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Well, I finally feel like I have a home again. After moving out of my apartment July 31, 2003, I couch surfed around the country. Actually, if you include Europe then I was quite the little nomad. Then on January 10th I finally slept in my own bed again.

Now you would think that would signify finally being settled. But it didn’t. Don’t get me wrong; sleeping in my bed again is heaven and I definitely look forward to nightfall when I can justify climbing into it and sinking into the featherbed and down comforter. Still, I felt unsettled.

Then my Comcast cable guy arrived. I had him install the hookup in the basement so I wouldn’t have to see any cables and wouldn’t put another hole in my sister’s house (the Dish Network guy had already made a few). Then I spent a pretty penny on a Wireless-G Router, wireless-G card for my desktop, and also one for my laptop. Now both of my computers are neatly set up in my room (my desktop has two monitors so I can work on a few things at once, cuz I’m just that busy) and I’m flying around the internet at warp speed. I even have an extra wireless card for anyone who comes with their laptop and doesn’t have one (or for my work laptop).

Life is Good. I’m finally home.

I spent all day yesterday trying to troubleshoot the error messages. You know the ones. A BSoD (blue screen of death) with numbers like 0x000000C2 or 0x000000A5 and of course everything I read doesn’t really help. Every time I thought I had fixed the problem there seemed to be a new error message or number. I won’t bother you with the details, but after shedding some tears in a Best Buy yesterday because they refused to let me exchange the wrong memory card (which they finally did exchange by the way, just to try and get this crazy woman…namely me…to stop crying) and then being on the phone all day today with Dell, I finally got to the point where they said it was the motherboard. Then after another hour of waiting to be connected to the guy who was supposed to set up a time to come out and change my motherboard, I finally talked to Kurt.

Kurt has renewed my faith in Dell. Before I talked to him I had decided (and will actually probably stick to this) that I will never let another friend buy Dell. Horrible tech support. Non-communicative. I could really go into it, but I won’t. But Kurt, wonderful, beautiful Kurt, listened to me. Really listened to me. He asked the right questions, he explained why he was having me try a few more things, he described what he was looking for, and within 15 minutes he figured out it was the original memory card that was bad. Not the ones I had been buying. Now my computer works again and they are sending me a free memory card. Thank god.

So I ask again, was this to balance out the spectacular days I had on Thursday and Friday? I was on such a high and then this happened and I haven’t cried so much in one day for a very long time. (There was more to cry over than just my computer, but I’m sure I would have been more apt to yell instead of cry if it were just that.)

But as I’m writing this I’m looking over into my sister’s kitchen (my sister who’s couch I’m sleeping on) and I see this glass on the floor in the corner. A glass that has been there for about three weeks or more. Underneath this glass that is turned upside down, is a spider. A big scary spider that my butch lesbian ex-army combat helicopter pilot sister was too scared to deal with. And so am I. We are so pathetically afraid of spiders that we have trapped this poor thing for almost a month and neither of us want to acknowledge it’s still there. So maybe it’s karma. Maybe my lack of compassion for this spider is what led to my computer crashing. Hmmm… Our mom was here last night and she always took care of spiders for us when we were little (never forgetting to include a “I can’t believe you girls are such wimps” kind of mumble under her breath) so we asked her if she would take care of it since she was here. She just looked at us like we had to be kidding.

Alas, the spider is still here and my mother won’t take care of it, probably as some statement about us being adults now or something. Do you think I could ask the Dell Tech Support guy to take care of it? I’m starting to feel guilty.

Aside from the added tips and tricks he taught us, I thoroughly enjoyed watching him feverishly write on the white board. He is right handed, but writes as a left hander would. Then he leaves out letters or reverses them, not out of a dislexic panic, but more out of sheer enthusiasm. It made me feel oh so much better about my own white board/post-it board stylin’s of the past. Cheryl leaned over in class and whispered to me, “He must make you feel so much better.”

I have a tendency as well to leave letters out, giving the misconception that I am a terrible speller, which is just not so. I also have no rhyme or reason to my charts so I tend to draw lines and then write over them haphazardly. Ah, the beauty of displaying your terrible handwriting for a class. Now you know why I keep a blog. Writing in a book would be pointless as it would be illegible.

Wisconsin again. This is actually a beautiful state. Not much to say except that my laptop monitor crapped out on me so I can’t use my laptop. I borrowed my co-worker Steve’s tonight so I could do extensity, but every time I tried to work on my expense reports it would get stuck and mess things up because the connection is too slow. I’m going to have to plug into the library’s network tomorrow. Isn’t this the most exciting stuff you’ve ever read? I know, I know. Brenda is probably shaking her head at me. “Katie, this is so boring. You can do better.”

But I’m tired and I’m cranky from lack of working laptop. It really is an extension of me. Argh. That’s a bad sign. You can take my cell phone, my TV, my car, but leave me a computer with internet access and I can do anything.

“Sleeping with the Enemy” is on TV right now and I forgot how this movie brought the song “Brown Eye Girl” back into rotation. We all loved it. We also thought the movie was incredibly scary and whenever he would play that creepy music by Berlioz, oh man…the chills. But now I think it’s just an okay movie if not a little boring. Funny how time does that. Ruins movies. Hmmm….. I could ponder more on what happens to movies over time, but alas I’m still cranky and now I’m tired and Steve probably wants his laptop back. Damn.

So I’m blogging this on one of our FUT laptops after getting the wireless lab up and running at the Sidney Public Library.

For all you trainers out there, get this: I come upon this FUT install realizing that I have to set up the Cisco wireless network for the laptops. I’ve never done this before. So I come into the room and start setting everything up, all the while thinking “geez, I hope there are instructions for the wireless stuff” and also “how come there are two separate labs here, Neptune and Denali?” Anyway, I am assuming the two separate labs is so we have all the wireless stuff and…oh who knows. That mystery is never solved and doesn’t need to be (although they were unlocked which we all know is disconcerting considering what just happened with the theft in New Jersey, but I don’t think the last trainers had a chance to lock these).

Anywho, I find some simple instructions, I get into the router, I set up the network and I put in all the wireless cards. Viola! Done. I felt pretty damn good about myself. But what’s this? No connection! What the hell? So I troubleshoot a few things, while quickly realizing that for some reason my brain is turned off. Eventually I call Kent, the networking God. Here’s where the frustrating part comes in.

Problem #1: No cell phone range, no cordless phone, no phone drops in the room, too far away to use the long phone cord. I end up running from one end of the library to the other while troubleshooting with Kent.
Pride points: drop 2 points for the number of people watching my fat ass run back and forth.

Problem #2: Since my brain was turned off, I hadn’t thought to look for a link light coming from the Ethernet 1 port to their drop. No link light. Switch cable for our own. Now there is a link light.
Pride points: drop 10 more points for having to be reminded to check for the link light, send e-mail to Kent apologizing for being an idiot.

Problem #3: Despite link light, still not working. Can’t ping their network. Spent a good two hours working with Kent, running back and forth, calling him back, sending him the configuration. Still feeling like my brain was off.
Pride points: drop 1 point for occassionally forgetting what I just did on the computer when I was relaying it back to him. Argh.

Problem #4: After all of this, Kent suggests we check where the drop is going and whether we really are plugged into the network. The tech woman and I discover that on the switch side of things, there isn’t a link light and furthermore, that port has died. So we plug it into our switch and SUCCESS!
Pride points: drop all my remaining pride points for not thinking of this from the very beginning when I orginally forgot to look for the link light on the router side of things. Why didn’t I follow that up then? Argh.

So now that I have it all up and running and feel great about the connection and the set up of the lab, I went to check on my e-mails from Kris to see how I did on Ruth’s page and what went wrong.

My Pride points are now in the negative because it turns out I really fowled things up with her website and I still don’t understand the basics of html and tables and crap so Kris, aka Angel of All that is Blog, fixed it. I checked out Ruth’s page and he had COMPLETELY changed it. Because Kris and I are alike in the sense that once we get involved, we pretty much get engrossed in fixing a problem and lose ourselves in it, he basically went in and started from scratch fixing everything. I had been working on her comments and page for about 8 hours yesterday before I finally crashed, but not before sending out my SOS to KB.

So here’s my shout out to KB and my apologies to Ruth for not being better versed at all this yet.

I decided that even though I have to drive six hours west to Sidney for my next stint, it still wasn’t worth doing tonight. I contemplated driving the 8 hours to Boulder, CO but again, I decided it would be nice to rack up some Hilton points here at the Embassy Suites in Lincoln. I found a great mocha place called The Coffee House, I’ve scoped out all the theatres, and the room service here is outstanding if I decide to stay in my pajamas all weekend.

Which finds me sitting here on my computer for the sixth hour in a row. I’ve been trying to catch up on everyone’s blogs and news and other fun sites. I’m also working on my html skills and trying to design Ruth’s new page. Right now she is using a template, but when she starts her biking tour job we hope she will start posting her digital pics and writing about her adventures. So I’m getting stuff ready for her to do that. I’m sort of Ruth’s Kris Bell. Filling the role he usually takes.

I better get back to work, but first I thought I’d purge my mind of some silly thoughts.

Thought #1: This one is coupled with a confession. My thought is that I should really be 200 lbs. After eating Mexican tonight with Erin and Brenda, I felt unsatisfied and munchy. I really just wanted a glass of milk so I could have some of my cereal, but then I remembered they have these really great pots of tea downstairs and they have room service. So I called and planned on just ordering the glass of milk and a pot of tea. Then I thought, well I usually want two pots of tea because they are kind of small, so I added a pot of tea. Then I saw they had popcorn so I ordered that, but they were out. For some reason I felt like I had to pick something else to replace the popcorn so I ordered a piece of cheesecake. But then I remembered I wanted something a little less sweet so I saw they have half sandwiches. I ordered a half a turkey sandwich and they said it came with salad, so I said, “Great, I love salad!” So in the end my glass of milk turned into: 1 glass of milk, 2 pots of tea, half a turkey sandwich, salad w/ ranch dressing, and a piece of Oregon Berry Cheesecake.

You know what the worst part was? Not only did they assume there were two of us in my room and brought settings for two people, but I couldn’t even fake that my imaginary second person was around somewhere (which is what I normally do, “oh they ran to the car,” or “they’re in the bathroom”) because just before they brought the food, I locked myself out of my room and had to go get a key. We arrived at the same time and it only makes sense that if I had a second person I wouldn’t have needed to go get a key. Embarrassing. I made Brenda eat most of the cheesecake and half the salad. And don’t forget, the milk was for cereal. And I ate that too. Pathetic.

Thought #2: The artists whose works end up in hotels must change their names to escape from the failure. If I were an artist, my pictures would be hanging in K-Mart bathrooms. I just know it.

Thought #3: Just because it’s gold, doesn’t make it pretty.

Thought #4: Am I the only person who eats Goldfish crackers by biting them lengthwise? And if I’m not the only person, do those who do it too feel as much satisfaction as I do?

Oh the little things.