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12:20:2002 Entry: "Ann : Let's recap what's happened over the past few weeks"

Let's recap what's happened over the past few weeks

Warning...this is all boring technical horrorshow stuff...no juicy personal melodramas, just digital disasters and the problems related to them. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Late June, I purchase an external hard drive, Norton Utilities and Toast 5 Titanium, the HD and Norton for my main desktop, Toast for my laptop. Vague instructions come with the HD, and as I'm trying to format and partition it so that it would hopefully work better, the software that came with it stalls, I force a restart, and my computer cannot find a system and flashes a question mark. I somehow managed to wipe out my computer's hard drive. I try a bunch of solutions to rescue my files, and manage to lose everything except for a few important files I managed to rescue with the help of Disk Warrior. Fortunately, I had backed up a month earlier, so I only lost a month's worth of stuff, minus the rescued files. This disaster caused me to be quite sick for the next few days, throwing up and just feeling like I wanted to die. I felt as though I lost my brain, not my mind, but my brain, and well, part of my life, which in fact I did. A month's worth. My systems and files were now a blank disk waiting to be reinstalled.

A couple days later, in between re-installing all the software on my desktop, I'm trying to install Toast 5 on my ibook which is running OS 9.1. Toast 5 is supposedly compatible. It gave me a system error on restart. I tried again, holding my shift down to disable the extensions. It still gave me an error on startup, which has never, ever in my many years as a Mac owner, happened. You are never supposed to get an error with the extensions disabled. That's why you disable the extensions. Figuring that Toast 5 and I are not compatible, I decide to return it, along with the external hard drive which obviously was formatted strangely, to the supplier. I fortunately got refunded in full. I purchased a different brand of HD which seems to be working fine.

The following Sunday, I had my 41st birthday. I didn't need to turn 41 in the midst of all of this.

Meanwhile, my dialup connection is acting flakey. Phone calls sound scratchy. It does this every summer, but this summer we decided to break down and have a phone company repair person come and install a new "box" on our house...whatever that is, hoping it will fix this problem. He was originally scheduled for July 19th.

Early this month, I'm trying to run a print on my inkjet, but no black is printing. I call a qualified Epson repair specialist in our town. He is very helpful and tells me what to do. After following his instructions, I fear I may have to buy a new printer, on top of everything else. I cannot afford this right now.

A day or so after that, I look out the window and see an Ameritech repair man working on the telephone poll outside. I hope this will make the line better, but it actually makes it worse. (coincidence? yeah, right). After having my fill of their company story and policy ("we'll send someone out to check out the problem, and if there's one found on your line, we charge $25 every fifteen minutes to fix it, plus $75 to send the technician out"--how would I know they're fixing MY problem or fixing THEIR problem but telling me it's MY problem, hmmm?), Stan and I decide to do away with our landline and go cable for internet and cellular for our home phone. We make this decision in one afternoon. Yes, it was hasty, but I feel it was the only decision. We were under duress. And we actually had casually discussed this option times before. We schedule cable installation for Friday, the 19th.

I take my printer in to the computer doctor. I'm hoping the surgery won't be too expensive and that it can be fixed so I don't have to buy a new printer. Fortunately, it was, only a $50 repair. He flushed out the heads and fixed the pump. Works great now. I am grateful. We sign up for cellular service the same day, but Stan's fraud alert on his credit report prevents us from taking the phone home the same day (long story about a schyster mortgage company we were dealing with last year who said they wouldn't return our papers to us...coke sniffers).

I had my opening this past Friday. More stress to add to the mess.

We cancel the appointment for the Ameritech telephone repair man. They try to sell us DSL. Yeah, right.

In the midst of all of this, I find out that the entry pages of all my sites (except The Dingbatcave which has a special .htaccess redirect script) all display broken images for people using MSIE 6.0 if they enter on the main entry way of the domain and do not enter via a hyperlink with a trailing slash! (i.e., ornamentalillness.com instead of ornamentalillness.com/) Having no idea why this is, and unable to troubleshoot it myself because Macs do not have version 6.0 yet, and having no idea why it happens with my site and some other sites, but not with others, I frantically implement a redirect script on all sites that take you to an actual page instead of just the root directory. Good grief.

We bought a gallon jug of enzymatic pet odor eliminator/carpet cleaner to clean the carpet. Our 'tard kitty, Persephone, had peed on it after we purchased it. After repeated applications of another brand of enzymatic pet odor eliinator that just didn't do the trick, we decided to go for the heavy duty treatment. We applied it this past Sunday. But to our horror, it made it smell worse. It was like the Seinfeld episode where the valet has really bad body odor which causes Jerry, his car, and Elaine to smell. Our carpet was now an evil entity.

We go back on Monday to claim our cellphone. They couldn't find the original paperwork, nor could they find the phone they had set aside for us. It takes us hours to actually get the phone and we had to stay well past their closing time. As we were waiting for them to take care of our account, paperwork, etc., some other people walk into the office. It appears to be a mother and daughter, the daughter was maybe approximately our age or a little older, but she looked a lot more haggered and was quite a bit larger, so it's hard to tell. The older woman, or mother, was there to get a cellphone, and her daughter was there to help her with it as she knew it all. The mother was rather sweet, but her daughter kept telling her "no, you're not getting that one" when the subject of certain ringtones came up. The daughter was just being so bitchy to her mother, it was unbelievable. I couldn't imagine talking that way to my mom. If my mom wanted a ringtone, why would I object? It's her phone, not mine. When the mother commented on the phone we were getting, her daughter said, "You're not getting that one. You're getting a better one." Bitch.

As we come back home, we discover it has been taken over by the evil carpet entity. It called for drastic measures. We have to have the rug smelling normal for when the cable guy comes this Friday. Yesterday, Tuesday, we rented a rug cleaning wet-vac and spent the whole day cleaning it. As I woke up today and entered the living room, it still smelled like Persephone's litter pan. Why does a combination of pet odor eliminator and heavy duty detergent NOT REMOVE THE PET ODORS like the labels claim they will? We put that carpet fresh stuff on it. Now it smells like a boudoir. Pungent, yet much better that cat urine.

I have my computer reinstalled. I have my printer repaired. I have my new cellphone. I'm scheduled for the final act of this mechanized melodrama on Friday, the climax of cable. And I am still at my wit's end.

When this is all over, we will have completely shed our skins. We will no longer be the same. We will have gone through a major paradigm shift. Yet we'll still be the same. We'll be at the same house, we'll have the same friends, same family, same animals, possessions. Yet everything will be different. It's like an egg. You break an egg open and you have this yellow-orange sphere inside a clear liquid. But when you scramble it, it looks like light-yellow, foamy glop. But it's still an egg. Chemically, it has all the same properties. That's sort of like the way I feel. I'm still me, even though I've been scrambled, turned upside down and rearranged. I hope that makes sense.

8 Comments

Well, it's good it's over :)

Posted by Nico @ 07:18:2002:06:33 AM CST

It's not over yet. Still don't have cable...there's still that hurdle to cross. And now Stan's sealed the floor underneath the rug with the awful oil-based stuff to prevent any future 'tard kitty problems. I think I'm gonna barf. I think he's damaged all our brain cells.

Posted by Ann @ 07:18:2002:07:28 AM CST

I read, years ago, that the best thing for cat pee is a solution of biological washing detergent followed by a white spirit solution. Apparently the enzymes in the detergent break down whatever it is in cat's pee that makes it stink so bad. Also cat pee contains soluble fats which is what the white spirit is for. I hope all goes well with your cable installation :)

Posted by Shelagh @ 07:18:2002:10:28 AM CST

Thanks, Shelagh. Funny you should mention this, as Stan and I were discussing last night that the best thing we've used for cat pee (in the past, before they came out with the bacteria thing) has been white vinegar, which I assume would be very similar to white spirits.

This whole bacterial urine-eating bacteria thing that the petcare industry has tried to pawn off on us simply doesn't work IMHO. It just does nothing to the odor, if not make it worse. And it's expensive too. However, the "experts" claim it's the only solution.

Baah. Experts.

Either that or my cat isn't normal. Well, I know that's the case, at least mentally. She had a high fever when she was a kitten.

Posted by Ann @ 07:18:2002:10:44 AM CST

B.t.w, why do the cat pee in the house and not in the litterbox? Does she have problems with the bladder or is ill in any way? Cause my cats has never done that, even so I got Salem when he was just 5 weeks old and he almost couldn't get into the litterbox by himself.

Posted by Nico @ 07:18:2002:03:54 PM CST

Persephone is a special case. As I mentioned before, she had a high fever as a young kitten (infection after she was spayed...it was very scary and she refused to eat and she had to be hydrated with liquid at the vet's). She does not have a bladder infection...she is healthy physically. Unfortunately, I think the fever killed some brain cells and left her defective. I do not know why she has decided to target some objects of ours. We have learned to adapt, i.e., we dare not leave clothes or towels on the bed or else she'll pee on them. We also do not use those anti-static cling dryer sheets because the scent of those makes her REALLY want to pee on our clothes if we accidentally leave them on our bed. She does use the litter pan, but it has to be plain clay...no fancy litter, and especially no scent. She must be semi-autistic as she seems super-effected by what humans consider "nice" scents. Why did she pee on our brand new carpet? Probably because it smelled like a brand new carpet, and as all brand new carpets go, they have that new carpet scent. It probably disturbed her. I know many people would've have given her up for ruining nice things (or at least making life very miserable at times) but we can't. She's our cat. And I believe you treat pets the same way you would a child and not give them up just because they're defective.

Posted by Ann @ 07:19:2002:09:16 AM CST

I just read that cats sometimes pee in the house, even on the owner's pillow, when they want attention from the owner, they kind of hope the owner notice the smell and come around, mostly they do that when the owner is away though.
No good catowner would give up a cat because she do this or that, like you say, a cat is a familymember. Unfortunately not every catowner is like you.

Posted by Nico @ 07:22:2002:01:58 PM CST

Heh...that reminds me of one time when we went out of town for a day and didn't realize Caligula (our very good cat whose only bad vice is nibbling houseplants) was trapped upstairs. This was back when we slept upstairs. We were gone a LOOOOOng time. When we came home, Caligula had peed and pooped on Stan's pillow. How's that for attention? :-D

As far as Persephone goes, she's more apt to pee on stuff if you GIVE attention to her. Stan says each time he pets her, she'll pee on something. So he's given it up. Doesn't seem to matter if I pet her though, but she'll make a mess if he does.

Very odd cat.

Posted by Ann @ 07:22:2002:04:21 PM CST

By Ann @ 20:23 AM CST:12:20:02 ..::Link::..