All I Want for Christmas is for shit to stop breaking

This is a rant. A bold-faced panting rant standing on a crates holding up a sign that says "Prepare for Rant!!!"

It began two weeks ago.

My wife Millie works overnight. As usual, she headed out the door about 9:45 and I sat down in front of the computer and prepared to check email, write, do something involving the computer. Five minutes in the desk that the computer, mini-milk crates full of CDs and some misc-shit rests on collapses, the only thing hold it up... my GUT! Or as we call it around my house... my front butt. Let me explain that this "Desk" was actually a huge wooden plank on huge braces screwed into the wall, creating a work bench. this wasn't some half-assed Wal-Mart press board crap, this was solid. The former owners used it as a sewing room.

So there I sat, trapped like Magnum PI (I'm not stopping to explain the reference... either you get it or you don't). I spend the next 40 minutes gingerly unhooking every piece of equiptment and lowering it to the floor around me. Eventually I am able to move without fear that the computer will crash to the ground. The problem was now that I could no longer use the huge walk-in closet "office" any more, I had to find a new locale for the computer and my "office" (why am I putting that in quotes. The long and short of it is that we moved everything to the spacious room that was earmarked as a possible future nursery. It worked out for the best.

The next weekend the fake Christmas tree stand broke. My son and I spent the entire morning and into the afternoon last Sunday attempting to jerry rig the thing to stand up. Nope. No good. So I bought a new stand. Apparently this "stand" was for something called a "real" tree what ever the fuck that is. No go. Even with the duct tape and towels it wouldn't stand. So my son and I collect up the now 2 year old, worthless fake tree and throw it away and then head out to buy a "real" tree. It worked out for the best.

Two days ago, while working on scanning and printing family photos for Christmas presents... my hard-drive crashed. After 7 years it gave out. Not quite two weeks after I worked so hard to keep it alive, it died. That is to say WINDOWS died. Of course. I have been running Windows 98 on this Compaq Presario since 1998. 7GB hard drive that always seems to hover at about 1.5 GB free. My work horse. My connection to everything. I wasn't giving this up without a fight. I broke the seal on my QuickRestore CD and dropped it in... in full knowledge that it would wipe my hard -drive clean and put me back to where I was right before my wedding in 1998.

I think I had a virus. The harddrive couldn't find a bunch of vbs files or something. Well V and S appear in it anyway. After 3 hours, two attempts and then all the adjustments for all the equiptment I have added... new monitor of undetermined origin, new mouse, the printer/scanner combo, and of course the call to Windows outsourced tech support in India, the system is back up. I have had to reload much of what I had. But everything seems to be working. Even though I type gingerly, like I'm hugging an old woman who is now frail.

OH! And the internet... yeah, I have been running on AOL 8.0 since 2002. I have refuse 9.0. I hear it sucks rancid monkey twat. I think that's what my mom said. Anyway, I pay for an AOL account so I found the preloaded AOL on the computer and logged in.

To make a long story short, I am blogging from AOL 4.0 . Christ, it's like I've hopped in a time machine. I'll be getting 8.0 back tomorrow, then I will stop having the panic dreams. Then the shaking will stop. Then... maybe I can have a good Christmas.

This doesn't bode well for my flight to Arizona in a few weeks. Maybe I have been watching LOST too much.

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