Today was fairly uneventful. It seems the secret to surviving without a spouse is to do as close to physically nothing as possible. For instance, I woke up, it was raining, I went to work, and that sums up about the first 8 hours of my day.
Things got a little more interesting as a phone call to a cartoonist friend of mine actually ended us both up at the steak house, where neither of us had planned on being. Oddly enough, this solved the dinner problem.
By six o’clock, we left, and I decided to start working on the bonfire pictures and videos. It’s near 11:23pm as I write this, which simply means the time totally slipped by me.
I guess the reason it’s taking so long is that we happen to be sitting in the middle of one of those rare update cycles. On the PC side of the house, Microsoft has just released a pile of patches, and it’s taking a bit to get the kinks worked out. My machine is trying to update, even as I write this, and I can only imagine the horrors of being on dial up. Worse yet, many people don’t know how to take care of their PCs, and simply skip this phase, only to complain (usually to me) that their machine is running slow, acting funny, or is displaying pornographic pop-ups every time they hit the space bar.
Under normal circumstances, I’d simply scoff and flaunt my Apple around. However, Apple’s preparing for some major sneaky goodness, and they just put out a major patch for OS 10.4. Unlike Microsoft, which tries to keep adding to the turd until it’s a uber-mess, Apple announces that they are deliberately going to break things in order to make them better.
The down side is that some vendors don’t get the patches out in time, and a number of applications that used to work start acting funny. Amazingly, my 3D rendering software and my video editor are both having a hard time with the changes. Not to worry, in a few days fixes will be available, and things will run better than ever, but that kinda puts a crimp in my getting the stuff done tonight plans. I suppose that’s the price to pay when one wants to be on the bleeding edge of technology.
Amusingly, my cat scared the willies out of me. She snuck up on me while video editing, and just as I was trying to get a frame transition properly aligned, she decided she wanted to play with the mouse that I was using. Landing on my hand, she sends me startled, flying back in my chair — as I thought my mouse just grabbed me or something equally surreal.
This sudden panic attack on my part didn’t do her too good any, and she went scurying across my desk, causing papers to fly, CDs to fall, which made an awful crash, which only scared her and me even more. Because, as she was doing her fireball of terror, my brain wasn’t registering what was going on. All I knew was that my whole computer workstation area was exploding, something that I was sure wasn’t caused by OS.
We’re both calm now and enjoying each other’s company. I suppose I’ll do damage control tomorrow.
Tomorrow happens to be Art Klub day. That’s when I get together with all those famous artists and we illustrate for a few hours. Should be fun.
Given that nothing’s terribly gone wrong today, I’m almost, but not quite, asking “Tamara who?”
That’s not to say I don’t miss her, or that I’ve finally returned to a state of self sufficiency, but rather that I’m so weary and tired I don’t have the strength to notice things going wrong tonight.