Now it suddenly looks like the laptop is to be allowed in to my website. WHY, i have noooo idea!
Whatever, other FaM sites are apparently dead. Sick and tired of this computer stuff!
Computers
A-a-n-d…just to make things perfect…
Now Facebook has changed its settings in some weird way so that I can’t get into my page there, or if I can, it won’t let me post anything there.
SCREW YOU, FACEBOOK!
Seriously: that’s the end of my Facebook presence…and…I hafta say, I am so out of patience with this kinda BS and with sites changing up the way you work them every time you damn turn around that I reckon I’m just done with social media. F***ém all!!!
Seriously: I’ll keep Funny about Money until the website crashes (as it inevitably will, dontcha know), and then that is IT for my online presence.
Gotta find some other way to amuse myself.
Maybe take up amateur astronomy again as a hobby.
Yeah: I still have my old telescope. If the lenses haven’t sagged (they should’ve, by now), I could break that out and go back to spending the evenings ogling the heavens.
That’s how I used to amuse myself in junior high and high school. Yeah: can you imagine: a girl kid who thinks she wants to become an astronomer??
Well, be assured that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the profession of astronomy wanted NOTHING TO DO a girl wannabe. Not…A…Chance!
So I could play with my telescope in the backyard but…no…I couldn’t take courses in the hard sciences…no, I could not sit anywhere but in the back row in trigonometry class…no…I could not sign up for a course in physics…no…no…no…NO.
Ahhhh, the good ole days!
Kaput?????
Well: we’ll see if Funny is kaput in the land of the flying computers… AUGH. It looks like my desktop is offline altogether, and the laptop is sorta offline…maybe kaput, maybe not kaput.
😮
To perfect that predicament, somehow I spavined a hip joint and now can BARELY limp up the hallway.
Hmmm… does that mean My hip is offline, too??? 😀
Whatever it means, it sure as hell hurts!
Okay…
….TESTING….
The Plague of Passwords
Godlmighty, am I ever sick & tired of password hoop-jumps set up for you to navigate at every goddamn website. Yeah: Including the ones you own.
FaM used to recognize my computer when I surfaced over here No more! Now I’ve got to look up a stupid password and type it in — carefully — to access my own damn website.
Yeah, I know: all for my protection. Right. A sappy little-old-lady’s blog must be protected from the Forces of Evil. Mmm hmmm….
Seems like every site you go to these days demands that you enter a damn password. And it can’t be just one stupid password. Every site demands something different — some unique combination of characters.
Maybe it’s time for me to find some new pastime: one that doesn’t entail getting online.
I suppose what I’m getting tired of is the world of humanity as it has evolved. And yeah: it does seem to get more and more tiresome with each passing year. And yeah: if I could go out on the desert, set up camp in a cave, and live out the rest of my life there, I’d probably do exactly that. But I can’t…I’d need a password to get into the cave!
A Day Not QUITE from Hell…
But close. Very close.
Why?
Well…where on earth to start?
Let’s start in the neighborhood computer store.
My laptop crapped out; needed the attention of a computer tech.
My son has my car, so I can’t drive the computer across the city to the Best Buy, where I have a warranty that covers it.
Shee-ut. So I pick up the gadget and hike the six blocks to the neighborhood computer store, down at the corner of Main Drag South and Conduit of Blight. Haul it in. Explain the problem. “Oh…” says the ninny at the service desk, “We don’t fix that issue.”
Wonnerful. I do have a warranty at Best Buy. But taking the machine to that august computer dealer entails a half-hour or forty-minute drive through nauseating traffic, plus a good 15 or 20 minutes of standing in line. “Know anyone nearby who can work on it?”
She sends me across the street to the electronics store over there.
Hike across six lanes of homicidal traffic. Stand in line stand in line stand in line stand…
“I dunno what the problem might be. You need to take it down to the Best Buy.”
Yeah: the one I just passed over because I didn’t want to make the half-hour drive in each direction.
Hike back into the parking lot, mightily pi$$ed. A military jet ROARS over, emitting a terrifying racket.
Reminds me of how much I hated living in Sun City, just down the road from Luke Air Force Base, which sent its ROARING jets over our homes every morning starting at about 6 a.m., and serenaded us for the rest of the day.
That reminded me of Sun City’s other horrors, not the least of which was its incompetent, misogynistic doctors. The bastards who made my mother’s final suffering ten times worse than it had to be.
Or maybe a hundred times worse. When does stupidity morph into outright evil, anyway?
By now, as you may have intuited, I was having a just LOVELY day.
Circled back to the Funny Farm.
Here at the house, I stumbled across an ancient computer power cord. And LO! The damn thing fits in the laptop’s plugs!!!
We’re now attached to an outlet, and it looks like the critter is going to keep on working. Apparently the problem, such as it was, had to do with the present power cord, which must have broken or worn out.
Do miracles ever stop?
* The palms of the hands are still buzzing.
* The upper gums over the front teeth: still buzzing.
* The soles of the feet: still buzzing.
* The ears whistling at high volume, nonstop.
Somehow, none o’ that seems to matter much.
* Computer breakdown
* Idiots in computer store
* Roaring jet
* Sun City memories & horrors
* Persistent peripheral neuropathy
WHAT a wonnerful day!!!!
Now What???
In a moment of misguided chumminess, I lent my laptop to a business acquaintance. This is a guy I’ve known for years, outwardly very professional, a successful chiropractor by trade.
Bad move! Among other antics, he contrived to break the computer, rendering it nonfunctional. My son has taken it to a computer store, in hopes of getting it fixed…but that hope ain’t one I hold out.
Can’t afford to buy another one. That unit was tax-deductible, purchased when I used it mostly for the editorial business. Now that I’ve pretty much retired from that gig and from teaching, I get no break on its cost. And my son is more than ever convinced that I’m crazy, largely because of long-standing friendship with Mr. Computer Vandal.
Meanwhile, a few weeks ago my car was trashed, when I rear-ended some woman on a dark, wet, rainy road.
Now I’m banned from driving (by the Kid) and so have to walk to the stores. I do still have a driver’s license…but no vehicle! He has glommed it and stashed it at his house…rather too far to reach without a car.
Luckily, the ‘Hood is richly endowed with neighborhood stores and chains: Sprouts, Albertson’s, Fry’s, Walgreen’s, Bookman’s, and a cute little liquor store in which to feel righteous by “buying local” when scoring a bottle of wine.
Dunno which way to jump just now. I could sneak around and rent a car. But frankly, that seems like more trouble than it’s worth. In the first place, I don’t want to go behind M’hijto’s back, no matter how unreasonable I think his driving ban is. Plus…about three houses down the street, a neighbor has gone into the Uber business. If I would get off my duff long enough to contact him, I could probably get him or one of his colleagues to drive me just about everywhere I need to go.
One damnfool thing after another, eh?
Yet to decide whether to pursue the scheme to convert the garage, now empty, into an art studio. Probably not: sounds like more trouble than it’s worth. Still…hmmmmm…. I do like it as an idea.