I miss my leisure time, boo hoo hoo

My very pathetic title is due to the fact I’ve had to spend the past week or so actually doing work, and not lazing around like I normally do.  The average person would still kill to have my “workaholic” life, but nevertheless, I’ve found it sort of exhausting.  The weird thing is, I look back and have a hard time pinpointing exactly what I’ve done with all my time, but I know it’s been used up in ways other than watching TV and reading (hence the “boo hoo hoo”).  Here’s a bit of what I accomplished this week, to the best of my recollection:

  • I finished the Shadow Distribution website, and it probably looks very basic, but it was surprisingly tedious to reorganize someone else’s work.  I’m relieved that it’s completed, although I think there’ll be a new film to add in the near future.

  • There’s a Google update going on this week, and it means nothing to the average person, but everything to us.  Our income comes from sites like iJoy Chair, so every move Google makes can potentially affect us in some way.  It’s usually a bad way, but this time, so far, so good.  We’re keeping our fingers crossed.

  • Yesterday I spent 5 hours trying to remove the horrendous CoolWebSearch spyware/virus program from our neighbour’s computer.  The virus hijacked their computer quite a while ago, and they were threatening to take it to BestBuy to get it reformatted for $200!  There was no way I wanted to see them waste their money like that, so I did the work and spent a grand total of $28.  I spent $20 on CounterSpy, a really nice spyware removal program which did a great job on the problem, and another $8 on a piece of software from eBay to fix their missing DVD decoder.  Sure, I lost 5 hours of my life (8 hours if you count the three I spent trying to fix the computer on Sunday afternoon), but I learned a lot and saved our neighbours some money.  I’ll get even with them by forcing Matt to help me paint the stucco on the weekend, when it’s 100+ degrees.

  • Did I post about putting new blue Xenon headlights in the Santa Fe?  I’m not sure if I did, but today I can post that I attempted to replace an overhead light in the car (a “map light”, I think it’s called), and I managed to blow a fuse and short out all the interior lights.  Go, me!  However, I then managed to figure out how to replace the fuse, but I don’t have any of the right size, so we’ll have to go and buy some tomorrow.  I’m breaking stuff but I’m learning stuff, so it all balances out (at least, that’s what I tell Nancy).

  • It’s been a pretty good cat week now that Frank is on Buspar.  His personality seems the same, but he’s much less confrontational with the other cats.  I bought another Feliway diffuser and put it in the bathroom here in the upstairs hallway, and even though it doesn’t seem to help cut down on fighting or nastiness, it’s had a remarkable effect on Chelsea’s demeanor.  She’s become much more contented and laid-back, and seems to actually have “peace of mind”.  Last night while I was at my desk she climbed on my lap, which is unheard of.  I think that the Feliway could have helped us avoid her stress/eating issues when she first came to live with us, but I had no idea that the product even existed back then.  If your cats are fighting I can’t promise it will help, but if you have a stressed or depressed cat please give it a try!

  • I vacuumed this week, both upstairs *and* downstairs, which is a miracle.  I was complaining today about the injustice of having to deal with “vertical dust”—we don’t just have dust on our flat, horizontal surfaces, we have dust hanging on our walls.  WE HAVE TO DUST OUR WALLS!  How insane is that?!  That’s why I think it’s better to just never dust at all, as then you never have to see your hard work disappear.  We’d honestly dust/vacuum much more thoroughly and more often if we had a decent vacuum cleaner that was also light-weight.  I now see the wisdom in a central vac system.  We love our Hoover vacuum cleaner but it weighs a ton, and just getting it over a baby-gate or down the stairs is a chore in itself.  We decided we need about 6 different vacuum cleaners for the house, and that I need to build “vacuum cleaner cabinets” to hide them in when they aren’t in use.  Sure, we could get a vacuum cleaner cover, but they frighten me *and* it would just be something else that needed to be vacuumed.

  • I think my aforementioned plan to build vacuum cleaner cabinets is the sort of thing which helped me with my biggest achievement of the week: I was “nominated” for membership in the Handyman Club of America.  I received a huge, obnoxious orange envelope in the mail, congratulating me on my nomination, and offering me a membership card and a sticker for the car, if I would just accept this prestigious honour.  If I don’t RSVP within 10 days, they tell me they’ll have to extend my invitation to the next handyman on their list of nominees, undoubtedly another “serious” handyman like myself!  Don’t let their website fool you—just because they make it seem that anyone can join, they really only want the creme de la creme of the woodworking industry, people who build furniture for their cats and who short out their car fuses changing a light bulb.  They want me, they really want me!  I know you’re all so jealous.

  • Today was our first “in the pool” day, and we spent it pulling palm fronds out of the drain with our toes.  You’ve probably wondered how Miss Universe gets such shapely legs, well, I’m quite sure this is her main form of exercise as well.  I’ve spent a lot of time outside this week, babying the new trees through the heat and helping them get established with twice-daily waterings (noon and midnight).  It’s so quiet outside in the evening that it’s not even a chore to stand out there, watering the trees, and knowing I could see really cool stuff in the night sky if not for the blinding street light shining into our yard.  I can see the light from the Luxor every evening, so perhaps that’s more exotic to some people than a silly little star cluster.  Speaking of nature, I highly recommend a really great magazine called Nature’s Best.  I picked it up at Borders and it’s full of gorgeous nature photography—the current issue is filled with photos people have taken in their backyards, and it’s just beautiful to look at.  It will make you crave the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II 16.7MP Digital SLR Camera if you didn’t crave it already.  I’m trying to convince Nancy that I need one, but she’s still skeptical.

  • The last adventure for the week—on Tuesday night we went to a talk about bats at the Nevada State Museum.  The talk was given by one of the curators of the museum in Carson City, and he’s supposed to be a bat expert, but I found the talk disappointing.  It didn’t contain any information that I didn’t already know, the slide show just featured photos from books I’ve already seen, the talk was very generalized and not specifically about bats in Nevada (I really don’t need to listen to 10 minutes about vampire bats), and the speaker seemed to have little interest in bats themselves.  He knew next to nothing about bat rehabbing, and showed no insight into bat intelligence.  The talk was supposed to be followed by a walk through the adjacent part to “spot bats”, but when the speaker said that he couldn’t identify bat species in flight, the walk became pointless.  We see bats all the time flying over our yard (sometimes we hear them, too), but we want to know what they are.  There aren’t that many species here—I’m surprised that the curator couldn’t at least guess at a bat’s identify from its size or type of movement.  So, that was disappointing.  This isn’t disappointing, though—a story about an amazing bat rescue in Texas:  http://www.batworld.org/main/rescue1.html

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/27 at 12:59 AM

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  1. Handyman Club eh? That makes more sense than the senior citizen stuff you get in the mail.

    Do you have a solution for cats who claw and bite you in their sleep?  Satchel and I fell asleep on the couch together and he woke me up by biting my hair and clawing at my neck.  But when I looked at him, it seemed like he was “sleepfighting”.  Yeah right, Satchel.  I’m not going to fall for that :p

    Posted by celinus  on  05/27  at  11:47 PM

  2. Hey, *I’m* the senior citizen in this household.  And you know, I thought I ordered the senior discount Sunset magazine, but we’ve never gotten it.  Ha!  They assume I’m a senior and I’ll forget.

    We went to the auto supply store today and Leigh-Ann fixed her fuse blow.  I just like how that sounds.  Say it out loud, “Fuse blow.”

    Posted by Flippy  on  05/28  at  01:18 AM

  3. Hey, it has been more than a week since an update.  I can only read this so many time you know.  And of course you are responsible for keeping me amused.

    So there.

    Posted by Nurse Ann  on  06/07  at  05:20 PM
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