Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

About a half hour ago, I was typing away happily, tagging RP tags, rewatching the first season of Supernatural, and musing about what fics I was going to work on, when out of the blue, I cannot get a single letter to appear on the screen. I figured it was a momentary hang-up, but even after waiting a few moments, I could not get any letters to appear on the screen. I tried restarting it, but It Got Worse. I can't even type in the password field to log into my laptop. :: Sighs:: I haven't had the best of times for the past few days, either, between working crazy hours due to storms, and having to walk on the street due to unplowed sidewalks, and getting pushed out of my slot at work by an out of control guy with OCD who insists on trying to ring up his own groceries and/or bag them himself. Now this. I know everyone has their runs of bad luck, but does it have to all come at once? ::Grinds molars::

Well, sort of. Thanks to a trip to the Best Buy in tax-free Salem, N.H., I am now the owner of a shiny new Dell Inspiron 17 laptop, with wireless capabilities, among other bells and whistles (like a webcam! Oh my!). I still don't have a connection via Verizon... However, I just discovered a weak wireless signal (possibly my neighbor's) and so I am making use of that for now. I do feel a little odd about pirating this signal, but hey, I'm making like a refugee from the Matrix, hacking into a signal to get my work done. I did discover that a local McDonald's has free WiFi, so I nipped in there for a couple of hours.

At least that much is going well: I wish I could say the rest of my evening was. I won't go into detail, but it entailed a long walk to and from a Perpetual Adoration chapel at a church in town, in the process of trying to find a family member who'd gone for a long walk. Let me tell you: long walks all over town, in the middle of the early night to find stray family members are cool only in Blood+. Hopefully I won't have to do this again soon.

My Twitter tweets have been spotty, this is how far into hermit-mode I've been: plus, I've been up to the eyes with work, Easter, and shenanigans at Carpe Horas -- the last has been keeping me sane when the first started to eat me alive.

--Easter: Had a fairly quiet Easter Sunday; we had a late supper at Cracker Barrel, and my dad and I spent much of the day cleaning up the yard after winter and all the windstorms we had (lots of downed branches and twigs in the grass). Gave my mom a Hello Kitty Easter plushie in her Easter basket.

--Work: crazy hours last week due to the holiday, also being asked to come in earlier and earlier on one day in particular. I understand it's busy and they need me, and I did miss a day due to that flood, but I ended up feeling a bit put-upon, especially after I waded through six inches of receding flood water on my sidewalk to get in to work one of those days. Forgive me for feeling a bit entitled: I just felt like I'd stuck my neck out for them and my efforts weren't being recognized.

--Also, a word of advice to fanfiction.net: No more ads with viruses, I mean it. I couldn't hit the Ad Block fast enough to keep from getting hit. I did not need a virus scare at one in the morning, which kept me up till three trying to calm down. I am not going to archive my fics on your site any more, as I'm scared to death of your buggy site now.

Unfortunately, this means I can't read fics on there any more, and some of my favorite fics are on there. :: Sighs:: Someone needs to come up with some kind of plug-in to make ff.n safe to surf, or to collect fics from there and disinfect them. There was a new YnM fic that I'd just started reading and enjoying.

But there's been some good things, too:

--Mom's parakeet: The past week or so, Flurry the budgie has suddenly started to get very friendly: he's coming up to the side of the cage to say hello to us, even getting close enough to give "bird kisses" (ie. teeny nibbles on our noses, if we get close enough to the bars of the cage). He's also getting much better about sitting on and staying on fingers -- and not biting them, either.

--carpe_ho_ras shenanigans: Crack plots a plenty, both the spooky and the silly! Practical jokes have been played on people by two twin elf boys, to the delight and annoyance of many. The moon turned blood red over the Mansion, leaving people scrabbling for an explanation. And I've introduced a character from one of my earliest serious fandoms, namely, Parsifal from the opera by Wagner; the guileless knight has been a hit at the Mansion and there is much plottage being planned.

Managed to get myself a week ahead on my word count, but now the NaNoWriMo computer bug seems to have hit my comp: I got up yesterday morning, went to check my email and I discovered my comp was making noises like a weed-whacker. So I made a slightly frantic call to Geek Housecalls to set up an appointment: they're sending a guy over today to take a look at it. The general consensus is that it might be the hard drive, but I think it's a fan on the GFX card, since that's been acting wierd for some time now. Hopefully we can get this straightened out without too much of a hassle...

Kudos to anivad for the heads-up on the recent LJ blackout. This from http://status.livejournal.org/:

LiveJournal has been under a DDoS attack since Thursday, August 6th. A DDoS attack is focused heavy traffic in an attempt to make the site unavailable; not an attempt to gain access to anyone's account or personal information. We have taken steps to filter this traffic so that the site can remain accessible.

The site is running normally for most users at this time. Because of the mitigation procedures required to keep the site up and running, however, some users may not be able to access the site or post entries or comments from some locations and browsers. This is not account-specific, and you may be able to access the site from a different computer or network.

What I want to know is why someone would cyber-attack a blogging site, unless it's out of revenge or spite.

Okay... thanks goes out to everyone who sent in their Friends request on my shiny new MySpace page... But I seem to be having a problem: Every time I go on there since last night, FireFox randomly crashes. I can't figure out what's up and if anyone has had this problem, do you have any suggestions on fixing it? Thanks in advance!

I feel like I'm spamming you guys for prayers about silly things, but this one could be costly: Turns out there's a very bad bug in the new EvE Online patch, that can mess up the boot files on your computer. Since my Internet connection is largely my means of contact with most of the people I really trust, I'd be in a tight place if something happened to it and I needed to call someone in to repair it. So, I'm asking for you to pray that my comp is all right and, if there turns out to be a problem, that I have the strength to keep my wits about me. Thanks in advance and I appreciate all of you.

I think I might just stick to MxO after this...

Waiting for the days to count down till the fiber-optic Internet service is installed, of course. I've got a lot of writing projects I'll be tackling during that time, including several MxO chat logs I've been meaninf to beat into story form... and a paranormal romance novel I've been toying with since I watched "Underworld" for the first time about two weeks ago (I know, I should post a review), when I was waiting for the last MxO update to patch. I've noticed there seems to be a trend toward these silly things these days (I'd blame Laurel K. Hamillton, but I've been reading her Merry Gentry series, which has become my chief literary guilty pleasure. I blame a certain fair damsel's reviews of them for getting me hooked on them :: Laughs at self, giggles at said fair damsel:: ), and I find it interesting. Of course they're usually vampires and werewolves or were-whatevers, but I saw one involving a mermaid, that looked intriguing.

I'll admit, I got the idea for the paranormal romance novel from a bit of RP going on in the MxO recently: Morraeon the reaper (Sieges's alter-ego) is a little different from her kin in that she has the capacity to love, to form attachments with other creatures, specifically Exiles and other AI-like beings, and she's been exploring this quirk of hers, which lead her into a somewhat ill-advised romance with a vampire named Vanil... but I was gently warned off of that plot by my good friend Anubis, since this guy, as good an RPer as he really is, tends to lean towards cybering, and he didn't want me getting into a tangle. But I came away with the germ of an idea for a novel. We'll see how I can adapt the situation and the universe so I can actually sell the book, and not just have it kicking around as the umpteenth fanfiction.

It seems the church is staying open indefinately yet again, but there is a catch: this one priest who often says the Latin Mass for us is for some bizarre reason not allowed to offer Mass for us. I swear the goons in the diocesan hierarchy are holding him hostage with the church as the ransom fee. There are times when I am so aggravated with the people in the Church, the hireling shepherds we're stuck with that it's enough to make me want to find a way to split from the Church as an organization and yet still go to Mass and the Sacraments.

And the main reason I haven't been posting on this journal as often as I should: my computer phobia is starting to come back with a vengeance. The little glitches and quirks were getting on my nerves so badly yesterday, it almost gave me a minor anxiety attack. Sometimes it's all I can do just to go online long enough to check my messages. I'd better get this thing in to the Geek Squad at the Best Buy in Danvers, but I'm worried about the cost of repairs. If I just knew someone personally who could help me tweak this thing and make it behave, I'd be much better off.

Some pluses recently: went into Lowell to First Friday Mass and confession with my mom yesterday, and I'm trying to work on the back story for my MxO alt, though I'll admit, my computer anxiety has made it hard for me to collect my whirling thoughts long enough for me to write them down. I've been reading a lot of books lately, to distance myself from these feelings and get my mind onto something else. Thus, I've been finishing a lot of half-finished books I'd set aside: Dante's "La Vita Nuova" (the love story of Beatrice and Dante himself), Mario Puzo's "The Godfather" (I like the movie better, but I love the ending of the book), several of Terry Prachett's hysterical books, including "Mort", "Reaper Man", "Hogfather" (great for the Christmas season!), and "Soul Music", and I just started "Maskerade"; if this guy's wacky stuff doesn't get my mind off my worries, nothing will!

Best of all: It snowed finally! Three inches of fluffy white stuff fell last night and blanketed the ground. Finally looks like winter out there!

I had every intention of posting about Christmas yesterday, but my Internet decided to act flooky again. If this happens to me one more time, I am going to knuckle down and get DSL, even though that means I may wind up being offline for a week or two. I'm about due for a break from the MxO, and I've got some writing projects I need to take a look at and get back to writing. Most notably, the infamous "This Shouldn't Be Happening".

Christmas post coming, I just need to get some liquids into my system, since the anxiety from work and from dealing with pernickety computers has left my mouth feeling dry.