I like cold weather, except when I have to shower and then it’s PLZ BE 72F KTHXBAI. Because I’m a total wuss when it comes to getting out of the shower and it’s 50+ degrees colder. I do not take to such drastic temperature jumps well at ALL. You would think it’d not be so bad because I’m a tubbo, but it gets me in my head and hands and it’s, just… DO NOT WANT. (And I’m sure it’s even WORSE for you men. Yeah. I see what you did there.)

Slingbox? Slingbrick is more like it. A couple weeks ago, there was a new firmware patch for the Slingboxes… except, um, it kinda bricked the two Pro-HD units we have here. I’d gone through all the troubleshooting steps on my end (connecting both the wireless bridge and Slingbox through Dinah’s LAN port… bridge is fine, Slingbox is unresponsive). Seeing as my Slingbox is, what, 2 years old, and surely out of warranty, I was just going to delay getting the remainder of the parts for my media center box (PSU and OS) and quietly replace both Slingboxes… until mother is all “OMG IT’S A PLOT TO MAKE YOU UPGRADE.”

*sigh,* the drama queenery is everywhere.

For one thing, that upgrade program does not apply to us because we already have Pro-HD units. Still, she’s gathering serial numbers and wants to call… fine, but I’m not sitting on the line for her so she can go coo over puppies, because they’re just going to tell me mine is over a year out of warranty. At best, they may send mother a new Slingbox to replace hers since she’d still be in warranty.

—-

Buh, I’m already nodding off. time to attempt sleep z_z

Specifically, the one about assuming my mother has anything resembling logic or reason.

She bought another white bulldog.

….

Yeah. You heard me.
Snowflake’s been gone less than a week, and… well, Pigeon demonstrates his amazing powers of seeing the future.

Gently mentioning “isn’t this a bit too soon?” sailed right over mother’s head. And then some, as her response is more like a kick in both the face and the pants: “I missed having a little female wandering around.”

I… um… wow.
I don’t know whether to be greatly offended at the confirmation that I really don’t matter anymore (and believe me, I really don’t need to feel any more alone and abandoned than I already do), or just disgusted at how completely unreasonable the whole situation is.

Mother was laughing off Octomom on the news. WTF. Does my mother not get that she’s the bulldog version of Nadya Suleman?

—

In other news, on Tuesday I slipped in the shower. My tankiness worked in my favor for the most part since it was more “roll” than “fall” but my upper left arm has a giant-ass bruise from having plowed into the trash can, and that’s pretty much kept me out of volunteer service for at least this week… hopefully it dies down by next week. Sore as hell. Ow.

/t Evil Stepfather,

If you are going to bark at me to put MLB score widgets on your laptop-that-you-really-don’t-need, do not bark at me if it turns out half of them don’t work at all, and the other half don’t let me specify which team to stalk (never mind that the season hasn’t even STARTED yet). No, I don’t know how to code Vista Sidebar widgets, I cannot magically write one that will stream your sports.

Ripping out all the bloatware and Dell crap on this thing was bad enough, I did not need to get barked at because I don’t care about baseball and sports in general. On top of that I was hungry and by the time I got upstairs, all the bulbs on my ceiling fan (which, aside from the glow of my monitors, is the only source of lighting in the room) had apparently burned out between my leaving for volunteer service and getting back. No significant lighting, um, kinda makes it not safe to operate my toaster oven.

(I cannot cook downstairs. Not because there are almost always puppies running amok, it’s just that my coming in, no matter how quiet, causes them to perk up and go berserk, barking in a collective frenzy, and I get barked at by Evil Stepfather for it because he can’t hear his precious sports and TV. The dogs REALLY need more obedience training because their conduct is, just, really absurdly apalling but, of course, mother just can’t be bothered to do it, even after I offered to pay for in-house lessons.)

It’s 1am and thus too late to cook anyway (even if I could see anything in here outside of the limited range of monitor glow, the beep of my toaster oven would send the dogs into a barking frenzy)… I didn’t even get to finish inking Celina because laptop-tweaking took too long.

I think tomorrow, everyone is going out for a good, long time, though. Sure, I could easily flee while nobody’s looking (and I have Dinah back in working order so I could ramen it up anywhere)… but I like my alone time with my big orange furball, too.

—

Go go Keith Olbermann, way to freaking PWN Ann Coulter. I LOLed when he busted out the diploma. XD

This made me smile after having to deal with mother and Evil Stepfather’s dumbassery.

Permit me to commit a bit of grand theft Keith Olbermann here, because my mother once again demonstrates her lack of common sense and thus takes all 3 slots for Ayarane Project’s Worst Persons.

She went with Evil Stepfather to process taxes and such…. okay… and now I get a call telling me that she’s buying Evil Stepfather a laptop so he can listen to his ball games through the MLB website.

Um…

…we have XM radio. And they have lots of sports channels and while I am generally ignorant to sports, I know enough that the particular teams Evil Stepfather follows are covered by these channels. We actually, you know, have a couple extra XM units, perfectly portable… they have these things called headphone jacks, and Evil Stepfather could just plug in some headphones and go to his baseball happy place.

Failing that, if he MUST go through MLB’s streaming service… we also have two computers that I built that are hardly being used. Sure, Evil Stepfather may have had half his right foot lopped off, but he can walk just fine. Is it that much trouble to walk over to one of the unused computers? (And he’s far more computer-literate than he claims, he knows enough to get around the Netflix website, and back when he was actually working he would send emails and such through the post office intranet.)

Seriously… WHY does this man need a laptop? I mean, if we didn’t have any of the above I suppose it would make sense to give him one, but this is quite absurd. Aside from sports radio and netflix, the man is not really interested in computers. Hell, most of his waking hours is just vegging out in front of the TV (because in his mind, retirement entitles him to sit on his ass all day and be a jerk– it’s easier to pull teeth or get Neo to play a non-Kit character than it is to get Evil Stepfather to, um, get up and actually interact with any of these $2000 bulldogs).

Oh, and for even more lulz, mother is trying to weasel her way out of slapping an extended warranty on it. Now THAT is really boneheaded. If Evil Stepfather’s going to be using this in the main den while the dogs are out and about, he can count on them slobbering all over the laptop or chewing on the cables or even knocking it off his lap when they jump up on him (despite his half-assed attempts to discipline them).

When I tried to confront mother on her lack of forethought into any of this, she suddenly claimed bad signal quality and hung up on me. Apparently she’s not interested in common sense and sanity anymore. (This on top of, you know, killing all our premium channels to save money yet coming home a few hours later with dog costumes that were never used, or trying to get me to eat massive cancellation penalties to kill off pet insurance before the contract is up so she won’t have to pay me $200 a month.) Oh, and I’m expected to do the initial configuration on this machine, so I’ll probably have to drop library service today because I just know she’s going to throw a hissyfit if I make her wait until after.

Yoshi’s mother: today’s worst person in the world.

Yoshi, gold medal winner for today’s Worst System Builder in the Woooooorld.

Why is this? Onyx wouldn’t turn on because I am a dork and transposed the front panel wires for Power LED and Power Switch. HUR HUR HUR.
One switch later and he’s installing Vista and such… though for some reason he was pulling very slowly. This was going through a Blu-Ray drive, and piped through Serial ATA. Shouldn’t SATA be much faster?

…and while I smuggled out Synergy… a few hours later I get a call from House Cantlay saying that she’s not booting and the buttons are stuck. *facepalm of EPIC proportions* What the hell, she was just fine over here! Argh… earliest I can get over there is Friday, too. I hope nothing got dinged too badly during transport!

—

Our thermostat is borked. Which, uh… is barely tolerable during the day, but at night it’s just brutal, even with additional layers.
Trying to sleep in such cold is even worse. I’ll have to see about stealing another blanket or something.

Mother may summon someone to see about fixing it… maybe.