I got my first birthday present today from my brother. He got me a $50 gift card for Borders and this, which makes me laugh. The packaging is equally wonderful. In the lower right, there's a yellow oval declaring "with poseable arms & gliding action!" It's got wheels under the feet so you can roll it along a flat surface like Fezzik in The Princess Bride wearing the holocaust cloak. I'm having a hard time deciding whether to take it out and play with it or keep it intact for display purposes.

mood ~  happy

Haven't updated in a while, but not terribly much has happened. We did get another computer, though. Took a little while to get the network setup. The cable modem was hooked up to this already, and I realized we hadn't installed Internet Connection Sharing . Also need to put in the second ethernet card, so I need the thing that came with the card which had a disk with the drivers and the Win98SE upgrade. Of course, I had no clue where it was. Finally tracked it down hours later and got this computer running fine, then moved on to the new computer. I'd never used XP before, but it seemed pretty straightforward. Even let me make a nice little disk for the other computer so I didn't have to change the IPs manually. (Little things entertain me). The old computer recognized the new computer fine, but the new one didn't recognize the old one. Took me a little while to realize ZoneAlarm was blocking it. Duh. Fixed that and had both computers talking to each other, but no net access for the new one. After fiddling a bit, we gave up and switched the computers around, so the new machine was the server. The new one worked fine, but wouldn't recognoze the old one again. Oddly, the old one could both recognize the new one and connect to the internet. Took me a half hour of screwing around to realize that the IPs had changed when we switched them, so ZoneAlarm was blocking it again. Double duh. Uninstalled it from this machine and all is well. :)

Got to spend a couple hours at the hospital last night. Tracy's had a sore throat for a few days, but last night her ear started to hurt, too. So bad that she was in tears. They gave her a horse-sized Ibuprofen and some liquid crap to numb her throat, but she was feeling worse by the time we finally got home. We stopped to at least get her painkillers (she has three prescriptions, but we only had enough money for those on us), but after waiting a few minutes, I took her home and went back later to pick them up. When I got back, she was sitting up on the bed, clenching a pillow and rocking back and forth with tears in her eyes. She seems to be doing bit better today, and she slept fairly well once she could fall asleep.

In lighter news, apparently I'm looking younger lately. I've been carded twice in the past week or so for buying beer. The first time I was in a bit of shock and it took a while for the query, "ID?" to sink in and comprehend. I showed him my license and as he rang it up, he felt the need to inform me, "You're older than I am!" Yeah, bite me. The second time was a couple days ago. The brakes on my truck were shot - one pad was down to the metal and grinding that down - so Al and I put the new brakes on and took it up to the store as a test drive. Since I was doing work on the truck, I was wearing crappy clothes and didn't have my wallet on me, which I didn't think about until we got there. Al lent me $20 to get beer and cigarettes, but the woman asked for my ID and refused to sell me the beer (technically she shouldn't have sold me the cigarettes either...). I told her I was 32 and she said she was sorry but she couldn't sell it to me. Al went back inside and bought it for me since he had his ID, and the woman apparently thought I was pissed off at her and she apologized to him, too, and said she couldn't sell it to me because she couldn't tell how old I was. He responded, "He's my girlfriend's uncle!" (which isn't technically true, but may as well be).

mood ~  confused