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My Profile
Gift from Hil Part 2 - 2014-12-30
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11:47 a.m. - 2011-10-02
Princess vs Skunk: Round 2. Damn that dog! Slightly cranky with Mick too. He insists the dog go out at least a dozen times a day. She doesn't need to go out that often. Princess has very tidy and regular potty habits. She goes pee when let out first thing in the morning by whoever gets up first. Then I let her out again mid-morning and she does her big poop of the day. A couple of random piddles with other trips outside, but she never messes in the house even if she's been home alone all day. Mick's mad thing with letting the dog out every 45 minutes (and yelling at Wolf to take her out according to Mick's insane schedule too) means she's got a dozen opportunities a day to run away, get covered with burs, fight with the groundhogs, and yes, get sprayed by a skunk. Such was the case last night. Anyhow, Princess got zapped again. And I don't have the $70 to take her to the groomer to be de-skunked. So guess who's getting in the shower with the smelly dog later? Mick will assist, of course, but it's good ol' Mom who's going to be scrubbing a skunky dog in a small shower stall that doesn't have a hand-held sprayer attachment. Should be all kinds of fun. I did wash her face last night. Making sure she didn't have skunk juice in her eyes and nose. Poor dumb doggie. She seems okay today. Stinky as all hell but otherwise unscathed. But no more midnight trips outside, that's for damn sure. I'd rather mop up a pee puddle than do this crazy maneuver of trying to scrub a dog in the shower. Mr Man is going to get with the program or he'll be sleeping with the skunks. I'll make sure of that. Last night before the skunk attack I was here as usual, watching 'Star Trek NG', nursing this wretched cold/sinus/bronchitis thing that will NOT go away, and just thinking me thinks and ZAP! Zizz! Crackle. POOF. Streaks of sizzling pixels, scary crunchy noises from inside my machine. Riker's face was bleeding blue with crackles of yellow and red. Everything froze solid. Hard shutdown. Restart. Black screen asking if I wanted to start Windows normally. Sure. Windows had other ideas. Next round. This time a blue screen of death with color bursts of scrambled error messages. Several frantic attempts at restarts later I was in tears. Trying very hard not to spin out into a flaming ball of frustrated inadequacy and resentment over how a working computer is the ONE fucking thing I ask for. Not riches, fame, thin thighs. Just a functioning machine so I can talk to my friends, play match 3 games and watch Netflix. There's no money for Geek Squad. No friends in 3-D who can do whiz kid computer stuff. I speak computer about as well as I speak Urdu. (One word- makaan. Means 'house'.) Leaking tears but otherwise composed I trudged upstairs and told Mick about my fried computer. He jumped in with a bunch of suggestions and offers of selling a kidney to get the Geeks over here. I patted him and said I knew he'd move Heaven and Earth to get my computer back. No worries, he's my hero. But for tonight I was going to leave it be. I'd just finish the last Hunger Games book which Stephanie had loaned me and then I'd go to bed. Surely tomorrow things would look less dire. Then, of course, the skunk thing. At that point I threw up my hands, declared I should know better than to think my life was ever going to be less than a stinking pile of disaster and fuckery, and I started to laugh. Had to. Screaming wasn't going to help. So I laughed and laughed. Cleaned the dog. Came in here and gave my broken computer a stern frown and then went into the kitchen and made Mick and myself soothing cups of herbal tea. We sipped and I laughed a little more. Bit my tongue over the suddenly fierce need to jam a spoon up Mick's nose and shriek at him for his dumb ass obsession with letting the dog out all fricken day and night. Instead I patted him again. Finished my tea. Said good night to my smelly Princess on the porch. And went to bed. This morning I got up fairly early. Girded my frazzled loins and sat down here to figure this malfunction out. Somehow, don't ask me exactly what I did because I don't know, but I got the machine to agree to a system restore. It worked. Obviously. No biggie and probably a "Well, duh!" move for you techie types, but to me it was wondrous as piloting a space shuttle. I made my computer all better! ME!!! Proud as a gander I am. Relieved too. Now all I have to do is de-skunk the dog, help Wolf study for his test on ancient Chinese and Indian history, scrub down the bathroom after the dog's shower, edit the paperwork from the lawyer about the foreclosure, go to the fabric store and help Mick choose curtain fabric for the garage windows, make the curtains, figure out how to make dinner with 3 potatoes and a freezer burned collection of random leftovers, and finish watching that brutally interrupted episode of Star Trek.
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