Bereft
Friday night my Handspring: Treo 90 took a dive into the cats' water dish. Despite careful drying, it's kaput. I don't know how to function without it! I keep everything in it. I printed out my calendar, but dang it, it doesn't beep and remind me to do things! Ghaaaaaaaa!

I bought an extended service plan from Office Max, but so far I'm not impressed. On Saturday, when I called, they gave me a phone number for a local service place open only during the week. When I called them on Monday, they told me that they don't do computer service any more. I called the service plan back, and now I'm waiting (since Monday...) for a pre-paid box to appear so I can mail it in to their service center. Then I'll have to wait for them to determine if it can be fixed. And then wait for it to be shipped back. If they can't fix it, I'll get an Office Max gift card for the original value of the PDA. Naturally, the Treo isn't made any more, so then I'll need to try to find something else for $299 (shouldn't be hard -- prices keep coming down, new PDA's keep coming out).

But... in the meantime... I am just lost without my PDA...

The Kindness of Strangers
Last time I saw my knee surgeon (blessed be his name!), I turned in, through him, a form to request free prescription medication from the Merck Patient Assistance Program. I'd pretty much forgotten about it... and then I came home to a FedEx envelope in my door. Inside was a 3 month supply of Vioxx. That, at least, is something to be happy about!

I haven't updated here because I haven't really felt I have anything to say. I'm in a sort of hinterland between apathy and depression, thrashing around and trying to discover something that will either let me feel better or worse. I've been mostly ignoring phone and email, feeling like poor company and not inclined to foist it on others.

I've begun (again) tackling the Living Room Mess, and am building up quite a pile of stuff that I hope to sell on Ebay. It took me about 10 minutes to drag the recycling out this morning, and I've got a fair number of trips to make to the dumpster with the unrecyclables. Unfortunately the Living Room still looks like it belongs to one of those crazy elderly ladies who keep everything and present a health hazard.

Maybe I am one of those crazy old ladies...

Strange Days
I've been in a weird, twitchy state all week -- scuttling between almost-depressed and nearly-furious, but unable to determine why. Just darned cranky. I haven't been watching my diet very well, or testing, so I have a suspicion that my sugar is way out of whack. On top of it all, I dreamed about Wil Wheaton, of all the strange things. I was at a film festival featuring a film he made (as opposed to acted in), and on crutches. Or maybe Wil was on crutches. Whatever... it wasn't a bad dream, but I have no idea why I'm dreaming about Wil Wheaton. I wouldn't even mention it, but I stumbled across a LiveJournal entry talking about how someone else had dreamed about Wil Wheaton last night.

The Politics of Loss
I thought I'd managed to work through and put aside my grief for the intellectual child of my heart, ripped from my custody and handed over to someone who promised he'd care for her as if I would. Pfagh. Not hardly.

Having raised this "child" on healthy food and loving discipline, I now am confronted by the spectacle of her new "parent" blithely stuffing her with junk food and abandoning curfews. Instead of her homework, she's scribbling schitzophrenic ramblings with little or no connection to what has been established in the past. I want to rage and pound my fists against the wall until they're bloody. I want to kick the self-serving idiot to the curb for pandering to steal her love.

But I can't. All I can do is turn away and stop visiting. There is nothing I can do; I've been shut out by no will of my own, and to watch the degradation will only drive me nuts. Otherwise I fear the next thing I'll see will be her teen p0rn webcam...

(For those who know I have no mortal children and who might think I've finally popped a spring, I need to rant and only feel that I can do so in allegory.)

Today's cute quizzy thingy
I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer... and it seems I'm season 5!

Season Five - You're about growing up, and you're probably the most mature of the bunch; after all, you've got Buffy giving up her own life to stop uber-tramp Glory. Your best episode is "the Body," which explores the process of grief by breaking TV conventions of sound design.

Which Season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

The More Things Change, The More They're The Same...
The Importance of...: The Anti-Miscegenation Amendment
Yes, by golly, someone tried to amend the constitution to prevent blacks and whites from intermarrying. Here's hoping that Bush is equally unsuccessful.

Busy, Busy, Busy
We've got a gaming convention (Foundation) coming up locally, and I've been busy wrangling the schedules for the scenarios and judges so that we have a proper mix. One of the things I had to give up to run Living Force was organizing conventions -- I'd forgotten how much I like this!

Yeah, it's stressful in its way, and all manner of headaches, but I feel an intense sense of enjoyment in the process. I think I may have found something I would really, really love doing for a living -- now I just need to figure out how to break into the field of event management at my age.

But at least I know one more thing that I love to do -- and that's progress.