Whoo hoo! I just got a brand-spankin'- new-except-it's-used CD burner and some more RAM installed on this puppy, and nothing has burst into flames! I'm so happy! Now, in my copious spare time, I have to start burning the songs I like from the CDs that are just so-so, and I can sell CDs. I'll get to that real soon. Really.

Dean was rebuilding and upgrading his machine at home, so I bought some of his old stuff off him. Plus, he installed everything. Life is good. I had Wendy here to translate and hold my hand while he took the computer apart and pried bits and pieces of computer gut out, but I remained more or less calm. We did have one freak-out moment when Dean said "Are these screwdriver bits magnetic?" after he'd been using them inside my machine for about 15 minutes. They weren't. Phew.

This was the sort of day when I think we should be able to sue weather forecasters for false advertising. "Windy, around 60 today!" Well, they got the windy part right. They failed to mention the snow, and they needed to divide that temperature in half. I was most disappointed.

I was semi-productive despite the weather -- got the new insurance for the house, moved stuff around and cleaned out my office -- but the place still looks like a tornado hit. Sigh. It didn't help that the cats pinned me to the napping couch for a couple of hours in the afternoon. Bad kitties. Yawn.

Wendy, Dean and I went to Home Depot to get a new ladder (to replace the stolen one), weather stripping and such for my doors, and a couple of cheap bookcases. Getting everything home was a bit of a challenge. Wendy does have a big car, but an eight-foot-ladder is, well, eight feet long. It did fit in the car, but that meant Dean, in the back seat, was hunched to the side and Wendy and I, in the front seat, had the ladder pretty much on our shoulders. It was jammed up against the rear-view mirror, too. Wendy said it was like driving in a small car with skis. I'll take her word for it.

Boy, I'm boring right now, aren't I? I apologize. Tomorrow it's Wet Hot Meatballs at Lotti and John's, so that should be amusing.

Oh, another thing -- Watched Godfather II last night, and while I didn't quite keep up with the movie ('Why is he... How did that... Wait, isn't he supposed to ... Huh?") I did come to one very significant conclusion: Robert DeNiro was hot. I had no idea. I mean, I'd seen Taxi Driver, but never really notice what an amazingly good-looking man DeNiro was in his youth. He ain't that bad now, but in Godfather II? Yowza.

Minor annoyance number 1:

I got two cryptic messages from TCF bank on my home answering machine, asking me to call as soon as possible. I don't have any accounts with TCF. Hmmm. I, being the sunny, optimistic person I can, immediately figured that someone had tried to open an account there in my name, or some other aspect of identity fraud. So I call.

Guy at TCF: Oh hi, Miss Jer-e-salad, we're just calling me to follow up on offer we mailed you a few days ago to see if you wanted to consolidate your home loans...
Me: (Deep, cleansing breath)
Guy at TCF: So can we interest you in any of our consumer loan products?
Me: First of all, I don't have any accounts with TCF.
Guy at TCF: Yes I know. I was just --
Me: And when I got a message from you, I figured it was because someone had tried to perpetrate credit fraud or something else dire.
Guy at TCF: Oh, well that certainly wasn't our intention.
Me: If you send me an offer and you don't hear from me, it means I don't want it. And if you call me again, you damn well better identify that you are trying to sell me something. No, on second thought: You need to take me off your list RIGHT NOW.
Guy at TCF: Um, ok.
*click*

It's bad enough that telemarketers call at all. Now they're leaving misleading messages? I'm polite to telemarketers -- hell I did phone surveys in college -- but that doesn't mean you can abuse my trust. Grrr.

Minor annoyance number 2:

We rent to Mormon missionaries. This is not a problem. We get paid by the missionary office, not by the guys actually living in our house. Also not a problem. The missionaries rotate through assignment. Again, not a problem.

What is a problem is when (1) They move someone new into the building without telling me, and (2) They ask departing tenants to fill out a survey on the state of the apartment. (3) The tenants identify something as broken -- in this case, the toilet handle -- without ever telling me about it. (3) The mission society sends me a letter telling me about the problem, instead of calling me. So the tenants have been living with a broken toilet (still flushable, but you have to reach into the tank to manually move the seal, which is annoying) for about two weeks, and I didn't know about it. I feel awful, but how am I supposed to fix something if I don't know it's broken?

So nothing earth shattering is happening, but I'm grumpy nonetheless.

I spent the evening tweaking my waxing story for publication. (And watching Buffy. Gotta watch Buffy. )Tomorrow I show the revision to Wendy. We'll see how that goes.

I think I've found replacement insurance for the house. I had been planning to switch both house and car,a s I was pissed at my old insurance company and didn't feel like giving them money for anything, thank you very much. Then I started getting quotes in, and remembered why I went with them for car in the first place: They're really cheap. As in, half as expensive as most insurers. So much for principle.

My new best friend is John Brown from Farmer's Insurance. Not only did he find me a decent policy that won't bankrupt me, he actually came out and told me up front that switching auto would be a bad idea. He talked himself out of a sale of car insurance. Damn straight I'm going to get property insurance from him.

I watched the snow fall from my cozy spot on the couch (with cats draped about feet and shoulders), and thought "This won't be so bad. It's big fluffy snow. Piece of cake." My, but I was wrong. At some point, there as rain, and then there was a deep freeze, all of which added up to a rather daunting crust of ice on the sidewalk. Sigh. Wendy had gotten us an ice-chipper thing, like a flat, sharp spade, and it worked very well. Our sidewalk is the clearest of all our neighbors. So yes, I rock, and yes, I'll still probably break something on the way to the bus in the morning.

I went a little crazy with the geek cheez-whiz today. One, my friend Jane has been posting from Vienna, Austria, where she is working at a medical conference. One of the things she mentioned in her Austria ratings was The sheep-counting channel. Austrian cable program in which fleece-clad ballet dancers leap-frog placidly over each other to trance music. On at 4 a.m. Amused but disbelieving -- she is suffering from some wicked-ass jet-lag -- I contacted an Austrian expert, Miguel of Feral Living. I IM'd him (I don't know the etiquette, but his IM is up there...) and he could neither confirm nor deny, as he doesn't have a TV. But I got to talk with him for a while, which was just so cool, because I read his blog every day. And he liked my ice dancing posts. How cool is that?

Yes, I am a blog groupie.

Also, in what is probably a very bad move, I finally gave in to the Dark Side that is E-Bay today. I won a Palm m500, if by "won" you mean "received the privilege of paying for it." Still, it's a refurbished version, so it's cheaper than I would get in the store, and I've been thinking about it for a while, but I have the horrible feeling that this is the sort of slippery slope I shouldn't go down. My experience with live auctions and silent auctions for charity has been a bit scary.

For a while I worked with a children's theater company called Runamuck Productions, and one year we did a fundraising auction. The most kick-ass auction item was a day cooking in the kitchen at Charlie Trotters, which is probably the most expensive, exclusive and famous restaurant in the city of Chicago. I figured this would be a good thing to get for my mom. Tragically, heath, the auctioneer, knew this, and knew of my, shall we say, competitive tendencies. He made sure the bidding went crazy, increased my bids by $50 a pop ("$300!" "I hear $350! Thank you, Sarah." "Wha -- I said $300, you bastard!" But I let it stand.) and generally made my life miserable. I "won," and mom very much enjoyed the day (at least she damn well better have...) but I ended up contributing fully half of the funds we got from that auction. Sigh.