(no subject)

Today (Oops, started writing this yesterday) Monday has been a string of annoyances and inconveniences, starting with the fact that I had to go back to work after a really nice weekend. I hate when that happens.

My alarm either didn't activate or did not wake me up, so I slept until twenty minutes before I had to leave the house when I was woken up by a call from my sweetie. As it happens, I didn't actually end up leaving the house then anyway. I got a message from serinthia, left about ten minutes before I woke up, indicating that she wasn't going to be at work. This lead me to rush out of the house at my usual departure time of seven o' clock to do the repair on my truck that I'd put off on Sunday because I didn't think I'd need to drive it in the immediate future.

I dug my tools out of the basement and the new tensioner from the porch. Removing the unidentified widget bolted to the bracket gave me access to the tensioner mounting bolt and I swiftly had it replaced with the new one. I narrowly remembered to reattach the unidentified widget after just about driving off without it. Fortunately I noticed it as I was closing the hood. It's a good thing the repair was fairly simple as I'd never done it on this truck before. The actual replacement process was easier than doing it on serinthia's car. Though her car didn't require removal of anything bolted to the engine to get to it, it did require disassembly of the wheel well mudguard. In this case, I just leaned over and dug in. That's what I like about trucks; I can get to what I need to get to to do work on them without jacking them up or putting them on a hoist.

That took me about twenty minutes to half an hour. I took the more direct tollway route instead of the non-toll, slighlty slower way to work that is my habit. I was only about fifteen minutes late, which isn't too bad all in all.

Things were interesting at work; we've just switched hardware vendors (HP to Dell) and haven't yet recieved any of the new hardware so we don't have systems to build for new hires. Fortunately(?) we have enough upcoming new hires that I occupied myself most of the day with creating accounts for them. That is, between the other crap that kept coming in that I mostly sent to our tech in Chicago to deal with.

I was pretty full from dinner so I never really ate anything or took a lunch break. Not that I usually take a lunch break. But I had my laptop to the side and was setting up a few things on it as I had the opportunity. I reinstalled Trillian and, after some experimenting, figured out what my password was for ICQ (it's an old one that I haven't used in years; not only that, but ICQ's password field was length limited so I had to leave off the last two characters.) and Yahoo. This lead to yet another disturbing realization as four contacts repopulated themselves on my list; one of them was a dead man.

A little after that, my nice Kinesis keyboard developed a fault that caused a row of five keys in the left hand well to stop working. Turning it upside down resolves the issue temporarily, but messing with the cord doesn't, so it doesn't appear to be a cord short. I emailed Kinesis to ask about repair procedures (which may sound odd for a keyboard until you realize that it's a two hundred and fifty dollar keyboard) and broke out a Belkin POS (Belkin makes some really great peripherals; keyboards are not among them) that makes my wrists hurt just thinking about it. After dealing with that for half an hour I dug into our bin again and pulled out a Dell Quietkey that was at least a little better. I dealt with that for the rest of the day. Today though, I have my vintage 1984 IBM Model M with me to use. If I have to be stuck with a flat keyboard for a while, there's no better one to be stuck with. Still, I have my wrist brace with me to minimize the discomfort that will probably result.

Finally went home (to my happiness, my truck continued to behave perfectly well) and had dinner with my parents and brother, the height of the day until finally snuggling up with Andrea for the night. Mmmm. Yesterday should go away and come again some other day. Or, if it's all the same, not.

The weekend is worth mentioning too. However, it's worth mentioning in it's own right rather than at the end of this mass of malcontented musing. Watch this space.