The first thing I do every morning is take a whiz. It wasn't always like that, but that too is another entry. I was immediately faced with having to take the lid off of the toilet tank, reach down into the water and reattach the chain that pulls up the little flapperdoodle-weird. Hell, my eyes weren't even open yet and I hadn't even had time to make the coffee. (A little warning: I do morning action verbs much worse than I hear them.) So I fixed the chain. I made the coffee, and while that was brewing I made the bed. Then I fired up my laptop to check my blog, email, and Facebook...
BIGOLDHAIRYFUCKINGBLUESCREENOFDEATH!!!
In the past six weeks I've gotten used to seeing them. I get one about every 15 minutes on some days, and on others I get only three or four. With the way yesterday began, I knew that I was in for a rough one. I waited for the computer to reboot and I logged in again. I won't go into all of the details, but by noon I was already wanting to shove this laptop up Toshiba-San's ass.
So it went. I spent hours online trying to find a solution (as I have every day for a month and a half). There's forum after forum full of people who are having the very same problem, but all of the replies from the computer gurus are way over my head. Can't one of them just talk to us like the noobs we are? Look, not all of us sit in our parents' basement all day playing video games and putting together scratch-built computers. Just tell me what to do in, layman's terms, damn it. If you say I need to upgrade my BIOS, please translate that into humanese!
Interlude
Meanwhile, the Dell (a warhorse of a machine that I entrust with my most precious data) has been having problems shutting down and would take 5 or 10 minutes. I decided to look into it. Fortunately, that went swimmingly and it now shuts down pronto like it did when it was new. Man, I love that computer.
End of Interlude
The rest of the day was spent in BSoD* hell on the laptop. I downloaded Memtest86, but it wouldn't install. I downloaded another version and had the same result. I then downloaded the Windows Debugging Tools, but couldn't make any sense of it. Finally, around 10:00 at night, I figured it out and discovered that my video driver needs to be updated. Great! But how do I know what to download? What if I get the wrong one? I'd been thinking that this was the problem, and I admit that I'm relieved it's not a memory issue.
I'm not even going to go into how many times Firefox 3 crashed on me until I solved that issue, or how many times my Windows Desktop Manager crashed, or even that the battery in my mouse died.
At 11:00 I decided to give it a rest and change the litter box. We were out of litter, so I got in the car and drove to Hellmart and got some. When I walked back in the door, Nettl told me that the toilet was running again. Thankfully, she fixed it while I was changing the litter box. Then a lightbulb blew, so I changed it. I'm sitting here now, saving at the end of every sentence in case I crash again. So far, so good.
Today begins another weekend in the garage; we should be able to park in it by 2012.
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* Blue Screen of Death
