I have been working on my holiday cards for the last week, punctuated mostly with the fact that my PC has been limping along for the last few months. It wouldn’t show thumbnails in Windows and wouldn’t play .avi files. It wouldn’t open several programs, like my general CD burner or Sony Movie Maker or WinAmp. It crashed if I tried to open the Sims2. However, with my gazillions of song files and ginormous photo archive, this lack of a CD burner was the biggest problem. You see, how did one back all of this stuff up if one cannot operate the DVD burner? One employs the uses of one’s local computer geek. Enter Esteban.
I hate reloading my PC and put it off as long as possible, because every time, every damn time, there is something that gets lost. Last time, it was my mail archives. The time before that it was all of my saved games. The time before that’ I don’t know, something painful that I’ve repressed. And one horrible time in the 90’s, it was every piece of writing I had saved on the hard drive. I only had paper copies of some of the missing documents so the rest are lost to the ether. Ah well, it was while I was an undergrad, so it’s not like it was all that great anyway, but if I ever end up as famous as Dorothy Parker, I’m sure someone will be upset about it, other than myself. Not likely, but still.
So I mentally prepared myself for being without the pc for two days while he backed everything up and reloaded everything and then Esteban borrowed some technical thing from one of his technical buddies (Hi Shill) and then realized that it wouldn’t work because my computer was that well and truly fucked. So I exhaled. He then told me that the easiest way to do the back up would be to buy another hard drive identical to mine and back everything up that way, so for a week, I asked him “Did you buy the hard drive yet?” and he’d say “No” and then the next day, I’d say “Did you buy the hard drive yet?” “No.” “Did you buy the hard drive yet?” “No, I will tomorrow.” And then the next day, “Did you buy the hard drive yet? Because I need to burn my holiday CDs and get them sent out.” And then the response was just silence, so I knew that the only way it would happen was if I ordered the damn thing myself. And then he balked and tried to act like he wasn’t a big hairy procrastinator and mentioned my tendency to need to marinate on decisions, but see, that’s different, Internet, because I need time to weight the options but in this situation, we already had a course of action which means that we should just go ahead and act already. Right? Can I get an amen?
Thus, on Saturday, while I was entertaining Abby in the living room with Karaoke Revolution, Esteban sat in my office and did the transplant. He was still transplanting when I went to bed, although I did check on his progress and open iTunes between revolutions with something and then was subjected to him racing into the room, flipping on the light and hissing “Did you open up iTunes? Because you might have just lost all of your purchased music.” Whatever, most of the music’s only got two more reloads left anyway.
So far, I haven’t noticed anything missing, although it will be weeks and months before everything is back the way I want it. And then the machine will need to be reloaded again, but at least I can do the Holiday Weetamixes before 2007.
As mentioned above, Abby stayed with us over the weekend. We were supposed to have her for 10 days, which is why we didn’t go anywhere over Thanksgiving weekend as we had originally planned during the summer, but then my sister decided to buy a house in a town 30 miles north of here, which meant that taking Abby to school became quite the ordeal and it made sense that she stayed with our stepsister instead, save for last weekend when she came to hang out with us. She’s always a fun addition to Casa Bix and aside from the propensity to strew her belongings hither and fro, she’s completely low maintenance. When I got home from Chicago, we went out to get dinner and then Uncle Esteban admitted that he hadn’t found her air mattress from the last time she stayed and if it was the one that Mopie had returned, then he had no idea where it was.
The majority of the weekend was spent playing Karaoke Revolution. You’d think the 8-year-old would go for the Michelle Branch and Avril Lavigne, right? Well, you’d be mistaken. Instead, she rocked “Call Me” and “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me”. And honestly, you haven’t lived until you hear a sweet little soprano plead with you to play that funky music, white boy, play that funky music right.
Her only request for the weekend was that we get pedis and manicures again, like we did the last time she stayed with us. My own manicure was hoopty and my pedi was in dire need, so no problems there. Unfortunately, the owner of the nail salon wasn’t available and someone else did Abby’s nails, which meant that instead of hand drawing snowflakes onto Abby’s toenails, they used stickers. This fact was belabored for hours afterward. Ms Abby has heady expectations for her personal grooming, apparently. Also, we went to Target because she didn’t have adequate warm clothes along with her, and ended up with a faux fur hoodie that was oh my god the best thing ever. Everyone had to feel her hoodie (which sounds dirty but she’s eight, so shut up) and act appropriately awed on how soft it was. Even that, she opined, would have been awesome if it had fur on the inside and the outside. Yes, Ms. Abigail, and as I tell Uncle Esteban regularly, it’s good to want things.
We went to Joel’s baby’s christening and then afterward, I took Abby to see the Santa Clause movie. Which, by the way, was sort of awful. I don’t like Tim Allen, hate the grunting thing a LOT, but I’ve always liked the other Santa Clause movies. Perhaps the added presence of Martin Short tipped my scales of Annoying Personality Tolerance and no amount of holiday cheer could set them right again. But I did laugh at the Canada jokes and eat a nutritious lunch of movie popcorn, so it wasn’t a completely lost afternoon. After my stepsister picked Abby up, Ward and June called and invited me over for dinner, so I went because I don’t see them nearly enough and I had also purchased some cranberry stilton for her at TJ’s that I needed to give her anyway. She made a delicious dinner and then they wanted to watch Ice Age 2. So basically I spent my Sunday watching movies that I had zero interest in just to make other people happy. And God bless us everyone.
