I don’t think words can describe how fucking irritated I am with my work PC right now. I don’t think it’s possible to run a web browser, email client (Outlook, a memory pig if there ever was one) Max5 and Photoshop all at the same time without the entire thing coming to painful grinding halt. I spend more time waiting for the “End Program” dialog to finish whatever lousy kung-fu it does than I do working. (I seem to remember “End Program” actually doing something in 2000.) The funny thing is that this machine is a replacement “upgrade” from the previous one…and it runs slower.

Other than that, there’s a big hole out across the street where a major water main blew under the sidewalk, and we have a trickle coming through the downstairs pipes; the jackhammers were working until midnight, and then they all left. So there’s no telling when we’ll get water back. (To the City employee who told my wife yesterday that the water running down the street was simply snowmelt: GET BENT. Why is my water ORANGE, you moron?) The lovely and accomodating Sara let us use her shower last night, so we don’t reek, but I can’t do anything with the house until I can shower again.

Meanwhile, I’m in some kind of wacked-out hibernation mode right now- my metabolism has sped up so that I’m constantly hungry, but I need 10 hours of sleep a night to be functional. (the fact that I’m averaging about 7, and that there’s a storm blowing in this afternoon, which makes my sinuses feel like somebody’s been filling them with concrete, does not help.)

This morning I woke up blearlily and stumbled downstairs to make coffee. Running the water in the carafe to clean out the dregs took a little longer than usual, because the cold water came in a trickle. And so did the hot water. I got the coffee started and checked all the pipes downstairs to make sure the basement wasn’t floating away. I checked the doctor’s office bathroom to make sure it wasn’t frozen solid. Then I went back upstairs to relieve myself, and found that the toilet tank wasn’t even refilling. At this point, I looked out the window to see a lake across the street from our house on Frederick Road: a 20′ section of sidewalk was covered in water where one of the mains had burst, directly across the street from our house. Swell. We have calls through to the Baltimore City DPW, but there’s no telling when our pressure will be back to normal (or when that annoying rust in the water will be gone.) So that funk you may smell as you go about your busy day just might be me, the guy with the hat pulled down over his day-old hair.

It was good to sip coffee this morning, look up, and see the ceiling in the hallway with a second coat of mud dry and ready to be sanded (which made last night’s dry-air nosebleed worthwhile.) It was good to hear this morning that my main freelance client has plenty of work planned for 2005, which means Jen won’t throw my ass out on the corner to shake my moneymaker. It was also good to get a call from a consulting client last night looking for more help (and letting me know that the stuff I’ve already done is working fine.) I may not have two pennies to rub together, but things are still moving along.

Fixing The Little Orange Wagon. As you may or may not know, we at the House Of Cats have a problem child. Penn has been banished up in the office/atrium extention for the better part of eight months while we try various medications to settle him down. (Recap: He began to get aggressive towards Geneva, the lone female, almost immediately after the Tribal Merge, until he was actively seeking her out for fights. Geneva is no pushover, but when the stress level started affecting her eating habits, we separated the two boxers into their respective corners.) We’ve gone through four different meds for Penn, each with its own effects:

1. Paxil: mellowed his orange ass out for a week, and then gave him a pleasant buzz, like a month-long amphetamine binge. We switched when he started yowling at the wall during the day like a mental pateint.
2. [forgot the name]: The switchover was a peaceful three or four days, and then it was back to yowling. He slept and ate more at this period, too.
3. Prozac: this was probably the best of the lot, although he still lunged at Geneva when she walked past. We switched when he began picking out the food with the medicine on it and eating the rest.
4. Valium: I’d heard through second-hand sources that the Big V was supposed to be King Daddy of chillout drugs, but this is LIES! Valium is sort of like a kitty crystal meth for Penn—he paces the room constantly. When he hears my voice, he starts a methodical clawing of the door that sounds like we have the Mother Under The Bed from that X-Files episode trapped upstairs.

So, we brought him back in for $450 worth of bloodwork, having his anal glands unclogged (eccchh) and a bag of special kitty food worth its weight in gold. The diagnosis now is that he has some kind of inflamed bowel syndrome (an abnormally high white blood cell count), which means he needs steroids, expensive steroids, and we haven’t even paid off the bloodwork bill yet.

The bottom line here is that he’s not gotten any better. He wants to be the Alpha cat, but Geneva has already locked up the nomination and crushed all other opposition. He can’t be out in the general population while he’s aggressive, and we can’t condemn him to a solitary life in the Penn-itentiary upstairs. We’re going to give him the steroids and then try whatever medicine worked the best (probably the Prozac again) for one last shot at feline harmony; if he can’t fit in we’re going to have to put him up for adoption in a single-kitty home.

Gift. When I do get some bucks together, I am totally buying this T-Shirt for my wife.

One evening, two beers, many curses, and a box of drywall screws later, we got the cieling up in place (with the aid of my wife and a homemade deadman stick.)

When there is a blip on the weather radar here in Maryland, people tend to get all freaky. The accredited, schooled, certified, experienced Weather-Scientist Guys on the news wring their hands with glee, fire up the high-techlology toys (usually called something like SuperStormTracker Doppler Radar®), send a few interns out into the snow, and then hole up in the SuperStormTracker Headquarters with a fresh suit and a fifth of Jack Daniels. Every channel features a helpful info graphic and a crawl on the bottom of the screen. The shocking twist at the end of Law&Order is broken in on at 10:45 by the news desk, who helpfully tell us that absolutely nothing has changed. We then see an hour of file footage featuring panicked citizens looting the SuperFresh for toilet paper and Hot Pockets; “Team Coverage” of cub reporters interviewing bored tow truck drivers, and ten minutes with a moron on top of the news building, measuring the snow with a yardstick.

Usually, the predictions are wrong, and like this weekend, the “foot to a foot and a half of snow” turns out to be 4″. Jen and I usually shop in advance for our snow survival kit, which includes a generous helping of booze, snacks, and food, in the hopes that we’ll get snowed in and have to camp out for a few days. Even though the snow stopped mid-afternoon on Saturday, we pretended it was window-high and played hooky. Jen made all kinds of tasty food while I finished the prep work in the hallway—fixture pots and wiring for two new hallway lights, as well as a new lead for a porch light and switch—and we said goodbye to the Ugliest Chandelier Known To Man. Sunday I finished up this work and we began hanging drywall, and by 11pm had all but a 4’x14″ section covered. Now we have three weeks of white dust ahead while I smooth the whole thing out, and then it’s time for paint.

P.S. Props to my folks, for giving me that laser level for Christmas two years ago. It just paid for itself.

This was taken directly before I pulled the wiring for the nasty chandelier down and ripped it out of the cieling. Goodbye, ugly fixture.