Easy Ways a Day Can Go Wrong Really Fast

 

I got to bed too late.*  I had Raphael coming in the morning so I had to get out of bed before the middle of the afternoon.**

I had a list for Raphael.  I always have a list.

There is apparently no way to turn OFF the wretched monster photos that have taken over everyone’s Twitter feed.  I’ll click on the photos I want to see, you know?  Stop frelling trying to make clawing my way through the last twenty-four hours even more of a ratbag.***

There is apparently no way to tell Windows 7 NO I FRELLING DO NOT WANT TO HANG AROUND ANOTHER TWENTY MINUTES WHILE YOU DO A FRELLING UPDATE, I WANT TO CLOSE DOWN, PUT MY LAPTOP IN MY KNAPSACK AND GO HOME.  You could on XP.  You could tell it, no, later, and it said, okay, you’re the boss, and shut down.

My email is a NIGHTMARE and there isn’t much Raphael can do about it.†  The settings all sit there sniggering behind their half-eaten address books and whimsical spam filters  saying, We’re all optimally configured!  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

When I finally got the poor patient hellhounds out†† there was not one but two off lead dogs in the churchyard, being ignored by two different irresponsible humanoid-shaped ratbags.  And the middle of town was jammed solid††† because Father Bloody Christmas had arrived and his grotto was open for business.

Maybe I’ll go to bed what passes for me as early with a good book or twelve.  Maybe I’ll even sleep.  That would make a change.

* * *

* Duuh.  In this case partly because I had loaded up my FABULOUS NEW EFFECTIVELY-IF-NOT-LITERALLY WIRELESS PRINTER with second-side paper and ran off a lot of knitting patterns.^  And when I pulled them out, having enjoyed the sound of a printer printing—no pings, no dings, no mysterious stoppages, no flashing lights, no screaming.  Just printing—I discovered that my new printer wants paper loaded with the already used side up.  Rather than down.  Oh.  My last several printers have wanted one-sided paper loaded BLANK side UP.

There was screaming after all.

And of course I had to do it all over again right then.  It couldn’t wait till morning^^.  A dozen knitting patterns I may never get to at all and certainly not any time soon since I have . . . um . . . several projects on needles already.  BUT I HAD TO PRINT THEM OFF LAST NIGHT.  YES.

^ Can some clever knitter person tell me if I could knit these on circular needles rather than DPNs?  http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/f163-cleckheaton-country-silk-fingerless-gloves

I don’t do circulars+ but I really REALLY don’t do DPNs.  Just looking at them makes me think of deep puncture wounds and the TOTAL FAILURE I was at cat’s-cradle.

+ Have I told you this story?  After I started my big plain square JUST KEEP KNITTING winter scarf out of mind-blowingly gorgeous wool and silk yarn on circulars, thinking that it would be easier to manage that way and in less danger of spilling off too-short needles—broomstick-length needles don’t fit in your knapsack, and they probably won’t let you on public transport or in the bell tower where you’re a hazard to the already somewhat risky flying ropes—AND INSTEAD the wretched rows jammed every time they had to come back off the cable again and onto the working needle tips.  The needle tips also needed screwing back on every time I got the fabric shoved onto the cable again.  AND THEN, ONE DAY, ONE OF THE NEEDLE TIPS UNSCREWED ANYWAY.  MID ROW.  KNITTING ALL OVER THE LANDSCAPE.  There was screaming.

I gave up circulars forever that day.#  Interchangeable ones anyway.  I still have a few basic bamboo-and-plastic fixed ones that Fiona gave me early on, saying to me in soothing tones that I would like circulars once I’d tried them.  HA.  HA.  I’m sure the Romans told the Christians that the lions they were about to throw them to were pussycats really.  But I could try knitting a glove on fixed circulars.  You only cast on forty stitches, instead of a hundred and forty.##  And I’d quite like to try this seamless deal.

The interchangeables came as a Yaaay!  You SUBSCRIBED!### bonus from a knitting magazine.  Moral:  don’t subscribe to knitting magazines.

# And yes, I lost the two and a half or so inches of knitting I’d managed to wrench out of those ratblasted needles.  Which is when I found out that my beautiful yarn doesn’t rip back very well.

## Arrrrrrgh.

### Suckerrrrrrrrrrr.

^^ Or, you know, afternoon.

** I sent him a text at umph-plus o’clock asking him if he could please Not Be Early.  I hope he turns his phone off when he goes to bed.  Although he has three little kids:  he may never sleep at all.  Nadia has only two little kids and she never sleeps at all.

*** On the other hand I asked Twitter if there was a programme that would let me have more than one Twitter account open simultaneously and lovely Twitter people answered and I am now the more or less proud owner of a copy of Tweetdeck, which is already massively to be preferred in all the ways I can figure out. 

Speaking of the kindness of computer nerd strangers, has anyone reading this ever had their Word 7 randomly turn blocks of text into italic?  IT DRIVES ME FRELLING BANANACAKES.  ALSO CREAM PIES.  AND SOME COCONUT ONES WHILE WE’RE AT IT.  COCONUT IS RELIABLY BONKERS.  Sometimes it won’t turn off again:  you highlight it, click, and it judders sideways and back and . . . stays italic.  Sometimes it turns normal again as soon as you highlight it.  Sometimes this block goes normal and then you flick up a page and discover a different block of text has gone italic.  You tend to need a biggish block of text to set off whatever this is:  it doesn’t happen (yet) to individual blog entries, but it’s really REALLY bad with KES, which I keep in files of a dozen or so eps per, because single words of italic seem to set off the gremlin and there’s kind of a lot of italic in KES.^

Anyone else seen this?  Raphael looks at me warily when I tell him about it since (of course) I’ve never managed to reproduce it for him.

^ For some reason.

† Except maybe help me look at real estate ads for houses in areas with better broadband.

†† They don’t want to use the courtyard any more, even if they’re DESPERATE.  WE’RE NOT THAT DESPERATE, they say, crossing their legs harder.  The courtyard now belongs to the hellterror.

And, speaking of things going wrong, Raphael showed up before she was finished with her breakfast kong.  By the time she is finished, she, her bedding, the crate and the kong are METICULOUSLY FREE OF ANY SUBATOMIC PARTICLE OF FOOD.  But it’s a little messy on the journey.  I don’t like keeping her crated when there are Exciting Visitors, it doesn’t seem to me fair, so I got her out and clutched her frantically to my bosom as I let Raphael in and shooed him (and hellhounds) hastily upstairs.  I didn’t quite need a bath by the time I shut her back up with the remains of her breakfast.  Quite.

Hellterror has had a good day however.  After poor Raphael finally left to go attend to some normal, corporate client, we all went out to Warm Upford to put petrol in Wolfgang, and had a sprint around an empty sheep field before we came home.  Hellterror doesn’t get out to deep country all that often and she was ECSTATIC.  And I have two dislocated shoulders.  One from an ecstatic hellterror, and one from two hellhounds trying to elude the ecstatic hellterror.^

^ The next field over was not empty so I didn’t dare let them off lead to sort it out among themselves.

††† Mind you this is easy to do in a town this size