If I fall asleep typing on this entry, it will be because I didn't get much sleep last night. Yesterday was weird all day long.
It started out normally enough: I got up, piled into my lounger with a big stack of papers to grade, and set about my day. Then the phone rang.
The call was innocuous: I had an appointment with a doctor who needs to be out next Thursday, and could I move to a date when he could actually be there? Sure, probably—but I have to check my calendars, both of which are on my computer, to be sure I pick a time when I don't have something else lined up.
The computer came up quickly enough, the times I had available matched times when I could expect the doctor to be there, and that problem was solved. It was annoying—I had been planning other activities around this appointment for some time—but it wasn't a crisis.
Since I had the computer up (the main reason I don't usually open it in the mornings), I took a quick look at my email; on Wednesday I had skimmed a message from a consulting client that I probably should answer before it got cold, and how long could that take?
The project is a writing manual. The client had approached me because she was a former student, and she asked me for a manual that reflected the way I teach my classes. We had dithered over it a bit back in the spring, and I had sent her a draft that did the best I could to match my philosophy with her outline and other comments. Her response was that it wasn't exactly what she wanted, but she'd need some time to go through it and communicate her needs.
Obviously she had found the time: nearly nothing she sent back is the way I sent it, and in several places she had written that she expressly did not agree with my directions, so she had substituted her "better" way.
At first I was pretty ticked off; after all, she had said she contacted me because she wanted to teach her subordinates my philosophy, yet her response to my draft was pretty clearly that she didn't want my ideas at all but wanted to promulgate the same bad ideas I try hard every day to combat. I was ticked off, but I had papers to grade (and students to try to teach what I consider the "better" way), so I shut down the computer and went back to work. My stomach was pretty knotted up with frustration, but I was determined to "power through."
I popped into the office to meet with students and handle some issues there, then came back home—still feeling pretty irked with my client—and checked my RSS feeds. Roger Ebert was up on the new Clint Eastwood movie about "the hereafter" (whatever, Ebert says, that is), and spent a lot of his space on the phenomenon of "psychics." Oddly, that finally eased my knotted stomach: as Ebert says, psychics pretty much start with "routine" possibilities and then follow the lead of their suckers to tell them what they need to know.
I figure I can do that: I can clean up what the client sent me back, respond to her few remaining concerns, and then negotiate until she gets what she wants. This is a contract job, so I never considered that the document would have my name on it, and if the question comes up, I can merely stipulate that it cannot. End of that problem, and I felt all better.
For a little while. The house pest who has been inhabiting one of my upstairs bedrooms was out for a few hours to eat supper with his father, who is in town on a break from his mission trip to Swaziland—great opportunity for me to run upstairs and use the printer that lives in that room. I've had a package waiting for postage for several days now, but I hadn't gotten to the printer to be sure my postal service shipping label printed correctly.
Shrek hadn't brought down any of several items I thought should have printed lately, but I didn't think about checking my printer drivers to find out whether the wireless connection was working; the connection is usually pretty reliable, but something about this computer and that printer means that sometimes the printer just decides that it's not online, and jobs pile up without ever printing.
I grabbed the laptop and the package and headed up to the room where I was hit in the face by a wall of hot air that almost knocked me down.
I've had the air conditioners off and the windows open downstairs for most of the last month because (a) the weather has been balmy and cool and I adore the smell of fresh air in the house and (b) my August utilities bill was about 60 bucks higher than any I remember getting in more than 30 years at this location. On top of that, the upstairs condenser had had a part go out that surprised me since the downstairs condenser is pretty much operating on original parts after 30 years; the upstairs one is probably less than 15 years old. The happy coincidence of cool weather in September meant that the electric bill dropped by well over $100 for the month and had I enjoyed the fresh air.
But one step into that room explained to me simultaneously why my bill had been so high and why we had had a steady stream of condensation pouring off the upstairs cooling unit for much of the summer: Shrek's powerful computer, huge monitor, big flatscreen tv, gaming system, and gosh knows what else combined to make the room an oven, and cooling that had taken about all my air conditioner could do. I suspect he never turns any of it off.
My initial instinct was to feel bad for Shrek for having to live in the heat of that room, but then I remembered that he hasn't paid rent—either in dollars or in kind, as I had asked when he moved in—and he hasn't made any significant, visible effort to find work or to extract himself from the space for useful endeavor. Maybe if I just let him sweat, he'll get up and move. He seems to be gaining weight since he got here, so sweating is pretty clearly not causing him to waste away.
I pulled the heavy curtain back from the window, set up the laptop near the printer, and ducked into the closet to get the postal scale so I could tell the post office what my package weighed. If I had doubted that the heat was the equipment before I opened the closet, I didn't doubt it afterward; the closet was cool and pleasant. I stepped into Number One Son's room across the hall just to confirm that, and even with the window mostly closed, it, too, was quite comfortable.
I plopped my package on the scale, dug out some shipping labels from their cubby, and logged in to fill out the mailing form. Except that the postal service wouldn't let me: the password my computer had memorized wasn't working. After a couple of tries, I gave up and clicked the "forgot password" link, which assured me the new code had been emailed spontaneously.
Not to me, from what I could tell. I felt sort of bad about sitting in Shrek's "space," even though it's in my house, so I was growing impatient when the email hadn't arrived after several minutes.
And then I remembered that the current email I use isn't the only one I've ever had, so I rolled back to my last email address (which opened with my old password, thank goodness), and found my temporary code. When I plugged it into the slot and was prompted for a new password, I found the problem: the old password had met the current security requirements at some time, but those had been changed, so my password had to change to match. While I was at it, I updated the email address.
Finally I thought I was ready to print, so I finished filling in the necessary blanks (the website does a fine job of managing my address book, so that was easy) and clicked the Print button.
Nothing. No indication on the laptop that I had a problem, and not a sound out of my printer. I mashed on the power button to try to restart the printer, but that did nothing. I unplugged the printer and plugged it back in, nodded along with the standard messages that that's no way to treat an otherwise well-behaved printer (or so it thought), and waited while it cycled through its warm-up routine. And waited.
Still nothing. Thinking maybe the printer had disconnected itself from the internet, I went through the connection wizard and waited.
Nothing. Back through the whole process again: mash power button, unplug, take the chiding, reconnect to the internet....
Okay, so maybe we need to try out the printer. Press the scan button. No, that's wrong; make it the copy. Printer clicks and cackles, then tells me it's out of paper. No it's not; I just refilled the tray. Pull the tray out and jam it in again. Nothing. Pull the tray out, add a bit more paper (but not much or it will jam from overfilling), snap it back in. Nothing. Open everything that can be opened, blow on it (yes, it has cobwebs in it), twiddle with anything that looks interesting, slam it all back together again. Aside from the insistence that it's out of paper (and, yes, I know I need to buy three new cartridges of ink), nothing.
So maybe the problem was is in the computer. I pull up the printer screen and check its messages to find out that—duh—the printer appears to be offline, and it has been for weeks (which explains why Shrek hasn't come downstairs lately with anything I've printed). I tell it to delete all previous jobs.
Nothing. It won't print, it won't delete, it won't do anything. It will, however, be deleted. Obviously, I couldn't just "delete" it and make it go away; I wound up "deleting" and "adding" it about four times before I finally got that right. But the printer still did nothing.
By this time Shrek was back from supper and offering to help. (He is, after all, trained to do at least some computer repairs, and he built his behemoth computer from parts.) First he reconned the can of air spray from downstairs and let me spray out everything I could in the system, then he took over while I went down to eat the supper NOS had cheerfully prepared for me.
About the time I finished eating, Shrek announced that he had gotten the printer working (he found a couple of "wheels" that didn't seem to be turning and wiggled them until they started up again; I figure they had cobwebs in them, too), and by that time I had deleted and added enough drivers to think it might just work. Which it did. One little printing job took me an hour or more to do, but it was done and I could relax.
Sort of.
Back downstairs, I decided I'd had about all the fun I wanted for one night with the computer, so I shut it down and went back to my room, where I could pile into bed with my newspaper/crossword puzzle and forget the frustrations of the day.
Temporarily.
NOS had started a load of laundry while he was cooking supper, and he popped into the laundry room next to my room to switch the clothes from the washer to the dryer. Except that they were still in a tubful of water in the washer. And the laundry room light wouldn't turn on.
Surely this was a matter of a flipped breaker, so he shoved aside the clothes in my closet to flip it back on.
Nothing.
That couldn't be right, so I moved him over and flipped it myself. Twice. To no avail; it just wasn't going to reset.
This is a fairly new washer/dryer set. I have the old dryer in the garage because I had passed that set to Soldier Son while he was in an apartment, and he brought the dryer back when he moved back home. But he had donated the washer to a friend's mother for letting him stay at her house while he was getting set up in a job in Houston, and I don't know whether he's supposed to get it back again or not. But this one definitely wasn't working.
Since the breaker was off, NOS figured the problem was just in the power system, so he grabbed a flashlight and made his way through the dark garage to where he had last seen a big extension cord. (We're assuming the power loop that is out operates the washer, the utility room light, and the garage light. We know it doesn't operate the dryer—which requires different voltage—or the garage door opener or the "outside" refrigerator. The light on the garage door opener isn't working, either, but that appears to be a burned-out bulb—and I don't seem to have another one in the house.)
NOS had to pull out the dryer to unplug the washer, but since it was empty, that was fairly simple. He pulled out the plug, hooked it into the extension cord, and took the other end of the cord down the hall to plug it in.
Nothing.
The outlet he had picked was in the entryway (20 ft beyond the one in the hall next to the laundry room), so it could, I suppose, be on the circuit with the emergency breaker in the bathroom. He fiddled with that breaker until he got frustrated and decided to take a coffin nail break. In a moment of indulgence, he allowed SS's dog to go out with him. We don't trust Tank, so NOS had him on a leash.
Which broke.
And Tank took off merrily across the neighborhood.
This time, though, the neighbors across the street had their daughter's two dogs in the pen behind their house, and the racket from barking dogs was a pretty clear indicator of where Tank would be. So NOS snuffed his butt, poked his head in to let me know where he was headed, and took off across the street. I popped out to see how the hunt was going and routinely locked the door behind me when I came back in—locking NOS and Tank out when they got back a few minutes later.
NOS isn't an electrician, but he's a pretty good mechanic, so he went methodically about trying to figure out where we had power that might operate the washer, since it only needed a standard socket. The night light he initially tried for testing sockets is light-activated, so it's not really reliable for testing power, but he found SS's Marvin the Alien one, which works like a charm. He stuck it into every socket near the laundry room, and finally he stuck it into the one beside the washer.
Which worked.
So having survived the frustration of the client's dissatisfaction, the problems with the printer, the power problems, and the runaway dog, I was ready to call it a night. I didn't fall asleep right away, though, so when I heard the washer finish its cycle, I slipped from bed to the laundry room and shifted the clothes into the dryer in hopes that NOS would be able to get a good night's sleep and wake up to clean clothes for work in the morning.
An hour later, I was still awake.
And an hour after that.
I know that I did eventually sleep sometime because of the weird dream I had. I can't imagine where I thought I was, but a few hundred feet away from me was a big building with a dome, like one of the older buildings on the campus where I teach, although something in the dream made me think it was a capitol of some kind.
I pass the building on our campus periodically, and my classes were in the building next to it when I was in graduate school, and I've been to our state capitol often enough that a building like that was no particular surprise.
The surprise wasn't the man in a trench coat walking toward the edge of my field of vision between me and the dome, although I couldn't much relate to the sort of slushy, snowy rain.
What I didn't understand at all was the "landscape" between me and the dome that looked like rows of hyphens and capital Ls:
-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L--
-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L--
-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L--
-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L--
No buildings, no streets, nothing remarkable except for a shrub here and there, and hyphens.
And every hour or so, I rolled over to check the time and found out that, yep, I was pretty much still awake.
All night long.
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