the new job is strictly a "work as much or little as you want" job, technically it is more involved than that. And in the coming month or so, I have a lot of training sessions, some of which are in Marquette, so it's going to take up a lot of time. But oh well - I guess I will be "rich" now, because now I have two good-paying jobs and will be working more hours. Goodbye, nice house! Guess I'll be renovating you a little bit later.....

I found this ultra-cool site - it is a list of free utilities available on the web, with reviews, and most of them are better or easier to use than their non-free equivalents. For example, there is an Acrobat-style reader that reads pdf files that is WAY faster loading than the Adobe version. I always have dreaded looking at .pdf files because Acrobat is so slow to load, although maybe it's just my computer. There's also a cool audio editor, input on the best free anti-virus software ( I have never bought Norton, etc., and never will) and many others. Here's the address -

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best_46_free_utilities.htm

Off to work, dammit! Have a nice day (it's very gloomy outside here, ho hum)

Douglas