Fang’s very very bad, no good day

It’s been so long since I’ve sat down to write a blog, I’ve forgotten how to even begin. Let’s see if I can remember… uhmmm... “That goddamned W, just today he…”

Yeah, now it’s all coming back.

Only today, it wasn’t W that stuck it to me, though. (Not that I know of, anyhow...) It was a wide-ranging assortment of disappointments, set-backs and unpleasant surprises, both big and small.

First, the Man Cub is laid up with his first serious stomach flu, has been for four days now. Puke, puke, puke, everything is puke. He can’t keep anything down, so he doesn’t want to take anything in. Crackers and small quantities of milk seem to stay down, everything else is just in gastronomical limbo, waiting to be stinkified then re-released back into the world.

I’ve been lucky in terms of not getting any directly on me (if by lucky you mean having lightening-like reflexes as well as a Tupperware bowl nearby specifically to catch any hurl that might occur), but The Missus, the carpet in my office, the new used car – everything but me that doesn’t move has been honked on in the last few days.

Tonight, I had a ticket to Neil Young’s annual Bridge School benefit show for autistic kids up in NorCal – to make it, I woulda had to have hit the road by 2pm. At 2pm, we were at the emergency care facility in the Big City down the road being told by the latest in a long line of bored medical professionals that what our child had was nothing to worry about and would pass in its own time. Gee thanks, Mister Wizard!

But it wasn’t just a Neil Young show I missed – it also included an eclectic collection of artists including Metallica, Eddie Vedder and (sob!) Tom Waits, too. I didn’t used to think there was anything that could keep me from a Tom Waits performance that I had tickets to, but parental panic is a motherfucker of a priority rearranger.

So since the concert of a lifetime had just been squashed like a bug in front of my eyes, we decided to go monitor shopping. We’re buying a new Mac laptop because my principal employer wants to me to use an application upgrade that my current laptop doesn’t have the processing power to run. So we gotta make the leap. We deliberately waited till Apple launched their new operating system last night, so our new investment would ship with the latest OS. It all makes so much sense on paper, doesn’t it?

Anyhow, the new lower-end of the line of Mac laptops that we can afford, the monitors are short and wide – they’re like a stick of wood, a 2x4, a surfboard for leprechauns (see doctored photo, inset). I make broadsheet newspapers on my computer – the new widescreen 13 and 15-inch slivers of screenspace would be a disaster for me. Thus, we ended up having to go monitor shopping.

Which actually went well. Found an Acer 22” widescreen that is just awesome and clearance-sale priced. Saved a bundle and got me a bigger monitor than either one of us thought was in our price range.

Before that, though, we had lunch. Lunch, then monitor-shopping with our sick 2-year-old in tow. What could possibly go wrong? By the time we were backing out of the box store parking lot with the new monitor safely in the trunk, the boy was making with the spew again in the back seat. I will spare you the gory details mainly because I don’t want to have to think about them anymore. He had a little bit of everything for lunch, though…

So we get home and I’m depressed as all hell about missing the Neil/Tom show, a little less worried about the boy in spite of his most recent Technicolor yawn, and psyched about my new kick-ass monitor.

After putting the woman and the boy to bed for their afternoon naps, I sit down at my 3-year-old iBook G4 to finish my weekend’s regularly-scheduled crushing workload, and suddenly stuff isn’t working. Haven’t even hooked up the new monitor, haven’t changed anything. I decide to restart, after all it’s been a few days. These old puppies get tired, and it only needs to last me another couple of weeks till we order the new hardware from Apple.

Computer restarts, and suddenly, the “Classic” environment isn’t working at all. Just plain won’t start. I build all my papers in the classic version of Quark. Panic. Wait, I have an uninstalled copy of Quark 6 for OSX that’s quirky, but it should let me open the existing Quark docs and work on them. I try to install Quark 6, and OH HAPPY DAY, my computer no longer recognizes me as the administrator, and informs me I don’t have the privileges necessary to install new applications.

Right back to panic. I drag The Missus in and she creates another user identity, complete with admin privileges, and we can’t install new software from that either. I’m totally, completely fucked. Except I’m not, because I have an even older Mac that is still OS9 native and completely not connected to the internet. Not wired in, no wi-fi, and it still runs my shitty older version of Quark. So now I’m doomed to at least a week of splitting up the various facets of my work over two computers, and swapping files endlessly back and forth via a Firewire external hard drive that has to be manually unplugged from one machine and plugged back into the other. Like my job isn’t front-loaded with enough time-wasting redundancies already.

I immediately develop my “Evil Pulse Theory,” which is basically that when Apple launched its new OS last night, it generated an Evil Pulse (via the internet) that disabled “Classic” mode on any computer running it from within OSX. A contention buttressed by the fact that one of the caveats of the new operating system is that, on it, the Classic environment will no longer run. Also supporting the Evil Pulse theory, the one computer that didn’t get all fucked up between last night and this afternoon is the one that’s completely disconnected from the internet.

But that only explains my inability to run Classic versions of apps. Why the fuck doesn’t this piece of shit recognize me as “admin” any more? Something is very wrong in MacLand, and I’m beginning to feel like a fool for not taking up my employers’ offer to buy me a PC for my home office.

I say “fuck it,” let’s order the new laptop NOW, online, and get it here asap. Once we do that, we’ll have all kinds of access to Mac Support that we don’t right now. So we do. Order it right up with all the bells and whistles we can afford and tell them to ship it in the next 24 hours. Time is crucial. Gawd, this set-up is unwieldy and this week is gonna suuuuck.

In what I hope is the final twist of the knife today… our piece-of-shit credit union just called up to verify our Apple purchase; of course, The Missus is on a Target run for Pedialyte for the boy and my name isn’t on the card she used to buy the goddamned computer, so my tech salvation may have just been put off a couple more days till the local credit union office opens Monday.

And The Man Cub hasn’t gone to bed yet, so there could still be more puke. And I’m a day behind on my work and I missed a Tom Waits show I had tickets to and we have to miss The Last Boy Scout’s kiddie Halloween party tomorrow and I’m not sure if the boy will be well enough to go to day care Monday which is an insanely busy day when all my tech isn’t in full revolt and my son isn’t sick.

I have a sinking feeling there will almost certainly be at least a few more very very bad, no good days in store for me before the next Good one.