choco_frosh | Entries tagged with kvetching

St. Thomas Beckett
I currently have plumbers replacing all the water meters in the building. It has so far taken an hour and a half, with no sign of stopping. (And of course the water is shut off, to the considerable inconvenience of Me, and the even greater inconvenience of downstairs tenants, since they didn't have time to prepare, since I didn't realise that these guys were going to do All the meters.)

And that would be bad enough, except I also had plumbers in (for inspection, rather than work, admittedly) on Boxing Day, and I get to have at least two more come by next week.

whut

Homeownership is overrated.
_______

ANyway, in about an hour I'm headed out (with the last-minute substitution of New!Gf for The Teenager) to drive up to Portsmouth and do Christmas/rando gift exchange with my immediate family+partners.
Possibly the plumbers will even be done sawing through pipes by then.

Cannot fucking believe that MassSave doesn't have a "Find a contractor near you!" feature.

COVID Levels: Still under 400 Bobcat-Robots

$#@%^&*(&*, Steve N' Seagulls is playing The Somerville tonight, and it's the one night when I REALLY cannot afford to expose myself to COVID at a concert. (Because I'm flying to Toronto on Friday to hang out with a whole bunch of people in a belltower.)

Well, the good news is that I have PRETTY MUCH all the verbiage into this issue of The Clapper. (Thanks for the help and moral support,

rocksinformation!)

So PRETTY MUCH* all I have left to do is add photos and captions.

The BAD news is that:
a) There are going to be a LOT of photos and captions.
b) The exact number is still to be determined, since I have a photo-essay that is going to get squished down to two pages or allowed to stretch out to three, depending on how I need to fix the page count;
c) Putting in photos and captions is traditionally a bitch.

Also, this issue is gonna be a MONSTER. I might just be able to keep it down to forty pages, but 44 is looking more likely. By contrast, last issue was 28, and even this Spring's issue (all Bruce Butler, all the time) only ran to 32.

Gaaaahhhhh.

* I also still have to write the Editor's Notes, put in the Final, Corrected version of the AGM Minutes, edit p. 2, and...probably a few other minor things I'm forgetting about.

ETA: FFS, fellow ExCom members. WHY are we STILL arguing endlessly about the precise wording of how we're going to phrase the changes to the by-laws?

Questions I keep asking even though I know the answer, because the answers aren't satisfying:*

Why am I cold?
Because it's cold in here.

Why is the apartment cold?
Because it's cold out, and we keep the thermostat fairly low for obvious reasons, and also the thermostat is a filthy liar, and the apartment is badly insulated and so leaks heat, which makes it feel even colder than it actually is, and it's 45 degrees and raining outside.

Why does the skin on my hands keep disintegrating?**
Because it's cold, AND because it's cold you're wearing scratchy sweaters a lot, AND you keep neglecting to wear dishwashing gloves.

* Or satisdactying.
** That may sound overly alarming: I'm just talking about my usual seasonal eczema-like thing.

OK, time to buckle down and do job applications. (The post-Mailroom euphoria has evaporated, due to the contemplation of my lack of income and structure. Seriously, I always forget how huge that last one is. Either that, or I need to find a career designing anachronistic architecture. And I'm pretty sure those don't exist.)

Also being reminded of the fact that job applicating tends to turn into a giant "WHO can write the best cover letter?" contest. And of how much I hate that fact.

OK, I shouldn't ACTUALLY be so negative. I'm making progress, I'm (sorta) ringing Grandsire now, Plain Bob* will probably happen within the next couple of weeks. As I say: it's just weird when you remember when so-and-so couldn't put two strokes together, and now YOU're the one who's an idiot.

And I successfully replaced the clapper on the #5!** Go, me! (Now I just have to check to reassure myself that the weird noise it's making doesn't mean it's about to fall off again!

Now my job situation at the moment: THAT's worth complaining about...

*******

After practice on Wednesday, went out for one last dinner at King and I with various fellow Ephs and

landofnowhere: the latter bore up well as the rest of us swapped stories of how the campus has changed over time, and which buildings we'd broken into for kicks at some point in our irresponsible youth.

Plain Bob, like Grandsire, is one of the simpler Methods in changeringing;
although having just read the comments on an entry by the incomparable

tkingfisher, I am now imagining that it is what she'd call her new property if she bought a chunk of North Dakota or something.

** Albeit with a lot of help from fellow steeplekeeper Ricki, and secondarily from Margaret, Austin, and Phoebe; none of whom have DW or LJ accounts that I know of.

I am in a bad %$^(&*) mood right now.

I got rejected for the Harvard cataloging job I was hoping to get.

I looked at all the likely job websites yesterday without result; this leaves me with* roughly zero motivation to look at all the second-string options today.

My employer/client in Germany is giving me the runaround.* He emailed me about a mammoth editing project yesterday; I wrote back to say Sure, I can do that by Friday, expecting that he'd be emailing me the actual document that evening.
I still do not have the actual document.
(And also, every passing hour is one less that I have to work on this %$^&( thing, and therefore increases the likely stressfulness of actually getting the job done.)

Due to the second and third points, I have spent most of today alternating between checking mail every three seconds, playing Civ3, and working on a graphics projects.**

...Oh, and OLD bad news: my sister-in-law didn't get into Tufts, so they won't be moving to Boston this winter as we had all (for various reasons) hoped.

Grr.

* In his defense, it sounds like this is because the end client is giving HIM the runaround.
On the other hand, this is the second week in a row that something like this has happened.

** And I can't figure out WHAT I was thinking the first time I designed that spiral staircase, since I can't figure out how I can get it to the second floor of the bell tower in any reasonable fashion; and it looks like I'm going to have evacuate my troops from Argos. So those distractions aren't exactly improving my mood.

I feel as though I ought to feel something about the Boston Marathon bombings; but after Oklahoma City, 9/11, Sandy Hook, and the rest, I've just gotten used to national tragedies; and I'm too caught up in personal tragedies. All I've got is profound relief that none of you got hit by scrapnel (err...right?); and the feeling that the following is a bit insignificant by comparison. But:

Things that are making me sad this evening:
- The amount I just agreed to spend on bike repair.
- The fact that it makes sense for this to be a higher priority than fixing (or indeed keeping) the Mob.
- The smell of malt on the wind, when I haven't felt like I could afford beer since Christmas.
- The quality of my students' papers. And following on from that,
a) the fact that the writing guide is now going to have to feature yet another warning: When writing on controversial topics, please be aware that the bar is higher for papers of this type. In addition, please check snopes.com before finalizing your paper topic.
b) the several students who haven't submitted papers, and are going to fail in consequence.
- The fact that one of you referenced a song that I used to have on this computer, and which of course went down the tubes the last time I had to reboot the system.

Some explanations:

One of the things I've been doing too much of lately is rereading Cherryh's Chanur novels. From which "Gods-be black things..." is a quote: at one point The Pride of Chanur gets infested with vermin (this is a Bad Thing in a spaceship). And "Gods-be" or "gods be feathered" is apparently a reference to some old Hani religious controversy, but that's not very important to the plot. Either here or there.

This all explains why this was the first thing to leap into my head when, awakened a night or two ago by rustling noises (as of a rodent attempting to steal some dried egg noodles), I leapt from bed and turned on the light, in time to see a small black shadow scurrying up the wall and behind my fridge.
Yup. It seems we have mice.

It's not a mystery, really. It is difficult to completely mouse-proof a house, and in any case my landlord has a bad habit of leaving the basement windows open. While I keep food in my room, and not in terribly secure places (for identical reasons: It is difficult to find space either in the cabinets of a shared kitchen or in your bedroom to keep a 25 lb. sack of flour.)
What is a mystery though, is

1) How the $#@%^*^&^ are they getting onto my shelves? I have found what appears to be mouse poop in my dishware, on my shelves--which are metal and glass--a meter or more off the ground. Are they leaping from the chimney to the fridge? climbing up the struts at the back? Or using some sort of mouse-sized Spiderman gear/abilities to climb up sheetrock without even scratching the paint??

2) What the $#@%^*^&^ do they want up there? I mean, I totally understand mice going after your food. That's just a given. But day by day, my cereal boxes remain unknawed, my apples uneaten; there are no holes in the flour sacks. From all appearances, the mouse is climbing up my shelves SOLELY to poop on my stuff and thus f<<< with my head.

ANyway. I have pointed this out to my landlord; he has promised to get traps. Hopefully we can catch this little bastard and give him the third degree on these questions.

So listening to the Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie song last night got me thinking, once again, about how much MS Word Sucks.

Because let’s face it, the program is bloatware at its worst. OK, it could be slower, but like something produced by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, it performs functions that no one could possibly want, while failing to do various things that one would have thought would be basic.
And even if it actually worked properly, it would stupid. Because it seems, ever increasingly, to be designed for stupid people.

Would it really be too much to ask for something like “WordPerfect 2007 (Academic Edition)”? A word processor tailored to those users (I’m sure there are enough that it would be profitable) who aren’t lobotomized receptionists?

It would ideally have the ability to insert tables, and perhaps do spell check. Oh, and envelopes and mail merge. And it would have short-cut keystrokes (including one for footnotes, which Word lacks, for no discernible reason. Perhaps one could even--gasp—have the “fn” key do this? But I digress.)
But other than that, stripped down. No Thesaurus, or grammar check, or Autosummarize (?!?), or Autocorrect. These, IMHO, merely encourage bad writing and laziness. (That’s certainly their effect on me!) Just one font, but with clear instructions as to where to get more if you wanted them. I, for example, am never going to use the dozen Japanese character sets, or the fifty-seven nearly identical slightly fancier versions of Roman that came with this machine, but I could really use Semitica, or a reliable Greek alphabet, or a better Gothic font.

It would not need the ability to load webpages, though the ability to insert images might be handy. But we don’t need Wizards, of any kind.
And we certainly don’t need the @£$%^&* Office Assistants!

**************
Discussion Question: Is it possible that Microsoft is, in fact, OWNED by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation?

It is way too early in the year for Daylight Savings.

Why does the hardware on my laptops keep breaking?
( Read more... )

(Wednesday, 12 April)

* Forgetting that it's April, and therefore bringing the wrong (out of date) Studi-ticket up to the Uni, so that when I get kontrolliert, I get fined. (Fortunately, they have a policy that if you show up at the office with a valid one, it's only 5E, instead of 40, but still. dumb.)

* The fact that the bus customer service office is closed on Wednesday afternoons.

* Having your webbrowser spaz when you try to open a composition window in webmail, so that it opens 40 composition windows.

* The fact that completely random people, whom I don't (believe I) know, have me listed as a friend on their LJ's. Possibly the LJ servers hiccuped, but...

* Having the Cisalpina be delayed for an hour, causing Grace to panic that we're going to miss our flight out of Frankfurt to Istanbul. Bloody Italian trains.

* Taking flights that are scheduled to arrive at 2 AM...and then get delayed!

As I’ve mentioned, dinner last night…and tonight…was a bit complicated. Decided the following was the best way to describe ‘em: it’s in classical form (repeating lines, unnecessarily long)

( “Blues” )