"I'm not lurking, I'm dead..."
Well, perhaps not quite. I
did manage an early night - then couldn't sleep. And the hill to school seemed incredibly long this morning.
Still, got everything done, banking, shopping and dentist. I needed a lower pre-molar filling replaced: while I was waiting for the anaesthetic to take effect I rang Ken to tell him I might be later than anticipated - and just as well I did, as he reminded me that a few years ago we'd made an executive decision to have any future fillings/replacement fillings done with composite (white, non-mercury) filling rather than amalgam... So I bit the bullet - well, bill actually - and asked to have a composite replacement.
It took considerably longer than an amalgam filling, but ye gods I'm dead chuffed with the result! It looks like I've got my original tooth back, instead of a shell of tooth around a whapping great lump of silvery metal. The anaesthetic is wearing off now (always uncomfortable), my gum feels a little sore where the metal thingie (can't find its name) that keeps the tooth isolated pressed in, and the injection site hurts, so can't tell whether it's been successful or not. (Later - it feels fine: I'm drinking very hot soup at the moment and it's not hurting any more, so the treatment seems to have solved the problem!)
Kai had a great day at school. They have a new ICT suite, specially built, and I gather the sprogs spent a lot of the day in it.
This site had Kai and his partner enthralled - they discovered, via their respective post codes, that they live within minutes of each other (new friend lives on the Bath Road)... Hm. There's a free downloadable version...
Though perhaps not just yet. Remember Special Reserve fixed my computer? Well, the A drive hasn't worked since (no real problem, everything's burned to CD anyway these days), but other than that everything seemed to be fine. Until I tried to print an email last week, at which point we had the old printer problem again (high-pitched
zzzzip noise then pages printing out just one line of enormous text). I know how to fix that (reinstall the driver), and afterwards the printer was fine. However, Ken's tried to burn a CD today - it verified successfully but when he tried to look at it on his computer it crashed the system: some of the files were OK but others seemed to be corrupted. So he burned another, with the same result. Then he needed to print out another email - the printer started playing up again. (I fixed it, but we'll have to see what happens when we boot up tomorrow.) Much more worrying is that now my D drive doesn't recognise that a CD has been inserted - music or data, it's just not seeing anything. Yet the
2AC backup rewriteable CD I burned last Friday opens just fine on Ken's computer...
I shall be very, very annoyed if he's infected my machine with anything. The last time I had this sort of problem he'd downloaded gifs from a site (can't remember now if it was Lycos or Tripod) which, I believe, carried some sort of virus with them and buggered up my system (I still can't use Word's search function. Reinstalling Office would probably fix that but I keep forgetting to do it).
Will see what happens tomorrow. For now, I still have the MIA site update to finish, then I'd better resign myself to several hours of scanning my system. Two and a half hours of AVG, forty-five minutes of Spybot S&D, another however-long-it-is of Ad-aware, Ewido, though I did a complete scan on Saturday (two and a half hours) so can probably get away with just a custom scan this time.
Note that the following refers to America the entity in general and the Bush misAdministration in particular, not to our American friends and family...
So the self-proclaimed wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet is asking for aid from the rest of us? Fine: over and above helping people in real distress it gives everyone a chance to show how generous and forgiving and compassionate they are. However, we really should make the giving of such aid dependent on America's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. After all, this is to some extent a self-inflicted disaster - and it's not like there wasn't any warning, unlike the Boxing Day tsunami. Everyone suffers the effects of global warming. What I find mildly ironic is that, if I've understood things correctly, America refused to sign because it was bad for American business - yet it would appear that the results of not signing, not acting responsibly, are even
worse for business. Well, all businesses except the (re)construction industry. And that's without mentioning the tragic human cost.
I foresee two possible reactions to giving aid, though I don't discount others. Either America will take anything offered as its
right, with its usual arrogance (we are, after all, talking about an entity that while spouting rhetoric about Democracy and Freedom invades countries to take control of their natural resources, that uses torture as a weapon, that is guilty of the very human rights abuses it so loudly opposes), or it will resent having to accept aid, and find ways to make those who've volunteered to help
pay for the monumental ignominy...
#
Joules *Dances with Haddock* Taylor
pontificated this at 9:35 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment