Working on Working

  Hi! Crazy Lady here, back with more problems again... Insomnia has been hitting me harder than ever, so I should apologize ahead of time for... Well, most of this, I suppose. When I do sleep, it never lasts more than two hours. It's been this way for over a month (two; three?) now. My brain is in a constant fog, and I find it harder to concentrate with each day that passes. Which is NOT going to help me with any of the mess I've uncovered: 

  Yay, my pattern notebooks have been found! They were misplaced in the move, and I've been hoping to find them so I could get back to work on some completed patterns that have yet to make it here. Since I had some things to do on the blog anyway, I thought I'd start typing them up. (Maybe a bad idea to do any work... Anybody remember the time I deleted the blog's background?) What I thought would be a simple task turned out to be a bad idea, indeed.



  The patterns in one of my lost notebooks were created while living at Dad's. Writing in the dim light from the TV with my book balanced on the couch, I didn't have the best penmanship. Well, I never do consider my handwriting to be good but this chicken scratch looks unfamiliar to my eyes. The letters of many abbreviations are smashed together, the writing fades to almost unreadable towards the bottom of the page, and I have sticky notes stuck to the pages which are fortunately more readable, however, I have no clue what they are for.



  What. A. Mess. And here I was thinking this would be a mindless task! Nope, this is not a job for tired brain and eyes. BUT... It's not like this is a total disaster, because at least I've found the notebooks. There's a chance I could decipher all of it someday, I just need to be able to find the time that I never seem to have.



  Hmm. Time. Like the time I wasted while searching for the link above? I got a little too distracted while searching for that post, and I ended up browsing my own blog for awhile. There are so many broken links! SO. MANY. And all of them are my own fault for creating my tutorials with Guidecentral instead of publishing my own content.



  They said it would be a great opportunity. I would get so much EXPOSURE (good god, I hate that word) and my own blog would benefit. They said I would make money, which I did for a time. First it was $7 per tutorial, then it got dropped to $4. I became suspicious when I was nearing my last payment threshold and they wouldn't let me publish any more tutorials. Dollars short of receiving payment, they shut the monetary side of the program down. But it's okay, they said we were more than welcome to keep creating tutorials for FREE, because well, you know, it's great exposure.



  Guidecentral didn't last long after that. (Aw, I wonder why?) We had the opportunity to download our own materials before they shut the site down, but I suffered another setback when my PC crossed over the great Fiber Optic Rainbow in the sky. I never recovered any of my work and I was left with a ton of broken links that were eventually forgotten among the bigger stresses in life.



  So... More good news! I now have another PC that's about to get hurled over that stupid rainbow. It used to work for at least 20 minutes before freezing, but it's getting worse. (No joke, it has frozen on almost every paragraph of this post.) After going through all the brains (OS, drivers, troubleshooting, etc), I opened the case up to check out its guts. Looky what I found:

  Could that be it? Well I'll just plug that wire all the way back in, then... Push; falls. Push harder; falls. Entangle wire with another wire so it will stay put; FALLS. Grrrr. If this is the problem, I'm not fixing it by simply plugging it back in. Use gruff mechanic-voice here: I'm gonna go get the duct tape and a hammer. If one don't fix it, the other will.



  This became motivation for me to hook up the previous desktop to see what I could do. I had worked on that machine for hours after it failed, trying to resurrect it from a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) just to get a Black Screen of No Return. (That's when I made the mistake of going to Walmart to buy the only piece of HP I could find.) So yesterday I set the old machine up on the floor, not expecting much from it. After three-ish years of being unplugged, the booger started up without a single problem! Then it crashed as soon as I started trying to pull my files.



  This is good news though, because it means not all was a total loss. My files are there! I just have to get them so I can load them onto... Oh... Yeah, there's no point in putting them on this piece of HP, is there? (LOL I suppose it didn't like me insulting it, so it froze again as I finished that sentence.) Since I still have the case open on this thing, I took another look and found the hard drive to be as warm as a freshly poured cup of coffee (mmm, coffee), so I'm guessing this won't be solved by some Windows updates or wiggling wires.



  The harsh reality? This is a simple issue that's pretty easy for me to fix: By a new PC. Pull the files from this and the old one. Load them onto new computer; begin working again. So, what's the problem? What I can't fix is the rest of my life where everything is always falling apart and I can't seem to stop it from affecting my work. And "it" just keeps piling up. What would be nice if I had a husband that wanted to lift a finger with any of those other things.



  I understand that Rip van Winkle can't help me with technology problems, but it would mean so much if he just made his own sandwich for lunch, or unpacked that lunchbox when he gets home, or do some of his dishes or laundry... You know, take care of yourself kind of stuff. Clean your own truck? It would have been even better to get a hug after my cats died. Something... Anything. I am so tired of this life that I would be happy to just walk away from everything and get a job at Walmart or a gas station or something so that I could leave this (unfinished) house and forget that I'm basically a maid that works to the tune of someone else's snoring.



  *Sigh* Gee, that feels good to say to people who might listen. He can't see the problem when he's almost always staring at the back of his eyelids. When he's awake, it's the TV he stares at... But that's after asking me to put something on to watch because he "can't figure out how to use the remote". He can't make his own food because he "can't find the dishes" and "can't get the directions right" for how to cook a Hot Pocket. And I can't see myself dealing with this much longer, but leaving my marriage will only result in another major upset in a life that has been derailed so many times that it's an official train wreck. Until I make a decision to stay or go, I'm just going to keep working on working.



  This post sure jumped the tracks as well, huh? My point is that I've had trouble finding the motivation to get back to work when I'm always faced with another issue to solve (or work around). And I'm starting to see that it's not all my fault... Things need to change. It's going to start with him microwaving some leftovers or going hungry. (Update: That resulted in him not eating until after 9pm when I finally set food in front of him because apparently I have no spine.) I have 50+ broken links to fix and most require the creation of a new tutorial. Forget that lack of inspiration! I already have a list of tasks ahead of me and it's time to get to work... As soon as I'm done spot-treating the concrete out of his work clothes.



  You may guess by my rambling that my mental state isn't at its strongest, but I'll be okay. Writing about it often helps me to work out my problems. And the more I reread my own pathetic words, I get mad instead of sad. When I'm sad, I'm only able to do the bare minimum of work. My "duties as housekeeper" burn up all the energy I have. When I get mad, I do things. Sometimes those "things" are me throwing half his stuff out the door while yelling "I can't take any more of your crap piling up!", but hey... It's doing something, right? *Disclaimer: He has at least refrained from bringing anything that came from a dumpster into the new house. He puts it in the shed instead.



  The more I think about it, the extra work of fixing those links might pull me out of this funk. Maybe going through those tutorials will help inspire me to get back to creating patterns. If I can't fix all the broken things in my house or my broken relationship, then I can at least fix the broken links on my blog. I can't wait to get to work! I'll start as soon as I'm done picking up the paper towels he's been throwing on the floor behind the trash can.


Thanks for listening, or at least pretending to. It doesn't matter if anybody reads this, it just helps to vent sometimes.

Happy Crocheting!