The fuckers are still a thing at work. For the entire winter and right to this day, sporadic bursts of bedbug infestations have been plaguing the whole campus. They just can't seem to get rid of them. Remember, I was also victimized by them last October.
So to combat, yet again, another threat of a possible bedbug problem in my home, I went on a thorough search. Luckily, I didn't find any sign of them anywhere.
But at least it got me off my ass enough to finally get the apartment deep cleaned.
The bug I spotted might have been a lone stray, having hitched a ride in my clothes coming home from work. Nice pay, easy-as-fuck job responsibilities and lots of downtime...but there are prices to pay in this job. And having to worry about bedbugs is one of them.
Speaking of bugs, Microsoft pushed out a pop-up message on my monitor as I was home cruising aimlessly on the web the other night. They again "asked" me to upgrade to the new Creators Edition of Windows 10. This one was worded subtly to the same effect of saying "Why not just pull the trigger now? We're gonna make you do it by force in the near future anyway? Why wait 'till you're possibly in the midst of a great fapping sesh?"
So I fell for it and clicked UPGRADE NOW. As it worked its spinny circles for well over an hour, I remembered I hadn't prepared one bit for this upgrade should, gulp, something go wrong. No files copied to the cloud drive. Nothing put on the flash drives. No hard-to-remember passwords stashed safely away into the Pearl Street folder. I was totally vulnerable.
And lo and behold...big fuckin' surprise...the spinny circles stop spinning and the words on the screen say "Let's Get Started."
And the screen fades to black. And stays like that, no matter what I do.
Fuck! I knew it!
Fortunately it was during my weekend and I had my laptop home with me so I was able to check to see if this was a common error. (Well, I could have done the Google searching on either of my two tablets or my phone for that matter but I hate excessively browsing on those things. I'm a computer loving dinosaur. Computers are not hand held items in my book.)
Yup. It's happened to plenty of folks. Solution according to tech sites? Pretty much: You're fucked. Use the laptop to download a USB drive installer of the entire OS from Microsoft, plug that drive into the affected computer and boot from it. Install it from there. And so I did. And since I think the problem may have stemmed from some of the janky issues I've been having with Home Mildred like rebooting when waking up from sleep half the time, I decided to say bye bye to the many gigabytes of lovely porn in my super secret folders that are NOT labeled "porn" and did a fresh install.
But, like my fresh smelling, sparkling apartment, now Home Mildred is like a brand-new system again. Ahh!
Finally, after visiting my doctor on Monday and seeing that my liver fatty acids and enzymes are dramatically up from just a month earlier, I decided, yet-a-fucking-gain, to quit drinking. I lost some 8 pounds or so over the past month since starting back on the Phen (aka Rainbow Magic) but it could have, and should have been more. If only I cut out the beer. And the gorging I do after I get drunk. Ugh.
The doc gave me 3-months worth of scripts for the pills so I'll be on it through the summer. No reason to not take this as a strong opportunity to get back in shape. Auspicious timing too. Last week was the 25th anniversary of the first day of the 1992 "Weight Reduction Plan" that saw me shed the pre-sobriety bulk and slim down to a teetotaling, energetic and thin dedicated devotee of Covert Bailey, Susan Powter and Richard Simmons. Of course, now Bailey and Powter are nowhere to be found anymore since their "low-fat, high-carb" diets are pretty much the polar opposite of today's trends. In retrospect, my success then may not have been in the ratio of what I ate, but simply the volume. And methinks that's still the key...carbs, fat, protein...the proportion of one to the others is far less important than cutting down the overall calories regardless of their source.
I think it'll be a great season this year. I'll throw open the windows and breath deeply of the magnolia-scented fresh air.
At least until a bug flies up my nose.
EDIT: I've been getting probably unrealistic paranoia lately about the information available to anyone in this blog. So, in another spring cleaning task, I've decided, as of 7:50 am today, to make this blog private. Even if my nagging anxiety about people at work reading this (which would, needless to say, be a really bad thing since I dis almost everybody there) isn't unwarranted, I realized that some past posts have indeed gotten very critical comments. I don't have comment notification turned on so it came as a surprise today when I looked at comment history on this blog's dashboard and there were some rather disturbing comments made on my "Laura Hupfel Is A Bitch" post written to this blog almost eight years ago! Meh, we'll peace out from the greater internet and I'll be the only one accessing this. Like the Time Reports this blog was based on, it was never meant to be a forum for the public anyway. It's my life and, honestly, I'm most likely the only person genuinely interested in it.