March 7th, 2006

The illness is receding. I’m still prone to naps, and being suddenly cold for no good reason, and odd coughing fits, but things are improving. Thanks for all your well-wishes. I know I complain a lot about the evils of TV, but let me tell you, when you are sick, TV is just about the greatest thing ever. I just wanted you to know, for the record, that I’m not a total hater.

And with that settled, allow me to carry on with the hating. Can someone explain to me why in the past two weeks I’ve suddenly become a magnet for random icqing? I’m using Fire, and after not getting random chats in forever, I now get about one to two dozen random people icqing me per day. Why? And why now? I can autodeny icqs that come from people not already on my list, but since I’ve managed to hang on to my icq account for seven plus years and lost my lists several times, there’s always a slim possibility that someone who hasn’t spoken to me in a long time might pop up again, and I’d like them to be able to ping me. Still, this is getting ridiculous. Blech.

I’ve also got a bone to pick with the cosmetics industry. I don’t despise makeup. In fact, I wear makeup around a half dozen times a year. My problem is, I can’t seem to find makeup in a size that’s appropriate to half a dozen wearings per year. I’m forced to buy these enormous tubes of lipstick, these tremendous vats of eyeshadow, these huge tins of base. Once opened, these towering piles are good for about a year before they have to be thrown out, usually with barely a dent to give away they’ve been used at all. I resent the waste. So, why oh why, don’t makeup purveyors make trial-sized doses of their wares? Surely I’m not alone in this regard. Likely even daily makeup wearers can find a use for a travel-sized portions of their favorite cosmetics. So. Why aren’t they available? What’s the problem here? Am I just failing to look in the right places?

Take a look at this New Yorker cover that wasn’t, but should have been. Thanks, Dick.

So it looks like today is going to be the day I restart Firefox. I don’t want to restart Firefox. As I told my husband today when he suggested it, “Restarting Firefox is for the weak”, but Gmail cannot be convinced to allow me to log in, for whatever reason. At some point, I suppose, I’ll have to get to my email again. My husband seems to think, and I’m not sure why, that I should tell all of you folks why I’m so reluctant to restart Firefox, and he suggests a screenshot will explain. So here’s my current Firefox session:

For the record, I don’t like rebooting my machine either. I postpone updates that require restarts, usually for a month or two and not just because of the restarting Firefox issue. I’m not running Unix under the hood here so I have to reboot every five minutes, or even every five weeks! Stupid having to set -o vi again on all my shells, and then the history is all gone, and plus having to relaunch all my apps, and I was just in the middle of two ecto posts and an appleworks doc and such. Man was not meant to live this way! Restarts are lame, lame, lame. My current uptime is only 23 days, so you can forget Security Update 2006-001 for at least a couple of weeks. Well, unless I decide to restart Firefox…at which point there may be a massive restarting extravaganza. Why the hell not?

P.S. I have no idea whether you can read the screenshot or not, but the “Black Bear Bakery” listed on that page used to be the place of employment of a fellow writer from WUTA. We used to call him the “Anarchist Baker”. Actually, we still do call him that from time to time. He quit the bakery so they’d pay him. And yes, it really does work that way. They tend not to pay you, unless you quit. This appeals to me, but that’s probably because I’m not an employee. I love living in a city with an anarchist bakery.

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