Forgive me bloggers for I have sinned, it’s been three weeks since my last submission.  It really is only a sin of omission technically so I think I’ll skip the penance although I certainly could use some discipline.

Ok, so here’s the deal, my computer is being cunty.  Thrice I have written blog posts and thrice the bitch has frozen up and I have lost everything.  Like it isn’t bad enough I have to deal with the cold of winter, now I was getting a chill from my computer as well.  I even wised up and learned to save right away but apparently this program (Pages) has no auto save so all of the additions, changes and edits I made after the original saving were lost.  The same thing also happened to my nanowrimo project, I felt so disheartened by the whole thing I just scrapped it.  I’ve also been working on business cards and for months now it’s been a huge source of ass pain because no matter what I do to what is on the screen when I print my design on the perforated paper none of the lines match up.  Business cards with half of the information cut off are only useful for fire starter. 

It was making me really fucking crabby and I don’t know anyone who could help me so I was winging it and losing.  And can I just say that ‘help’ is really of no assistance at all?!  Combine my computer illiteracy with the far too regular freezes and the mess that things are in offline and I just couldn’t deal anymore.  I needed to step away from the ledge and the computer for a while.

The really bad news is that my husband was off work again last week, another shutdown.  We’ve recently received word that the mill will also be down for three weeks in December… Merry fucking Christmas… which brings the year’s total to twelve weeks.  Yep, that’s a grand total of three months this year without a paycheck.  Imagine if you will for a moment what your life would be like if the main breadwinner in your household lost that much income.  Oh wait, it gets worse.  What I do for a living is not an essential service so when people are struggling or the economy is heading for the shitter they cut back on things like hair removal and pedicures.  Our business has been cut nearly in half.

Now I know a lot of people have it far worse than we do.  We’ve managed (somehow) to make all of our payments and we’ve not resorted to eating the dog… yet… but we and our credit cards are straining under the financial burden.  Heiny has been looking for other work but pickin’s are slim at the moment as we are all in the same leaky sieve of a boat.  

At least we have our health.

Sort of.

His Highness went for his surgery consultation yesterday, he’s getting his hernia (I call it Harold the Hernia) removed and they are doing a scope up his ass to try to see what’s going on up there.  My guess is that some squatters have moved in and are having wild colonic parties.  

I had a monster headache through most of September and October and was at the point where I was ready to go all hari kari and just be done with it.  Apparently however I have no friends who’d strike the final blow for me, not that I had a sword either but I’d have happily used a butter knife for the beheading at that point.  I was a mess, I couldn’t concentrate, I had no ambition and I guess I was more than a little stressed, tensed and depressed.  I felt like my entire world was circling the drain and I needed to find something to hang onto before the septic system swallowed me whole.  There were too many things in my life that I had no control over but there were a few things I could at least make a conscious effort to change.  So I did.

I am back on the helliptical which I (not so lovingly) refer to as ‘that fucking thing’.  I will never love exercise but I knew that if I didn’t do something more physical than typing that there could very well be a heart attack with my name on it in my future.  I ride(?) the fucking thing for thirty to forty minutes five days a week (I shoot for every day but sometimes it just doesn’t happen) and then I do free weights, crunches and stretches for another half hour or so.  I am loathe to admit that I feel better because of it but the headache is gone… although the ache in my knees has generously replaced it.  

It was also time to do something about my diet so I am once again livin’ la vida low carb.  Those lovely starches that are so satisfying and tasty only add more ass to my assets and they also make me feel crappy so I cut them out.  I’m not doing atkins or south beach or any ‘plan’, I just stopped eating sugar, bread, rice, potatoes and pasta.  I’m subsisting on mostly protein and vegetables with a little bit of fruit and very little dairy, mostly in the form of cheese.  At this point the only thing I’m feeling like I am missing is Cheerios (of all things) and maybe eventually I’ll add cereals back into my (very limited) repertoire.  For the moment however this is working for me and I’m feeling pretty good physically and I’m not beating myself up about it anymore which is a huge step for me.

I had made great strides (literally) in getting my shit together but I was still pissed at miMac for the freezing and the fucky printing of my business cards.  The other morning I woke with an idea (usually my best ideas come when I am sitting on the toilet, it’s where I work shit out) to hook up the old PC, do my cards on there and then transfer the PDF to the mac with my usb stick (the disc drive on the PC is hooped).  If I could print the cards that way I would at least know if my problem was printer related or if it was a mac issue.  

It worked.

So I still don’t know why my computer is brainfarting but at least now I can do what I need to do until someone smarter than me (anyone) can figure it out and tell me how to fix it.  Life is not great yet by any stretch but I’m feeling less like I am flailing and I’m grateful for the little victories.  Everything else is up to the universe and all we can do is keep plugging away and hope that 2009 will see our ship come in and with a little luck we won’t be waiting at the airport.