My sister is supposed to be here to help with my pa, but she’s usually out gallivanting around. When I came home from the gym, she was gone and he wanted me to heat up some soup. Usually that means he leaves most of the soup for “later” (i.e. for the garbage when we finally take it away and toss it) but today he finished it all. Which means my sister was spending less time feeding my pa, and more time fooling around with her friends. Oh, well. It beats staying here all day and having him drive her nuts.

I suppose you’d think my pa could heat up his own soup, but he is 88, so he can do what he feels like. And if he feels like waiting and letting me do it, that’s OK too.

And I finally downloaded the pictures from my little Olympus thingy.

I’m sure I’m in trouble for showing my work desk, since there’s probably some sort of violation of office policy or something. Notice that the screen is showing my sister’s blog.

If you think my home desk is messy, you haven’t seen the rest of the room.

That’s a 20th Anniversary Macintosh that is used only as a TV, and piles of stuff I probably ought to throw out.

Well, no electrical disasters today, and I didn’t even have to work on my own stuff. My friend John needed some wiring help on his boat (mainly because he’s too big to fit in the crawl space under the upstairs dashboard). I’ve also decided that calling things by their improper names is a lot of fun for me. I’m sure the upstairs is some sort of flying bridge or something and the dashboard is probably the helm.

Had a stomach ache most of the day. I think they were trying to poison me at the place Greg and I went for breakfast. The chicken crepes were cold on the inside and I had to send them back once. I almost never send things back.

So this morning all my computers were acting quite odd. And fixing the “fast” computer required that I replace things a piece at a time until everything was new. That wasted most of the day.

After taking my dad out to dinner, I thought I’d finish my laundry. Well, that is pretty easy unless I have to fix a plumbing leak or the washer pump or the drier idler and belt. None of that was a problem, but I did cause an electrical fire with the iron. The cord must have been frayed on the inside because it burned a hole through the cord and the ironing board cover.

I better go to bed before I cause more trouble.

As you probably know.

So, to improve MY SISTER’S STUPID BLOG (it’s had a QUARTER MILLION HITS since I started keeping track), I upgraded the web server and added more memory to it. That meant having to swap some memory out of my main computer. But since I had to actually poke around the inside bits of the computers, my main computer DIED. I’m not sure what’s wrong with it, but I’ll probably have to replace things, piece-by-piece, until I get it working again. My suspicion is a dead power supply, but what if it’s the motherboard?

Of course, the voltmeter I lent to my friend Darrell was returned with a completely dead battery, so I had to go buy a battery to be able to test other batteries in the computer. Chicken, egg, etc.

Oh, well. Good thing I didn’t have anything better to do.

I’ve spent the last couple of days transferring over my sister’s stuff and my stuff to the new server. Mariko’s site is the one that gets all the hits, so really that’s the reason it’s all transferring over to something faster. That and my friend Anne gave me her old cast-off because it was acting up. Really, I think her problem was WindowsME (and so does she) but it was a free computer!

So, Super Eggplant should be up and running.

Nothing much is going on in my fantasy life. We did go to a bar for lunch yesterday and there were some attractive women giving all of us attitude, so it wasn’t just me! We’re all geeks getting the stink eye!

Plus, I did get some real comments today, along with a bazilion blog spam. At least it will all come through FASTER!

So, no ruminations, no discussion of the cars trying to run me over the past few days, nothing like that. I have to get some sleep before I drive my ma to the airport tomorrow for her trip to Japan!

OK, so the question is how long is it going to take me to upgrade SuperEggplant from a PII-450 to a P4-1.4. Should be much faster, though I don’t know how much difference that will make for the people accessing it from the outside. Too bad I’m not mean enough to make my sister cough up some dough for all of this. What I really should replace are my old Macs, but I can’t do that to them.

Went to the gym today and the 22YO was as surly looking as ever since the melon-headed guy wasn’t around. There are two “older” women there (older meaning they’re probably 30-ish rather than 20-ish) whose attractiveness dropped when they started talking about “marketing goals” and “graphs made to resemble Mt. Everest.” They were on the elliptical trainer near me, and a somewhat swishy male friend of theirs joined them. You can guess who kept looking my way and ended up talking to me. Well, good thing we had nothing in common. He likes Country/Western music, and C&W is the reason I have my iPod as backup at the gym, so I can drown it out if they start to play it.

Too bad the cute woman with the big nose isn’t around any more. She was, well, cute.

Yesterday I took a lot of naps, but I did get a free computer from a friend. It was a fairly new Pentium 4 system, but it needed more RAM and I wanted to replace the operating system. The RAM it uses is specialized and costs twice as much as the cheap stuff. And buying it wasn’t easy either. My local computer dealer told me it didn’t exist any more and after I ordered it on the web I got an email telling me that I only ordered one unit when it only works in pairs.

OK, so I got home and I tried to install software. This meant I needed to find some floppy disk and it took ELEVEN before I found one that worked. You can imagine how that worked: write a program to the floppy, try to run the program from the floppy, try the floppy again, give up and go to the next.

I think I’ll find another hobby with easily found parts. No computers, no yarn, no clay. Maybe just moving the rocks in the yard around or standing out in the rain. Something simple.

Everything happens at once. My local tavern had their 20th Anniversary, my neighbor had a concert, and a friend had his 30th birthday party. I figured I could make it to 2 out of the 3 things. But my friend Greg asked me out to dinner as well. So the best laid plans went awry. I was supposed to get a free computer from my friend at the tavern’s anniversary, but I forgot that while buying beers for a neighborhood friend who is a janitor at a big foundry which is also in the neighborhood. I went to the birthday party and found the people talking to just the people they knew, so I spent time talking to the people I knew. And then afterwards I went to a strip club with my friend Il.

It’s kind of sad that we went to a couple of strip clubs before we found a place that we could order a drink and sit at “the bar” (as opposed to at the bar). It’s also sad that we went to a popular club and I was comfortable enough to walk in with a multimeter (a geeky voltage measuring device that my friend who turned 30 returned to me) and they were nice enough to me that they didn’t care as long as it wasn’t a camera.

Friends at the birthday party tried to get me to quit watching football (my primary distraction in the fall months) and told me to go to pottery class to meet women. But the only people I know who go to pottery class are an older retired woman who I worked with and who didn’t like many people but seemed to like me, and a gay real estate agent who also knew the cranky retired woman and didn’t like her much but who also seemed to like me. So I don’t know of any younger women to meet at these pottery classes.

A librarian friend of mine also told me that she’s going on a date with a guy who declared his love for her. Do declarations of love work for anyone besides this guy?

Oh, my dream I had last night. I was looking up through a basement window and I wanted someone to give me a hand and get me up and out of the basement. The person I was trying to get to help me was, well, me. But I wouldn’t help me. And typing this is not making things clearer, but it is making me a little depressed.

I keep waking up in the middle of the night, wondering why I’m awake. I don’t feel apprehensive or anxious, but I’m wide awake. I had the same problem when I first heard I might have some sort of chronic illness. Not outwardly worried, but always waking up.

Weird how your brain does that to you. I haven’t remembered many interesting dreams, either, but if you want to see interesting dreams, go over to Slow Wave. The cartoons just seem kind of surreal and pointless unless you know that they’re illustrations of dreams that people send into Jesse Reklaw. It doesn’t make them any less surreal, but it does make them more interesting.

Well, one of the reasons I bought a digital tape recorder was to record my thoughts. Maybe I ought to keep it by my bed to record my dreams. My dreams are rarely seedy (darn it) but often interestingly phantasmagorical. (Like the $10 word?) Well, they’re interesting to me at least.

OK, lately, it’s because I had something to do. I got home to find two packages, but they were both for my sister, who is visiting soon. Fortunately, one was filled with water-soluble packing material and I had fun dissolving it.

Kind of sad that’s the most interesting thing I can think of right now.

How come the states who are least likely to get bombed got to pick the President?

Conversely, how come the states most likely to get bombed picked John Kerry?

Anyway, lots of people were talking (and I know it’s just idle talk) about leaving the country but that’s not a valid option. In fact, a friend (the one most likely to leave the country, though for different reasons) called us on on it. Here’s my reply:

OK, bad word you’re the one moving to Italy ASAP. And I’m not leaving.

Did your father have all his property confiscated and then get thrown in a prison camp just because his parents were from a foreign country and were easily distinguished, and have this happen in the land of the free and the home of the brave? Were your grandparents restricted from purchasing property because of their race? Do you have to watch what bars you go into because the patrons don’t like the color of your skin (and believe me, this comes and goes and gets much worse at times even in my chi-chi neighborhood)? When the country of your grandparents — no, great-grandparents since your grandparents were immigrants — did well economically and started buying property in this country, were you told to go “back home” even though the Dutch owned more of America than “back home”? And have you been “back home” to find that your real home is here in the US?

Bad word that the Vice-President likes to use in the Senate all you white bastards, I’m staying.

OK, so that’s not a completely valid argument, but though it’s hard being here sometimes, it’s still home. And let me digress and complete the racist part of my ranting to say this, “Damn, another Asian woman with a white man. Ain’t that a bitch?” (There’s no reason for the last quote, I just think it sounds funny coming from a bitter Asian man.)