internet frustration

I moved into my new apartment on Friday. The internet was supposed to be turned on but it was not, and the technician could not arrive until Monday, and therefore I spent the weekend without internet.

This was pretty inconvenient while I was trying to move in and coordinate with sources that can only be reached online. I created several really odd analogies around 1AM last night to explain how I felt.

Analogy One: Comcast is a witch that made me do manual labor.

Not having the internet means that instead of doing your work, checking your email, and finding out crucial information online, you must instead busy yourself by cleaning your apartment and unpacking things. This unpacking is fraught with the idea that if you had internet, you could take breaks to be on your computer doing things that were equally productive.

As for the witch thing, I don't know. Apparently I personify Comcast as wearing a pointy hat.

Analogy Two: Making transactions on your smartphone is like trying to play Monopoly with a tiny gnome.

The gnome wants to play Monopoly. But the board is way too small for your giant fingers! You must make purchases and transactions, but you keep putting hotels and houses on the wrong properties. You don't even know what the properties say. You have to ask the gnome to read things to you, but he's not very talkative, so you just struggle along by yourself, slowly hemorrhaging money.

Gnomes and witches are in league with each other. They have a club of pointy-hats.

Yes, the number of accidental amazon and peapod orders I had to cancel was pretty monumental.

Analogy Three: Maintaining a positive attitude during an internet outage when you are moving is as much of a no-win situation as having a staring contest with your cat.

You can never win a staring contest with your cat. Even if you think you won, the cat still thinks he won, and basically that is tantamount to losing. Even if your cat were giant or you were really small, and you were therefore on equal ground size-wise, the result would be no different.

But in the end, my apartment is unpacked, the internet is back, and my cat just lost the staring contest I tried to have with him. So everything is good.

That is all.

heat exhaustion

I had heat exhaustion.

That is all.


Also happy birthday to Steve!

dog presentation

As a child, I was pretty much like every other kid. I wanted a pony, and a bike, and eventually, a dog. Our bus driver was fostering six beagle mix puppies. She was looking to give them away, after they had been vet-checked vaccinated.

A normal kid would go about asking for one of these puppies like this:

However, I was smart enough to know that this would never work out in my family. The children of architects have great spacial reasoning and structure. The children of professors have a great love for academia. My parents had worked for years in businesses. In my family, if you wanted a raise in your allowance or planned to tackle a large-scale project, you made a presentation. With charts and graphs. And at the very least, a clearly outlined budget.

My brother and I also used to get our allowance twice a year in a large, bi-yearly sum. We had to spend it over six months in accordance with the budgets we had made.

Feeling that asking for a dog ought to be done professionally, I set about formulating my presentation for a dog.

While some matters, such as how much a dog would cost and what the budget would look like, were straightforward. Other matters, such as why we should have a dog in the first place, were not.

My presentation, therefore, started out strong and then quickly went downhill:

Although my parents thought my dog presentation was good, they saw it as an opportunity for a lesson: just because you make a presentation doesn't it will yield positive results.

We did not get a dog. Later, however, I managed to get a cat through more traditional means.

THAT was the day that I learned the effectiveness of good visual aids.