I’m getting input and since no one has replied to my twittering of this and I’m not feeling patient I’m going to post it here. If you were shopping for a gift for a woman in your life (mom, aunt, grandmother, girlfriend, wife, whatever) or for yourself (if you’re a woman, it’s too small to fit most men’s wrists), would you buy it? The thicker wire is stainless steel, surgical grade, the beads are chrysoprase – May’s birthstone.
Please forgive the blurriness of the photo. It was taken under low light with my point and shoot. I edited it up as best I could.
Those spam people are really clever in their random, multiple lettered stuff telling me that my entry/essay whatever is the best they’ve ever seen and look forward to more information coming from the tips of my pudgy fingers. It makes me glad that there are spam filters running on my comments thingie.
I’m doing better. I took two days off work and cried a whole lot. I know now that part of it is because my thyroid is failing more because I received word that my test results show wonky cholesterol levels and problems with hormone levels. The thyroid puts out hormones that affect metabolism as well as mood. Since it was under functioning it’s possible that I might not need to increase the antidepressant once I get the right dose of hormone into me. Certainly the cholesterol levels will fix themselves. That’s one thing about having hypothyroidism, it does affect cholesterol to the point that it can cause severe heart problems Such a simple fix too.
I was going to go in tomorrow and talk to the locum but my own doctor is coming back on Monday. I’ll find out which day next week that he’ll be working in the evening and go and see him. I just started to work with him. I don’t want to try and deal with a locum right now.
There’s word at work of things coming down the pipeline. I can’t say anything here right now as it’s not official (as in I haven’t been told anything, but have heard that someone was told by the boss). When it does become official and it’s in the bag (if it’s going to happen) I’ll let you know. If it’s going to happen it is good news. One bit of news I can share is that the work health plan cards have come through. Saskatchewan has great health care coverage for people. I get to go to a doctor for any reason at no cost out of pocket. All my hospital care is free of charge including any prescription drugs given in hospital. But those prescription drugs aren’t covered covered by the province all the time once out of hospital. This makes supplementary health insurance is a good thing.
The work plan will prescriptions up to $2000/year, basic dental care and some other types of dental care like dentures (though there’s some foggy bits here) as well as eye exams and some toward the purchase of glasses. With the prescriptions, we can apply to get extended benefits if our income is low enough. Because Bran is taking a whole lot more medications and my income is low, we should get partial coverage by the province and the supplementary coverage through the work plan will take care of the rest, except for dispensing fees. That might ensure that Bran doesn’t go over the yearly cap. Lower drug costs are a good thing.
As I said before, I’m not part of the life insurance plan offered through work because I’m depressed and fat (go figure) so I have to get private life insurance. I’m also going to look into disability insurance for me as I’m the primary wage earner of the family. That’s down the road though as we couldn’t afford that right now.
I finally got my wire today. I’ve already made a nice bracelet using chrysoprase stones (they’re May’s semi-precious stone, I can’t afford emeralds). They’re expensive little buggers those stones. I’m not sure I like the bracelet as it is right now, but it’s a start. I’ll take a picture of it and post it here and you can let me know what you think. I also repaired and shorted the chain on Bran’s medic-alert bracelet. I did up a few earring chandeliers as well. So far working with stainless steel is a bit of a challenge as it’s more stiff than the copper wire I was working with, but it makes stronger jewelry.
I took my library books into the university library, turn in the keys to the grad students’ office and to my locker and gave my form of withdrawal to the secretary for sociology grad students. I did that yesterday after a delicious sushi lunch. I was offered some treats from Tim Horton’s but I was too full. I would’ve needed a ram rod to eat anything more at that time. I haven’t heard from the woman who was my supervisor since I told her I would be withdrawing from the grad studies program. I think she’s mad at me. Oh well. This isn’t about her, it’s about me. I had a lovely chat with another of the profs who encouraged me to the program and wrote me a letter supporting me when I applied. She understands that I need to leave even if she doesn’t know the reasons. I’m doing this for me. I already feel an enormous sense of relief with that burden gone.
Last night, as I was working away at my desk, Michelle brought by a large piece of very rich, very fragrant chocolate cake. I commented when we were out for sushi earlier in the day that the chocolate cake they had there just wasn’t up to meeting the requirements of the craving that was created by the cook at work making chocolate cake the previous Friday. Since the cook was making “finger foods” for supper (an entire meal of appetizers) I didn’t want to spoil what little appetite I had left after the large sushi lunch by eating the cake. Instead I sniffed it…several times through the evening. I also knew that it was large and rich and I probably wouldn’t be able to eat the entire thing. So I shared it with Bran. He also had a chocolate cake craving since Friday. He shared his bit with Boy who didn’t crave chocolate cake but is always up for a treat. I did eat the majority of the piece though, probably a little over 2/3 of it. It was glorious! It was rich! It was the perfect chocolate cake. Thank you, Michelle!
So that’s about it. Thank you to all who commented with such wonderful support. It’s been a really hard few months. Having support, both from my family here and from all you and work as well has made the difficult times easier to cope with. I appreciate your words and intent more than you could possibly know.
Geez Louise! It’s nearly 3 am. Then again, I’ve only been home for 3 hours. That’s like 8 pm for people on regular hours.
I’ve been in a mood for few days now. I think it started out with me being angry last night. I managed to figure out that I was feeling jealous and angry that Bran went out. It’s not so much that he went out but he went out without me. Totally unreasonable, yes. Understandable, yes.
A heart attack is a very significant and life altering event for everyone around the person physically affected. So many people die from heart attacks that it leaves those around wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. That’s how I’ve been the past while. Then with the non-event this past week it was like someone pulled the rug out from under me again, just as I was regaining my balance a bit. Like a knife to the core of my being, it was like I was losing Bran. Not that I was, but that’s how my psyche responded. Now that he’s back my mind is clinging to him. I don’t want him out of my presence. I don’t want him wasting time with other people that he could be spending with me.
I did say it was unreasonable. Intellectually I know that he needs to spend time with other people. He needs to have his connexion with the world outside our home and family. He needs to have his needs met by going out to events he enjoys, that feed his psyche, like poetry night. But the part of me that isn’t so attached to the intellect doesn’t understand that. I’m not sure it will but I’m trying to get it there so he can do the things that feed his soul. As much as I need him to be around me all the time, I also need him to be healthy and happy. It’s a double edged sword for my mind to try and work around.
Today I can’t stop crying. I’ve tried. Since I’ve gotten up my stress levels have been peaked out and the tear ducts have been on overdrive. This has been a very hard summer. Let’s recap, shall we?
Dad had a stroke and ended up in hospital.
The stroke left Dad only a shadow of the man he used to be. He was paranoid, at times combative, confused and forgetful.
Dad got an infection of some sort (staph, probably contracted in hospital) somewhere and went into renal failure.
The renal failure further pushed the deterioration of Dad’s mind. He was unable to, for the most part, to respond to any stimulus around him.
Dad’s mind further deteriorated to the point that he forgot how to speak English and reverted to his first language, French.
Dad died. Oddly enough, this was the easiest thing to deal with as I’d been prepared for it and already had significant grieving done as he was already gone when I first saw him earlier in the month
Then I had to spend a week with family. I like and love my sister and niece, but my older brother brother leaves me wanting to crawl out of my skin. Spending that much time with him and also with my brother-in-law was extremely stressful.
Less than a month later Bran has a heart attack. I’m terrified that I’m going to lose my best friend, my rock in the world.
I spend a week having to work, sleep and and make sure the few of Bran’s needs I can take care of are done.
I’m unable to be there as much as I’d like to for Boy. He’s an adult in years, but he’s still my son and he carried so much of the load while Bran was in hospital. Another instance of where my inability to be nurturing leaves him in the lurch.
Bran comes home and is home nearly a month when he feels pressure in his chest and some pain. Diabetics tend to have atypical symptoms for heart attacks so back he goes into ER and is admitted to hospital.
I again face the distress of the possibility of losing Bran to heart disease, of being alone without my bestest friend.
During all this I’m also having to do something I dislike a lot. I have to drive. It increases my stress levels to drive. It’s not that I can’t, I can and I’m a good driver. It’s that I intensely dislike doing it. Add on the fact that the car is a manual and I’m wasn’t used to driving a stick, you’ve got recipe for high stress.
So now I sit crying. Well, not so much crying as weeping. My eyes are leaking and I can’t stop them. Believe me, I’ve tried. I can’t hold myself together long enough to get my nose cleared. I’ve called into work as a mess. I’m not sick. I’m just a mess. Luckily they understand. Unluckily they don’t offer sick pay. Were I to own the business that would be one of the first things I’d do, make sure that full time staff accumulated sick pay. At least I have a day in lieu from training last month. I won’t lose a day’s pay to this.
I’m getting on my high horse and doing some pontificating today. This is about religion/beliefs/spiritualities and the perceptions of some of the majority of people in my country and the USA.
Tonight in a blog I (now used to) read a poem given to her when she stayed at Embassy Suites Hotel. She lauded the hotel for the poem, but most particularly for leaving in the word “God” instead of being politically correct and leaving it out.
“Politically correct”.
Yeah. That pisses me off, you see. She considers it politically correct to be sensitive to the minority of her country, even continent. She considers it to be more correct, even a relief, that a corporate entity would promote the idea of a superiority of Christianity over any other form of religion, spirituality or atheism.
Then I read another blog written from the perspective of a woman who is an atheist but who sends her children to a Christian preschool. She does this because of the superior academic curriculum. She does have some discomfort in the fact that her kids are being inundated with Christian beliefs, but also acknowledges that her kids have the right to know and decide for themselves what they choose, or choose not, to believe in as they grow up.
Speaking from my own point of view, if I were given that poem I would hand it back to the person who gave it to me. I have no interest in being choked on the religion of someone else. I certainly wouldn’t expect anyone else to tolerate that from me. It’s just another surreptitious way of making things Christian normative.
This isn’t a small thing either. In science, medicine, psychology, sociology, males have been considered the “norm”. How men acted, thought and ailed were all considered the norm. It’s still the case. Take HIV as an example. Men tend to get pneumonia as the first ailment that can be indicative of HIV infection. Women don’t but for a long time women were misdiagnosed because what they get are chronic yeast infections. The same goes for heart disease…women tend to have different symptoms of a heart attack from men. But despite this there is still a pervasive thought pattern in those sciences that says that men are the norm.
Move on to sexuality and sexual identity. You are presumed heterosexual unless you either prove or state otherwise. In some places, being or saying that you aren’t heterosexual is a death sentence. The saddest part of this is that the supposed “Christians” are more than enthusiastic about killing anyone who is different. The right wing Christian groups are very active in Africa in promoting anti-gay legislation.
I’m angry and sad about this. I’m angry because I know that I outside of my small family, small group of friends and small group of internet readers, I wouldn’t be accepted. In real life I’m very careful about who I tell that I’m a lesbian, even a celibate lesbian. I don’t advertise that I’m a sort of pagan Goddess worshipping, shifting to atheist because I feel no need to have the bible shoved at me lest I go to hell.
I can’t be me without having to justify myself and that pisses me off.
They grow up so fast! It’s been 29 days since Bran’s heart attack. Except for the blip in the middle of this week he’s been healing since. He’s also been chafing at the bit, wanting more independence. He’s not been allowed to drive or ride his bike for 4 weeks. Now, riding the bike isn’t such a biggie since he didn’t ride it much before, but it was the principle of the thing. That avenue of escape from the house was closed to him.
Today, not 5 minutes ago, he took his keys and Boy and drove out to Costco. He’s now free of being tied to the house. He can drive himself to poetry tomorrow night. He can drive himself to coffee. I think he’s a happy camper.
My anxiety has been given free rein and is pushing me back into the couch. Really, even the thought of getting up and sorting laundry is causing me issue. So I’ll wait it out a bit and push myself to load something into the DVD player, clear off my table (thus shutting down my computer) and start making jewelry to sell. I figure earrings, bracelets and anklets. The earrings will be all birth stones. The others will be other stones or a mix of others and birth stones.
Goddess! I hope they sell.
And someone took our parking spot in front of the house. They didn’t even drive up far enough to enable two cars to park. Jerks.
Bran is once again in the clutches of his family. We’re all very relieved that nothing was wrong (or wronger) and that he’s back on his proverbial feet. He can even start driving tomorrow, though I’m not sure he should as he needs to be somewhat careful with his right hand as they inserted the tubing for the angiogram through the wrist artery on that hand. Technically he could.
I got my bead order from Fire Mountain Gems today. I ordered and received: chalk turquoise, lapis lazuli, blood stone, red feldspar, citrine, clear quartz, chrysoprase, amethyst, carnelian, troumaline (cats eye – it’s very nice), and rainbow moonstone. Except for the moonstone, the stones are all birth stones. I’m hoping that they’ll sell well as people like to have their birth stones for jewelry. For some reason I was charged duty fees on this shipment. It’s the first time I was charged for jewelry supplies coming in through Canada Post. I can’t figure out why. Nothing I got from China was charged duty. I wonder if it’s just arbitrary as to who and what they’re going to charge duty and import fees.
I received an email from Tracy at Rings & Things apologizing for not responding to the email and that they can’t find it. She (maybe he) said that my order was shipped to me that day but they hadn’t received my return package as yet. Hopefully they’ll get it soon. I just wrote on it to return to sender. Sadly, it puts me enough behind that the sale in October I was hoping to have stuff for might be missed, or have reduced variety because I don’t have the wire to create stuff with in time. I should have some stuff for the November sale though.
I’ve been denied life insurance through my group plan at work because of my depression and that I’m too fat for my height. No request for a physical that might prove I’m healthy despite that, just that their stuff says that’s a no-go so I have to get private life insurance. That’s going to have to wait until I get the inheritance because I can’t afford it right now.
I’m tired. It’s been a very long day.
Last night at about 9:30 I was getting ready to head to bed. Alas, Bran had other ideas. His chest was bothering him and he was worried. That stands to reason considering he’d just had a heart attack 26 or so days previously. He complained of a heaviness in his chest that was odd. He wanted to head into the hospital. I tiredly agreed.
On our way out he asked which hospital we’d go to. I said RUH as it is where his cardiologist works out of, where the cath lab is and where he’d get the most prompt service (not that St. Paul’s wouldn’t give prompt service, but it would likely involve another ambulance ride from St. Paul’s to RUH to the cardiac ward anyway). So that’s where we went.
They hooked him up to the monitors, the vampires came along and sucked some blood and sprayed some nitro under his tongue. He had a chat with the resident on duty. The resident said that his heart enzymes were elevated, not as much as when he had the m.i. previously, but weren’t zero. He was concerned that with the previous stent blocking up and needing to be redone and with there being another artery that was fairly blocked that Bran was having another “event”. So in comes the cardiac resident. He looked at things, prescribed morphine and Gravol for the pain (the heaviness translated to pain on our drive over) and heparin in case to keep clots from forming. He said that though he had to speak to the senior cardiac fellow (fellow being a position, not just a guy who does cardiology) but that the likely hood of his being admitted to hospital was very high.
By this time it was after 1 am and I was dragging my ass (hard work, let me tell you). I needed to stay awake. I needed to be there while there was a possibility of Bran being sent home. After all, someone had to drive him back, right? At about 2:15 the news came back that Bran would be admitted to hospital and the cardiac resident would push to get Bran into the cath lab first thing in the morning considering his history and worries about the other artery being involved. I went out to the parking lot to go home.
Here’s where my adventure got to it’s pinnacle. It was bad enough that I had the stress of Bran being hospitalized again, but I had to try and find the cash exit of the parking lot. For the life of me I couldn’t find it. It’s a good thing that I had my credit card with me because I was trapped there. The only exit was the “Express Exit” which doesn’t take cash, nor does it take debit. Not only that, but even if I’d found the cash exit I wouldn’t have had enough money. That 4.5 hour session in ER cost $13.50. At night. The gouge you something fierce there. It was crazy. Anyway, I was finally on the road at 2:40. The time lapse from leaving ER to getting out of the parking lot was spent trying to find the exit to the parking lot. Poorly labelled, with construction going on blocking exits, and stupid arrangements of parking meant that 20 minutes was spent just getting out of a parking lot. Yeah, I’m that pathetic.
I got home, Tweeted and Facebooked the news and also texted the news to Boy. He was having a difficult enough time trying to sleep on his friend’s couch. This added to his inability to sleep. Poor kid. At least I managed to convey that he shouldn’t put too much effort into worrying (not that it would help anyway). Of course, being Boy he worried anyway and I was answering texts until 4 am.
The event was organized by two women at Parole, the supervisor of parole officers and one of the program workers. The host was the supervisor of Northern Saskatchewan parole. Also slated to speak was the head of the Saskatchewan Elizabeth Fry Society, a former prisoner who now works with women at the Prince Albert YWCA and with prisoners in the federal and provincial corrections systems. She was truly inspiring as she spoke of her life from a young child being taken from her parents to a residential school, to being given to a man she didn’t know by her mother, her abusive relationships with men and how she spiralled into a cycle of drug and alcohol abuse and prisons. She spoke with amazing candour about her attitudes of that time in her life and how, one day she decided to change and used the healing lodge in southern Saskatchewan to help herself make the changes she wanted.
Another speaker university professor, Colleen Dell who has done extensive research with women offenders (both provincial and federal) as well as working within the CSC system as a parole officer. She also was involved in the research that created as part of the end findings a song and video “From Stilettos to Moccasins”:
The final speaker was an Aboriginal woman who now works at the men’s healing lodge at Beardy’s First Nation. She spoke not just of the Creating Choices successes and challenges but how important the document and direction was to the healing of Aboriginal people and communities. Of course there was so much more that she spoke about and I wish my memory was better. Suffice it to say that she’s truly a treasure that I hope CSC is grateful to have.
All in all it was a very interesting day and despite having less than 3 hours sleep I managed to stay awake through the entire thing. That says a lot to not only my interest in the subject matter, but to the speakers themselves. We had lunch at the cafeteria at Wanuskewin (pronounced wan-us-kay-win). I had the three sisters soup (beans, squash and corn) with buffalo meat and a ham and cheese sandwich (that was today’s special) and my two co-workers had the buffalo burgers. They were less than happy to discover the burgers were cooked to medium rare. Neither like their meat to be pink (get your minds out of the gutters people). I’m waiting for the unfortunate side effects of the beans to take effect.
I took photos of the statuary, all except one of a medicine man wearing a white buffalo hide holding a buffalo skull aloft. I don’t know why I didn’t take a picture of that, but for some reason it felt wrong. So I went with my feelings and didn’t take a picture of it. Here they are:
So there you have it. That was my day. Now I await Boy to get home from the hospital after visiting his Dad. I was too tired to drive and rather grumpy. I made sure that most of the items Bran wanted were sent along with Boy so that at least Bran wouldn’t be bored (music, phone charger, something to read). Boy will be bringing home subs for us to eat and then I’ll be going to bed. Speaking of bed but has nothing to do with it. It’s murder and mayhem night. I’m going to turn the TV on and veg out.
Summer is over. I know that according to the calendar it’s still technically summer, but the leaves are turning colour and falling from trees. Our neighbour’s vine (the one climbing up their large elm tree) is turning bright red. The nights are crispy and getting darned close to freezing. The rains of fall are now causing havoc to the few farmers around who had fields that weren’t underwater long after planting time.
Three weeks ago on this day Bran had a heart attack. At this time on that night I was sitting next to him at St. Paul’s Hospital waiting to find out what was happening and hoping that he would be ok and not die. It ranks high on the nightmare nights that include the one, when Boy was 3 months old, I spent in the paediatric ward at Royal University Hospital before the head CT of Boy the next day. Happily it turned out to be nothing in the case of Boy. It wasn’t so simple with Bran. He’s recovering well and making changes that will ensure he will be with me a while yet.
I’ve gotten fairly good at driving the manual transmission station wagon we own. I don’t like the manual very much, but I’m getting used to it. My one worry is that my foot is going to slip off the clutch and I’m going to lurch and stall. The worry became more tangible today with the rain. You see, the rubber thing that is supposed to be on the pedal came off some time ago so my foot is placed onto the metal of the pedal. That’s kind of slippery. Happily nothing of the sort has happened yet despite the rain, my fears and the slipperiness of the sole of my shoes.
Work is going ok. One of my co-workers is doing her minor practicum for her social work degree at a children’s residence. The kids there have the typical problems one would expect with troubled kids…Fetal Alcohol Spectrum, ADHD, etc. The people there treated her like she was a clueless newby when she arrived but they’ve learned to stop that. Not only has she already worked with troubled youth at a girl’s home but also done practicums at a shelter for street kids and now works with adult offenders on day and full parole. A 15 year old kid having a temper tantrum is a snap for her to handle considering some of the big guys she’s had to deal with by herself during her shifts (there are 4 adults for 9 kids and they consider themselves overworked – we have as many as 25 men and women and work alone). Yeah. She’s looking forward to being done there. I hope her major practicum is better for her.
I’ve been giving thought to getting a social work degree. It’s an applicable degree that would allow me a wide variety of places and areas to work within the corrections field. I won’t be doing it for a while though. I’m not ready to get back into the demands of school and I need to be full time for a while.
Speaking of school. I have to get my withdrawal thing into my supervisor (who’s also the Chair for Grad Studies of the Sociology department). Sometime this weekend I’m going to get my two remaining library books back into the library. With that done the formalities of me no longer being a student will be complete. I still haven’t heard back from my supervisor since I sent her the email saying I was going to withdraw from the program. Anyway, getting it all done will mean that I’ll have that load off my back…until it comes time to start paying back my student loans. Hopefully by then Bran will be recovered enough to have a job and life will be somewhat easier for us all.
Is it me or did summer pass by far too quickly? It’s not like we had much of a summer this year with cool temperatures and rain nearly every day, but still, people are talking about snow already. Even for cold loving me that’s a bit too soon for me. I was having enough trouble adjusting to my son being an adult and then summer disappeared. Time passes far too quickly the older you get.
I rescheduled the physical I was supposed to have yesterday. I have it on the 20th now instead. The concept of a physical is still quite disturbing. Try as I might the idea of someone I don’t know touching me anywhere (not to mention the more intimate places) is more than a little intimidating. Hopefully by then I’ll have myself psyched up enough to be able to go through with the process.
Did I mention that I had to send back the entire order of wire back to Rings and Things (Google them, I don’t feel like having a link of my blog to them right now, I’m put out with them at the moment)? I did. They sent me 1/2 round wire. Then I sent an email to their sales department telling them that I was sending the order back at their cost and wanted the mistake corrected. Have I heard from them at all? No, I haven’t. Not a peep. That doesn’t bode well for customer service, now does it? When I write to Panda Hall I get a response within 24 hours attempting to address my concerns. Fire Mountain Gems is also very good at responding quickly. So after I get my wire (if I get my wire) I’ll be looking for a new place to order from.
That’s about it. I still look forward to winning the lottery (or a nice subsidiary prize). Then again, don’t we all…or at least all those people who buy tickets.
Bran figured out what the problem was. It had something to do with he and I sharing the same static IP number or something like that. My laptop was giving some kind of warning window that helped him figure out what the issue was. Now we have separate IP numbers and everything is hunky dory again. At least it’s not that we need a new router.
Everything else is going ok. I spent much of this weekend sleeping. I know, that’s not any news but it’s what I did. I’d get up in the morning, have a little something to eat (this morning it was two zipper skin oranges and some peanuts) and then it’s back to bed for another four to five hours then up again. Now I want to go to bed again. I’m going to try and stay awake though I do have to be awake to call the doctor’s office and find out when my physical is. I had it in my calendar for today. Since today was a stat holiday and their office wasn’t open, I’m going to assume that I wrote it in wrong.
Another reason I want to be up is to take a couple of texts in to school to sell. I went through my bin (mostly) and packed up the school related stuff. Before I closed up the boxes I input the text authors to find out which texts can be resold. Inconveniently enough, only 2 (maybe a third) can be bought back by the book store. Sucks, but that’s the way of school. The rest of the stuff in the bin is office supply stuff and extraneous other things that will find their way into drawers. The books that weren’t texts but were of general interest reading are on a book shelf waiting for me to get around to reading them. I’ve already read Hunting Humans and Stolen Life but there is also Just Another Indian and Thunder in My Soul that I want to read. I also have to return a couple of books to the library. Those ones were at home. With luck, they’ll be the only library books I have out. I’ll check when I return them.
I’m using my old laptop. It’s somewhat noisy (compared to the quiet of most other laptops as the fan needs to be replaced) but it has a much larger screen and that makes me happy. It also has a touch pad that actually turns off (what a concept!) and a keyboard that’s a more standard size. I’m still getting used to it again. I’ll be downloading my address book and old emails from the net book, backing up all the information there and letting Bran do what he wants with it. I suppose it could be sold for a few dollars after everything is wiped off of it. I will miss the matte screen.
I picked a good week to have a physical. My IBS is acting up. Nothing like having something actually wrong to make the check up worth while, right?
My netbook is giving me all kinds of grief by not working properly. For some reason it’s dropping the connection to the network modem thing. It was driving me batty. It’s just one of a string of issues it’s had since nigh on the beginning (but after the time we could do a quick exchange at the store).
First it was the connector to other video wasn’t working. In fact, it never did work. I figured that was no big deal. I mean, how often was I going to be connecting my computer up to the television, right? Next to go was the ability of the touchpad to be off. I turned it off. The software recognized that I’d done that. However the touchpad itself remained active. Then the backspace button lifted and wouldn’t stay down.
The last was the ethernet connection dying. Bran thought it might be the d-link thing that’s going but Boy was connected. There’s absolutely no reason for it to die. Well, technically it was on hiatus. If I’d started the computer again, it probably would’ve worked as it should have. Sadly, it probably would be temporary.
So I hauled out my noisy old laptop. The first thing I did was figure out what needed to be pushed to get it to try and find the wireless signals. With that accomplished it was a a simple matter of logging in…or so I thought. That didn’t work. It was seeing the signals, it just couldn’t connect. So I thought, hey, we have wire. I’ll just hard wire it into the network and I’ll be going right away. That worked for about 1/2 hour and then the wire connection stopped working. WTF!? I was hard wired into the network. It should’ve been working. But it wasn’t.
Alas, during this whole fiasco Bran was out at Tonight It’s Poetry at Lydia’s. This meant that I had no easy and quick fix to my issues. It had to wait until he got home. Luckily for me, not long after I wound up the wire (and tried really hard not to scream – successfully) Bran phoned for the ride home. I asked him if he’d changed the key for the wireless since I’d changed from the laptop to the netbook. He wasn’t sure, but it was possible. Turns out he did. Big time. So now with the correct key to the wireless my laptop is happily chugging along. I’ve updated my bookmarks on Firefox, gotten the new version, downloaded and installed Twhirl for tweeting, gotten the newest version of Thunderbird going and settled in to some amazing amazement.
I’ve tweeted it, but it remains true. I can’t believe how large the screen of the laptop is. On pages I have to scroll down with the netbook I can just straight up read on the laptop. Sure the laptop is heavier, but it’s also got much more viewing capabilities. The storage is somewhat small too. I suppose I could get a larger hard drive. That could mean replacing the fan that’s making all the noise. That would also mean that the money spent on the laptop could be spent on a new system. Hmm…something to think about in the future. I’m not worried right now. I’m not going to be adding music or much in the way of documentation. It has a D drive that has 30 gigs free. I didn’t know that until just now. I’m not sure what I can stick in it. I’m thinking of dumping the music off this thing. It’s all on the external storage backup unit. It’s not like I need it on this computer. I don’t listen to music on it.
Anyway, that’s my adventures into geeking. It’s nowhere near what Mush or Brad do when it comes to geeking, but I did figure out it was a problem with the key, and not give up. I’m glad of that.
