I have decided to flip my previous plan, and get the CPU from the US Amazon and the case and get the motherboard and cooler here in Canada.

I mean, I have $150 in big bad American dollars sitting on my Amazon American account. That’s around 225 Canadian./

$150 American is slightly less than half the price of the CPU. The rest will come out to roughly $172 American, or about $230 Canadian.

That sounds better than shelling out $420 on this side of the border.

But what about import fees? The Internet seems to think that there aren’t any import fees on computers between the USA and Canada.

Which makes me wonder where the $110 I paid in import dues for my graphics card went. I get the feeling I was scammed by UPS.

Which, to my mind, would meet the basic definition fraud, which is “obtaining money by lying. ” If I get another of these notices that payment is due, I will definitely be scrutinizing it very, very carefully to see if there are weasel words in there that would let them get away with this kind of chicanery, or even better, that would reveal that I do not actually have to pay their fee to get my package.

After all, that would also be fraud AND extortion and a violation of their contract with Amazon to deliver packages for a set fee.

Might be fun to put their nuts in the wringer over that.

Anyhow, back to my plan. I keep going over and over it in my head looking for some kind of flaw that would make it a terrible idea .

But it’s too simple a plan to have flaws. As far as I can tell, I will get the CPU for way less money this way.

And that makes me happy.

Anyone else want to give me American money? 😛

---

Great idea for a website : a site for people who have no sob story or grand justification for wanting to crowdfund a purchase, they just really want the thing.

It would be called “wannit.com” and it would be a grand celebration of consumer greed.

People would be encouraged to be completely candid about why they want the thing. No appeals to compassion, no moral high ground.

“I need money for this thing because I really, really want it. I want it so bad I can taste it. It’s driving me crazy. So please contribute. ”

Now I doubt it would work on a large scale. In fact, it might be better to just make a comedy website for it.

But I love the idea. And I am positive that there are people who would never in a million years contribute to a indiegogo pleading for compassion (libertarians) would be tickled enough by the open display of greed that they would contribute just for the hell of it.

Put your wallet where you mouth is, libertarians. You say greed is good? Then encourage it in your fellow citizen. Incentivize it.

Or do these things lose their appeal when they cost YOU money?

More after the break.

---

My culinary dilemma

I’m finding eating difficult lately.

For one, my stomach has turned against baloney completely. Can’t even imagine eating any of it The mere thought makes me wanna barf.

The hot dogs are a possibility. I can at least imagine eating and enjoying one, thought th hot dog in my mind is not a kind I know how to make myself.

Like, how do you toast a hot dog bun? In the toaster oven, I guess.

Even bacon has lost its appeal. And when a man is tired of bacon, he is in a dangerous state of mind and probably should be sedated.

Yeah, if only. I’d be a lot more likely to be shot than sedated. I mean, I look pretty much exactly like the big bearded biker it takes four cops to bring down in movies and TV.

Anyhow, I will, I think, have to look into lunch meat type things.

But not, I hasten to add, things like salami and pepperoni. They are gelatinous.

But things like sliced roast beef and rotisserie chicken and maybe even some chicken nuggets for when I want to eat like a kid.

I wish our oven worked. Then I could get things like tater tots for an occasional carb later indulgence and even be able to get back into baking.

I like baking. But it’s rather oven dependent

Right now, I am back to only getting vitamin b12 when I eat in or eat out. And I already know from experience that is NOT ENOUGH.

I gotta fix this.

A simple thought

A simple thought that had a profound effect on me passed through my mind today.

It went like this “I don’t know. I guess whatever happens, I’ll just deal with it. ”

Clearly, this idea meant a lot to me. It meant that I could stop trying to see in all directions at once so I can anticipate all potential dangers and avoid or neutralize them.

Too bad that’s impossible. People need to have the ability to deal with things in realtime, and that means handling things from an adrenalized mind state, without the luxury of being able to think things over carefully to get the “right” answer.

That is way too much pressure to put on an innocent cerebellum.

This dovetails with my little experiments with going with my gut. I process everything through my amazing rational mind, and that is inefficient when I have a lot of perfectly good instinct and impulses that could do the grunt work.

Get to work, you slackers!

---

Sorry about the fucked up formatting. WordPress was having a shit fit. Dropping tabs in random places, spazzing out when I try to type an S, and as you can see, somehow overwriting existing text like I am using a freaking typewriter.

Reminds me of the bad old days of struggling to figure out why the hell Wordperfect was doing THAT all of a sudden.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Julian, bless his heart, is currently scouring Richmond for a Pay Power card for me. And so far, he ain’t finding any.

More distressing is that places he goes are telling him that they don’t stock them any more. And that is making me wonder if the whole damn company imploded and nobody told the people who run the app.

Admittedly, that’s not the most likely theory. It’s just the way my highly neurotic mind works. I leap to the worst conclusions with astounding agility.

Maybe it started as a rational attempt to ask what is the worst thing that could happen in order to put a hard limit on how much I freak out about something.

But like everything else in this big brain of mine, it got corrupted by the Evil Empire that is the diseased part of my mind.

I wish I could just excise that shit. Go in there with a laser and cauterize all the bad and broken brain cells and free my mind to actually work like it’s supposed to do.

Anyhow, back to my credit card issues.

If there are simply no PayPower cards to be had, I will have to consider one of these “Joker” cards a try.

It appears to be more or less the exact same thing, apart from the damn name, and I am becoming very upset about this whole deal and want it to be over.

I may also investigate other ways to accomplish the same thing. Like one of these virtual VISA cards that could take my direct deposit every month.

That would be so convenient it’s almost obscene.

---

Had a personal power failure this morning.

I was coughing and wheezing and worst of all, when I breathed, I got this awful bubbling feeling like there was a bong in there.

Which I guess would be mighty convenient for some.

I also had a runny nose and felt quite weak. Ergo, I called up the Community Care Clinic and canceled my Wound Care appointment.

Or I thought I did. I left a message on Megan’s voicemail but apparently it did not get through to the nurse who was to be handling my wounds.

That sounds wrong.

So I got a call from the nurse asking where I was. That was awkward.

But like I said to her, at that point, I was worried enough about the possibility that I had PNEUMONIA that it’s like I was mentally halfway to Urgent Care already.

Luckily, things have clear up some day and the symptoms have disappeared.

Except the weakness.

It’s hard to be sure, but I think my condition has gotten worse lately. I feel heavier and weaker and more tired.

Maybe I just need to catch up on sleep. I definitely feel like I am behind on my sleep debt. Perhaps with some normal sleep, I will feel better.

But the feeling that my body is held together by old rubber bands and used bubblegum just keeps getting worse.

I don’t want to die.

More after the break.

---

---

Death warmed over

On the one hand, I’m, not in pain. Gabapentin plus my recently acquired Aleve(yay naproxen) are taking care of my aches and pains, my headache from earlier is gone, and getting some sleep has reduced my background stress level.

But the tiredness and weakness has only gotten worse.

When I stand up now, I feel like I have a very heavy backpack on. This makes my gait even more unsteady than usual.

I have had several near-disasters where I almost took a nasty spill already today.

Even as I sit and type to you wonderful people, I feel heavy. Also a tiny bit lightheaded or “floaty” as if I was a little bit drunk and having trouble with my equilibrium.

No wonder I keep nearly braining myself in a fall.

I am hoping that I just have some kind of bug draining my energy, and that when I finally shrug it off, I will feel fine again.

But I wouldn’t be me without thinking about the worst case scenario : that my condition is getting worse and from here on, it’s just a steady downhill slide into being bedridden and highly dependent on others for the rest of my life.

I’d hate that.

I mean, I am not exactly super functional now, but at least I can still get my own food from the kitchen and make it to the living room and the bathroom on my own.

And I can still get to Denny’s and (most of the time) Wound Care without the use ofr an industrial hoist and a team of huskies.

The bathroom thing in particular haunts me. Needing help in that department would be so unfathomably humiliating. Like I am suddenly a helpless infant again.

I guess I would get used to it eventually. But I really don’t want there to be someone else in the room when I am doing bathroom things. Let alone someone whose job it is t take care of big ol baby me and who has to hold intimate parts of my anatomy for me in order for the operation to go smoothly and cleanly.

If I had my druthers, I would, obviously, be healthy again. I would be able to walk like everyone else and I would not be stuck watching my body rot out from under me while the medical establishment is trying to puzzle out what is wrong with me (medically, anyway) at a majestically glacial speed.

No hurry. It’s not like it’s a matter of life or death. Oh wait…. yeah, it is.

A slow, tortuous death at the hands of a mysterious disease that attacks my neuromuscular system and is slowly but inexorably destroying me.

It’s not just a matter of whether I can walk or not. If muscular degeneration progresses far enough, it attacks the muscles you use to breathe, not to mention that rather important muscular pump known as the heart.

I have doctors. They are working on it. But nevertheless I feel doomed.

But other than that, I guess I am doing okay.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The one between my knowledge of my amazing abilities and my self-worth.

It’s beginning to crack. If I build myself up enough, usually by writing it here, I can enjoy some time in which I think I am freaking awesome.

And I am. Objectively speaking. Never had to learn to study, super talented, etc.

But the moment passes and I lapse back into my default of not actively hating myself or wishing to harm myself out of sheer self-loathing and frustration.

And it’s taken me decades of therapy, both the traditional and the journaling kind, to reach this state of détente with my inner demons.

So why the firewall?

Let’s start at the core. Deep down, low self esteem is a feeling. A dark and terrible feeling, a mixture of pain, fear, and doubt that expresses itself on the surface as a deep inner hostility towards anything being good about yourself, reality be damned.

Hence impostor syndrome. If there is objective evidence of your worthiness but you are plagued by that feeling that corrodes all self-worth almost instantly in order to maintain the (horrible) status quo and “stability”, the only possible solution is that you have somehow faked it all and fooled people into thinking you are good when you are crap.

There are people with gold fucking medals who feel this way,

Not me, though. I don’t have impostor syndrome.

You need to have accomplishments for that.

But I get it. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, talent coming out of both wazoos, charisma, etc. and somehow, most of the time, that does not prevent me from feeling like I am worthless and horrible and toxic and bad.

And like with impostor syndrome, my guardians of the status quo are always ready to somehow negate anything I might come up with to argue against its self-hate.

Like how for decades I could not bring up my high IQ without saying “fat lot of good it did me” or “that just meant I was bored all the time at school”.

Like that negated it somehow. Oh, that didn’t count.

Funny how when you dismiss any and all evidence of something, it somehow seems like it doesn’t exist.

And when I try to understand why it is so hard for me to esteem myself, all I get is that cocktail of dark emotions.

Fear is definitely the strongest one. I think that on a deep level, I fear that “giving in” to higher self esteem will somehow set me up for a fall,. Or attract misfortune somehow.

Like somewhere there is an authority figure waiting to strike me down if I should ever dare to stand up.

I suppose a childhood in which I tried my best not to exist set me up for THAT. Being noticed was actually a bad thing in many ways. The only way to be safe is to blend in with the wallpaper. Don’t remind people you exist. Hope they forget you.

And they did. Because that’s what they wanted anyway, and I knew that.

I think I feared triggering my brother’s jealousy, too. That is an emotion I am simply not capable of handling, and seeing as Dave was in many ways a father figure to me, his anger and disapproval meant a lot to me.

But it’s safe now. There’s nobody to chuck thunderbolts at me if I dare to lift me head up and actually enjoy a positive self-image for a while.

You hear that, deeper self? ALL CLEAR.

More after the break.

---

This is so gloriously fucked up that I had to share it.

WARNING : I like disturbing things. And I like this a LOT.

---

An important update

Joe is fine.

It was just a cyst, and the headaches he was experience were unrelated.

Thank goodness. I was so worried. I think I was experiencing hypochondria by proxy.

And I am a little ashamed to admit it, but I am really glad that someone who is not me ended up going to the ER for what turned out to be nothing.

And not just anyone. It was Joe, a levelheaded, sensible guy.

Makes me feel a lot less fragile and flighty about my “dry runs”.

It’s just too bad that he had to be there like seven hours in order to find that out. I guess “I have this weird lump on my head” does not get a high triage score.

I can relate. That’s happened to me so often that I have made it a policy to tell myself over and over that things will be so much better once I am admitted.

That makes the waiting more bearable.

And they will be. Once I am admitted and have a bed and there are nurses on call if I need anything. I can relax and let my mind drift into “hospital mode”.

Like I have said before, “hospital mode” is a state close to sleep but with me staying awake enough to respond when someone needs me to.

Like when they are hooking up an IV, or need to draw some blood, or a handsome doctor is so taken with my wit and my adorable personality that he just has to take me there right in the ward.

Hey, it could happen!

And I would know he was “the one” if he actually genuinely LOLs when the nurse acts me if she can take my pulse and I say, “Only if you promise to give it back after!”.

Literally nobody has ever laughed at that. My best response has been a tight lipped and wearily indulgent smile.

Well I think it’s funny.

Oh and get this : I finally got my Pay Power account back today. Julian was nice enough to go out to buy me a new card at long last.

Only to find out our usual places have STOPPED SELLING THEM.

What the everlasting fuck, life?

Ergo I am still cardless. I am going to look up other locations that sell them in Richmond, and they apparently have competition now from a brand of prepaid cards called Joker (all together now : “Now there’s a name that inspires confidence!”), so I might end up taking my business to them.

But man, why does life have to fuck with me like this?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think I can buy my dream computer parts right away.

Right now, I have around $790 spendable cash. The new CPU I want is $420. I will be buying it from Amazon Canada, where, thanks to my sister Anne, I already have $50 on account. That drops the effective price to $370.

$790 – $370 = $420, which is more than enough to cover my expenses for the three weeks until my next Deposit Day.

Turns out there’s a benefit to not being able to order in! I got cash.

$420 divided by three weeks equals $140/week. Piece o’ cake. Heck, I will probably have some left over on Deposit Day.

Oh, but what of the motherboard and cooler I will also need? Those will be covered by the $150 my sister Catherine gave me.

Unfortunately, her Amazon certificate was for Amazon America, so I will have to order the cooler and motherboard from THEM.

Ironically, the sister who lives in the States knew to give me Amazon.ca money and the one who lives in Canada did not.

Oh well, I can deal.

I just don’t like dealing with Amazon Murka because of all the cross border issues. You never know how long your order will take to cross the border, and there is always the chance that your order will get slapped with an import fee and end up paying a lot more for the thing than you anticipated.

That’s what happened when my friend sent me my new graphics card. I had to pay an import fee of $110 to get it.

Grr. Luckily, I had the money, but still.

I mean, I can’t complain too much. I was still getting a $1200 graphics card for $110, and that’s one heck of a deal.

But take how much a Taurus like me hates surprises and of all the things to be surprised by one of our least favorite is surprise EXPENSES (grr), and you can understand why I am still a tad growly about the whole thing.

Oh well. Now I know.

Oh, and the motherboard my friends recommended is only $70 and the cooler is only $10, so I will have enough left over to buy a new case, too.

I’m not looking for anything fancy. In face, fancy cases with lights and plastic moldings and other nerdbait stuff only annoy me.

But I am open to the idea of something fancy but tasteful. Like a computer case that looks like an old filing cabinet, or something.

The important thing is that it be roomy. My current computer case is uncomfortably small and hard to deal with on the inside, so I want something big.

About the size of a washer/dryer should be enough.

All in all, everything is set. All I need now is the courage to pull the trigger on the whole thing, and writing it all out here will help with that.

Unfortunately, I still have not heard from Pay Power about being able to log in and register new cards again, so I will have to give Joe the cash and use his credit card for the major purchase.

He has agreed to this already. Why? Because he’s a mensch.

Now I am going to lay down and see if I can trick the Pay Power app into letting me in.

More after the break.

---

And now I’m worried

Julian just told me that he dropped Joe off at the ER.

He is worried about a lump on his head. And now I’m worried about it to. Very worried. Gee, did I say something about not liking surprises?

Not that anyone did anything wrong. This is strictly my own neurosis I am working through. It’s nobody else’s problem.

That said, I did not need this right now. But then again, it’s not like there is a good time for things like this. My reaction would be roughly the same whenever.

Obviously, I hope he’s okay. That it turns out to be something benign and/or easily treatable and he’s back home with us soon with nothing more than a tale to tell.

But I fret.

And part of the reason I fret is that, unlike me, Joe is not the type of person to go to the ER unless the problem was pretty bad.

Me, I have to be on a hair trigger (relatively speaking) because I have a lot of health conditions that could go boom at any moment.

Isn’t that a lovely thought, dear friends? Fruvous, the world’s cutest time bomb.

Don’t worry too much, though. The odds of anything going radically wrong with my innards at any moment are still incredibly remote.

But I have to keep a close eye on how I feel nonetheless.

I hate it when my hypochondria is justified.

I’ll keep you informed on the Joe saga.

---

I’ve been enjoying this game I bought, Dragon Age 2.

It is, alas, not a lot like the first game, Dragon Age : Origins. That one was much more focused on strategy, whereas this second game is a lot more action oriented and so far I have been getting away with using very little strategy whatsoever.

Luckily, it’s been a long old time since I played the first game, and that has kept me from pining for the good old days too much.

Not that I am inclined to do that anyhow. I am a forward facing type.

Says the guy who has written hundreds of thousands of words rehashing his past and trying to make sense of it.

But not to wallow in nostalgia. Far from it. My past sucked and I am glad to be where and when I am instead.

I’ll admit , I do have some nostalgia for the 2000s, when I was in my twenties and had so much verve and energy, and did things like organize the local Freecycle and the local furry community, and got the heck out of the apartment way more.

But even there, I know that it is not like I was blissfully happy back then. The real tragedy is that, activity level aside, my life then was a lot like it is now.

Then as now, I spend most of my time right here, in front of the computer.

There was nothing forcing me to go out and deal with the world, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to do that of my own accord.

Now it’s 20 years later and I am only more firmly entrenched in my indolence and timidity. And now they are backed up by real danger to my health and the undeniable fact that I have serious mobility issues.

But I will figure something out.

Get well soon, Joe!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been on the hunt for a good Boxing Day deal on the CPU I want, though I know the odds are pretty low of finding one.

Big ticket computer components generally don’t go on sale. Their price is pretty much fixed by the manufacturer, meaning the retailer would have to risk taking a loss on the sale if they sold for less.

The CPU my fuzzy friends recommended is the Ryzen 7 5800x3D.

It’s around $420 CDN. Yikes. And that’s not including the cooler and the motherboard I will need to buy with them, which adds another $80 to the price for a cool $500.

So I might just have to save up for a while before I get it.

Oh well, it will give me a concrete reason to try and get some freelance work so I can get my dream computer sooner.

Me want zoom zoom box for the pew pew games!

Which means I either have to jump through UpWork’s hoops to establish my identity to modern excruciating standards, or find another freelancer site that is not so picky.

I hear fiverr (not a typo) is working out well for some people.

I know the world needs my incredible talents. I know that I have much to offer the world in exchange for precious legal tender. I am an amazing guy who can do so much that it’s like I am a wizard.

I just need to get past this stupid “too many options” thing.

I know it’s an illusion created by my depression as a final firewall against me actually getting my shit together and that my challenge is not to “solve” it – which is impossible – but to learn to think around the problem.

I think the key solution involves being willing to make a final decision even though that means leaving a whole lot of other possibilities behind.

After all, there’s no point in “keeping your options open” if you’re never going to actually do anything. Then they stop being options and start being merely the ghosts of possibilities you keep around to preserve the threadbare illusion that you are actually going to do something at some point.

But when? What set of circumstances would lead you to act? And how likely are those circumstances to come about without you doing anything?

Like I always say, it’s just a target painted on the horizon, never getting any closer or further away, just sitting there reassuring you that “some day” things will change.

Nope. That day will never come unless you take an active part in making it happen.

Me, I am going to die an ignominious death stuffed full of tubes, living a silent nightmare 24/7, if I don’t pull myself together and get the fuck up off these train tracks before that big black train kills me.

Which also means definitively defeating the part of me that wants that to happen. There are a lot of ways to kill yourself, and simply letting everything fall apart while you cower in the dark away from the very idea of taking responsibility for your life is one of them.

Something has to break this eternal stalemate. Something big and powerful, far bigger than my puny self, has to come and shatter this freeze state so that my soul can finally live and breathe and feel the sun on its face.

And that means growing up and making choices and not worrying so much about making the “right” decision.

 It is far better to make mistakes and learn from them than to rot in place while your world falls apart with you in it.

You hear that, deeper self?!?

More after the break.

---

A priority message

I have also been pondering how to stop taking silly things less seriously.

I think for normal, healthy people, who did not at any point lose any and all life momentum, this kind of thing just works itself out as the hurly burly hustle and bustle of life teaches them how to prioritize things, at least along functional lines.

After all, taking the wrong things seriously while driving at highway speeds is a top notch way to get killed in traffic.

“As near as we can tell, sir, he let go of the wheel to alphabetize his shoelaces. ”

But for someone like me, who became jetsam on the sea of life after falling through the cracks of whatever system is supposed to stop that kind of thing from happening and ended up washed up before ever becoming anything, our lives are so devoid of meaning and content and events that we just kind of float forever in eerie silence without life happening to us at all.

Nothing ever happens here. We just keep on drifting like astronauts floating through interstellar space on just that tiny bit of thrust they got long ago from being hit by a basketball sized meteor.

Man, my metaphors are detailed.

Anyhow, back to taking little things less seriously.

When you float like I do, it’s hard to keep any consistent sense of scale. The smallest things dominate your internal landscape while enormous issues get downplayed as being no big deal because you are too weak to handle the real thing.

In such a mess, things default to seeming as big as they feel, and that is one crazy ass way to measure things. Perspective is impossible in that situation, and without it, you have no way to anchor yourself in reality and put some solid ground under your feet.

No wonder I ended up so crazy. There is so little reality in my mindscape.

And I want to reach out and grab hold of a piece of reality then hang on for dear life until the storm passes, but I don’t feel capable of it. My arms don’t reach that far.

And, I think, part of me is well and truly terrified (there’s fear again) of what will happen if I truly stop spinning and have to finally take a good look around me.

I can’t imagine I will like what I see. My life is crap. My prospects are terrible.

But somehow, I will fight my way through all this mishigas and find a way to stand on my own two feet and face the fucking world.

Until then, I will just keep drifting towards that big ol waterfall, I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Brainwave : some career paths are “bug zappers” in that they offer a big bright future to lure you in and get your educational money, but most of the people won’t make it through to a career and just get “zapped”.

What none of these pricks and cunts will ask potential students is, “Are you prepared to fight like hell for the very tiny number of jobs in this field, and do you think you’ll win?”

Lack of that consideration is, in my experience, the main cause of highly intelligent, college educated people working menial McJobs that have nothing to do with their supposed area of expertise.

Kids, do NOT sign up for an education in any field where the only jobs in that field are in teaching it to others.

Because unless you are massively competitive, that’s a sucker bet.

---

Just one word : powerslut.

---

Word to the wise : I might not make it to 1K today. We will see.

---

Hope everyone enjoy the Christmas adventures of our fluffy little friend Fruvous.

I must admit, I am worried that sticking to my established pattern of writing everything strictly from his point of view might have made what was going on a tad too obscure. I probably should have gently bent the formula a little to actually use the word “Christma” in there a few times to give the audience a clue.

But he’s just a floofy little fox. He doesn’t know what Christmas is, or why any of the weird events of the story are happening. All he knows is what it seems like to him.

I guess that’s an issue a lot of authors have struggled with : being true to your vision versus making yourself clearly understood by your audience.

And nestled in there somewhere is whether or not it would be insulting to your audience to explain things a little TOO well.

You don’t want to talk to them like they’re idiots just because your healthy writer’s neurosis has you obsessed over being clearly understood.

Besides as a kid, I loved anything written from the point of view of an animal. One of my favorite books was this weird book where Merlin, in order to teach King Arthur to see things from the point of view of the natural world, first turns him into an ant so he can live as an ant for a while, then turns him into goose for the rest of the book.

Or possibly a duck. I don’t remember, I read the thing a long long time ago. Heck, I don’t even remember what the book was called!

It’s “The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norman Juster all over again. When I was a kid in elementary school, I borrowed that book from the library, read it, loved it, returned it, then promptly forgot the title and therefore couldn’t read it again until I happened to finally meet someone else who had read it and could tell me the title.

And that didn’t happen til I was in junior high!

And you have to admit, the title has very little to do with the events of the book. It’s like if “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” had been called “The Magic Closet”, or if “Alice in Wonderland” had been called “The Weird Hole”.

But, let’s not go there.

More after the break.

---

---

A very Fruvous Christmas morning

When he woke up and stretched all four little paws toward the ceiling then flopped over onto his feet and stood up, shook out his fur, then gave the air a little sniff, Fruvous immediately knew something was different from last night.

Something subtle, but important. And not just that all the strangers from last night were gone. That had happened when Fruvous had still been (kind of) awake last night.

No, something new had happened. He was smelling things he had smelled before, but only faintly. Now they were much stronger.

This was far too interesting. He had to investigate!

He frisked his way up the basement stairs and into the family room, and saw a vision of perfectly delightful chaos.

A few of the odd smelling boxes with the paper on them had been opened, and now some of those odd smells had an obvious source. Not only that, but the paper was strewn all around, along with big white clouds of softer paper, and these clouds made very exciting rustling noises when they moved. And the whole family was all gathered around and laughing and smiling and everyone was so warm and happy!

This all made Fruvous so excited he could barely stand it! His fluffy tail was wagging a mile a minute as he rushed around the room smelling all the new things.

“Ah, so there’s our little lisa! ” boomed Papa as everyone chuckled at the manic frenzy of the little fox. “Thank you so much for joining us!”.

Stacy was giggling so hard she nearly fell over. “Daddy, he’s so silly!”

But she knew what her job was. When Fruvous came near, she deftly and gently scooped him up into her arms and gave him a kiss on the nose.

:”Slow down, silly. You can’t smell everything at once!” she laughed.

Fruvous replied as he always did : by licking her face all over, setting off another storm of giggles as she fell on to her back with him on top of her.

After making sure she was properly soggy with his love for her. Fruvous trotted off to further investigate. But more slowly and carefully now.

Of particular interest was Nicholas’ new brown suede boots. The lovely detailing and superb craftmanship meant nothing to the fox, but the smell of the leather was intoxicating, causing him to sniff so deeply into the boot that his little snout got caught in there, eliciting a muffled bark of confusion and terror.

Luckily Raina swiftly pulled the boot off the poor fox’s muzzle, then fuzzled his head and called him a durak.

After that, everything went smoothly. People opened their presents one by one, and Fruvous politely restrained himself to a quick sniff-over of the new object plus the recipient’s hands before allowing things to continue.

Usually the recipient gave him a pat or a pet or a rub, which Fruvous considered fair compensation for his services as gift inspector.

Then, just as the last present was being unwrapped, Fruvous dashed off into the house, leaving his bemused family behind.

“He must have some very important business to attend to upstairs!” remarked Nicholas.

Mama put on her fake-disapproving voice and said. “Tch, working on Christmas day!”

Raina nodded solemnly. “Mama, I’m beginning to think our little lisa is a heathen!”

Then everybody broke into gales of laughter.

---

But what they did not know was that Fruvous had not run off at random.

Fruvous had figured out that what would come after the presents was a meal, and he planned to be strategically placed when it happened.

See, he knew that he was not allowed under the dining room table during a meal. But he WAS allowed under there at all other times.

Ergo, if he was under the table BEFORE the meal, he could stay under there while the kids fed him little scraps of food..

And all he had to do was be very, very quiet so Mama didn’t catch on.

And he was very good at being quiet.

He waited under the table, and basked in his own cleverness, tail swishing.

He couldn’t wait to taste what he’d been smelling for so long!

---

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

OK, so it’s not a major tragedy, but it’s still pissing me off.

Short version : Bought a new game and it doesn’t fucking work.

The game is Titanfall 2, and I am currently fighting the apparently error filled installation process because it’s totally borked.

Bought and downloaded the game via Steam. Was able to do so because Joe was super awesome enough to lend me his credit card for the day.

I gave him the cash up front, naturally. I don’t need a loan, I just need to be able to pay for things on the Internet.

Anyhow, I bought the game. It has a fantastic Steam user score plus a few of my fuzzy friends testified to its goodness.

Plus, it’s not another ISO RPG like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous, my two previous games.

As far as I know, it’s an FPS with a heavy plotline where you play as a soldier who finds an abandoned giant robot (a Titan) and team up with it to fight evil.

That’s all I know and all I need to know. The rest I will discover by playing.

Anyhow, so I bought it, downloaded, and ran it, only to have it pop open the Origin client and gives me a cute “Whoops! We guess something went wrong!” error.

The error persists through multiple re-installs. What the galloping frick?

So now I got to Google this shit. Le sigh.

I need to save that shit to my HD because it is relevant so often.

One of the solutions that worked for one Redditor involved uninstalling and reinstalling the Origin client.

Because you can’t just play a fucking game any more. You have to go through the company’s own launcher or even their own Steam-like store.

Ya know, so they can try to sell you MORE of their crap. “Well, you were dumb enough to buy ONE of our products, ergo you might be dumb enough to buy more!”.

Anyhow, I go to reinstall the Origin client and THAT fucks up.

Back to Google. I am told to install an older version of the Origin client.

I download and install THAT, and it tells me that the Origin client was superseded by the EA client when EA bought Origin.

Meaning Steam sold me a version of the game that tried to go through a client that doesn’t even fucking EXIST any more.

Which is why I am now pissed off at THEM.

I thought they were better than that. I am disappointed in you. Steam.

So I let it try to update the EA client. In doing so, it uninstalls the Origin client. Then the EA client errors and starts a manual update process in a DOS window.

Nothing’s ever fucking simple.

Then, while I am doing something else, the DOS window disappears. I assume that means it did whatever it needed to do.

But I won’t know any time soon, because now I had to uninstall and reinstall the game, and that means re-downloading it, and that will take a while.

Me, I’m going to go play games on my much more reliable tablet.

More after the break.

---

The damned game still doesn’t work. Grr.

---

---

A very Fruvous Christmas

The first sign that something was up was that the house began to smell a lot more interesting to Fruvous.

All kinds of new smells were wafting around. Sweet,. tantalizing smells that Fruvous loved even though they made him a little dizzy. Deep, complex, meaty smells that Fruvous thought must be what Heaven smelled like. And dense, bready smells that Fruvous didn’t like at all and daintily ignored.

The second sign that something was up is that the people started doing entertainingly weird things to the house.

Bits of paper were stuck to walls, up high where Fruvous couldn’t “investigate” them.

Shiny twinkly stuff in little strands that Fruvous was expressly told not to eat was strewn about. He turned up his little black nose at that, affronted. As if he would deign to eat something that gaudy and bizarre.

Besides, he’d nibbled a little and it was disgusting.

Then odd objects started showing up. A strange little wooden hut with dolls shaped like little people and animals was placed on the mantle of the fireplace. Little glowing lights of different colors were strewn everywhere.

Fruvous left those well alone after one burned his nose a little. But he liked watching the ones that blinked on and off from a safe distance.

And strangest of all, a tree, an entire actual tree, was brought into the big family room! He thought maybe his people had lost their minds when he saw – and smelled – that. One of those bushy, needle-y trees that stayed the same all year.

And then they dressed it up all crazy! Shiny stuff that wrapped around and around it. Little balls that hung on hooks and bobbed in a way Fruvous found mesmerizing. And lots of the little glowing lights, these ones even fancier.

But then, something Fruvous did not like at all happened : strange people in the house.

And not just outside the front door, like the man in the blue uniform and the boy with the bag of paper, who Fruvous was no longer afraid of because he knew that they could not come in to the house.

He still barked at them, of course, but just for fun.

No, these people came right in and sat down and acted liked they lived there!

Fruvous did the only thing he could do : he bolted. Ran away like he was being chased by a house. Hid in one of the many hiding places he had discovered while investigating the house and refused to come out until the strangers were gone.

That is, until one night, when the house was especially full of weird new people and Fruvous was hiding under a convenient pile of jackets and coats that had shown up on one of the beds all of a sudden, when his angel. Stacy, came to see him.

She stroked him and pet him and talked to him softly, and he melted to her touch like always. And when she picked him up and started carrying him toward the family room, he didn’t object at all, because he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that when he was with Stacy, nothing bad could ever happen to him.

She carried him into the family room, and the people there suddenly fell silent. And for the first time, Fruvous noticed that these strangers kind of looked like his people, and smelled like them too, and that helped Fruvous stay calm during the next thing.

Which was that some of the people, starting with the littlest ones, came up to Fruvous and tried to pet him. And at first, he shrank back against Stacy, not knowing what to make of this strange intrusion. But Stacy kissed the top of his head, and told him it ws okay, so, trembling slightly, he let one of them touch him.

And it turned out that they did not, in fact, want to eat him. In fact, they were quite nice to him, and soon he was surrounded by people stroking his fur and petting his head and praising and admiring him.

And as Fruvous relaxed and basked in all the attention, he decided that maybe all the weird things happening recently were a good thing after all.

And on the family room’s stereo, the following song played.

---

And on a more personal note, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers. May your dreams be sweet, your days happy and bright, and your nights filled with love and affection and kisses in the dark.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m still all a-flutter about this credit card thing.

But I am a fox. I am a trickster. I am clever and resourceful. I can figure a way out of this trap that I’m in.

There are probably other places that could sell me something superior to the cards I have been using.

There might even be some way to spend money online and have it come directly from my bank account, which would sure as fuck simplify things.

Then all I would have to do is figure out Venmo or the like so I could pay Joe the rent every month, and I would never have to go to the bank again.

That sounds nice.

Right now, I am investigating the option of doing my grocery shopping online then having Julian go pick it up for me.

That would be easier for him, as he would not having to do my shopping for me from a shopping list any more, and easier for me, as I won’t have to come up with said shopping list any more.

A task I find strangely difficult. Too many decisions requiring too much forethought.

That’s hard on my fuzzy little brain.

The key question right now is, can a grocery pickup be paid for in cash at the time it is picked up, or does it have to be paid for in advance via credit card?

Being able to pay on pickup would certainly make sense and be convenient. But there are dickwads out there who will order groceries then never show up to pick them up, thus wasting the employee’s time, and so I can see the stores wanting, as it were, the money up front.

We shall see.

---

Well Safeway wants payment up front even for pickup, anyhow.

On the plus side, if I do end up getting credit card functionality again, it looks like maybe Safeway has their own delivery service, not Instacart, so maybe when I have a credit card again, I will be able to order my stuff online like I used to do.

That would sure be nice.

Assuming they don’t fucking reject my credit card. Grr.

Oh well, at least I’m getting the same gift everyone else gets this time of year : stress!

It could be argued that having a credit card is increasingly mandatory in today’s world and therefore the government should pay for one for me.

Go ahead and give it a credit limit of zero. I don’t want a loan anyhow. I just want to be able to spend money online.

Money I already have.

God damn it, why do things always have to break down and complicate matters? None of this would be needed if my Pay Power login hadn’t stopped working for no reason.

Well the sun has gone down and that means I am getting very sleepy. Time for for me to settle down for a long winter’s nap.

Now where did I put my cap?

More after the break.

---

Life’s like that

Woke up feeling grumpy. Grr.

Well technically, I woke up in a sweaty, incoherent quagmire of fried brain cells and partial dehydration, but once that wore off, I was grumpy.

In between, I staggered out to the kitchen, looking for some of the leftover pizza from last night’s Pizza Hut. And lo and behold, there it was carefully preserved in layers of paper towel in a Tupperware container.

And there it stayed because I could not get the goddamned thing open. It’s like it was pressure locked shut, like Joe had somehow removed all the air from the container and now it was being held shut by the weight of Earth’s atmosphere.

But that’s probably not the case.

After that frustrating experience, you bet I am feeling grumpy.

It didn’t help that, after making myself a distinctly unfun PB&J, I returned to my room only to find I had forgotten to get myself a can of beverage.

Even though I was sure I remembered grabbing one. A decaf diet cola.

I get back to the room. I unpack this and that, and look around for my drink. And there’s a can of diet cola.

Psych! It’s empty. I drank it earlier.

Maybe that’s the “taking one out of the fridge” I remember? Freaky.

So then I had to go back.

Ergo grumpy. Grr. Arrrgh.

---

You’d have to be a computer….

Had a tech consult with my fuzzy friends about my upcoming purchase of upgrades.

Furries are the people to go to for this kind of thing. Like 3/4 of them work in IT. Always at least a few hardware experts around.

The results were, of course, bewildering. They talked about a lot of things I don’t understand and gave me a lot of advice that went straight over my head.

But I emerged from it with a list of things to buy, so, victory there.

Expensive things. The Ryzen 7 5800x3D CPU they want me to get is about $420 CDN.

Yikes. Scuttlebutt about it is that it’s by far the fastest thing around. Even faster than chips that cost way more.

Groovy. But that price, oy. Dunno if I can get that much together.

I hope there’s a REALLY good Boxing Week sale waiting for me that will take like $100 off that price.

And the motherboard’s another $120. I get the feeling that I will be buying this setup piece by piece over a long period of time.

Another complexity : the good news is that my sister Catherine sent me a $150 Amazon virtual gift card for Xmas! Woohoo!

The less good news is that it’s for American Amazon, Amazon.com, and while that does mean it’s in big sexy American bux (yay), it also means that if I buy anything major like a CPU with that Amazon.com money, odds are very good that it would then get slapped with a serious amount of import fees when it crossed the border.

Makes me wish I had a friend just across the border in Washington State who was willing to engage in a little light smuggling for me .

Just hide it in a big ol’ box of well used sex toys. They never search those.

So I dunno. It’s all so complicated.

I just want to buy things!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is me : Duncan and Eddie

I highly recommend that webtoon. I am going through the archive and I am loving it.

Basically, in that scenario, I’m a Duncan (goat) who is built like an Eddie (gator).

I am so glad I have friends who understand me. Though I am quite sure that now and then I have put them in that exact position.

Especially when I going on about science. 🙂

---

Because I am crazy

It’s easy for most people to grasp what is wrong with the more severely and obviously insane that match the old-fashioned cartoonish notion of the lunatic.

“That poor man, he thinks he’s a dog. ”
“That poor woman, she sees spiders everywhere. ”
“That poor politician, he thinks tax cuts pay for themselves. ”

But it is a lot harder for people to imagine my kind of crazy. It’s far more subtle, and involves fears and aversions that don’t make sense and are very hard to convey, and yet they bind me and freeze me in place like invisible chains made of steel and ice.

This is why I didn’t get angry or upset when my former roommate, Eamon Jones, told me that he didn’t think I was crazy, I just thought I was.

Eamon is brilliant at building movie props and has an ability to follow his passion that I envy, but he is not that deep.

Of course, one could argue that thinking you are crazy when you are not is, in fact, a form of being crazy, but let’s not go there.

It gets annoyingly meta real fast.

But suffice it to say I knew and understood Eamon well enough to know he meant no harm when he said that, he was just being his earnest, blunt Aries self.

I miss that guy sometimes.

Nevertheless. I am very self-conscious about not being able to “prove” or explain why I can’t do what normal people do.

Which is why I need to constantly remind myself that I am crazy. Mentally ill. Sick in the head. And that means I do, say, and believe a lot of really crazy things.

Like that everybody hates me and only tolerates me out of pity and that they all wish I would just crawl off and die somewhere so they wouldn’t have deal with me any more.

Gee, I wonder where I got that idea. Oh right… my entire childhood.

And I know, intellectually, that said belief is beyond ludicrous. That when people look at me they do not see me the same way I do, as some hateful disgusting creature too vile to even think about.

They see a fairly average big fat dude and nothing more. At the risk of developing imposter syndrome, one might even say I have them fooled.

They have no idea that a wizard walks among them. One with powers well beyond their understanding, and tricks to dazzle the most jaded of minds.

Now if only I wasn’t too crazy to use all that.

More after the break.

---

Annonces en Francais

OK, this is meta-bugging me, because it’s not only bugging me, it’s bugging me how much it is bugging me.

But for some reason, more than 50 percent of the ads I get on YouTube these days are in French for some reason.

And, as I discovered back when I would watch shows on CBFT (French language CBC) back home on PEI, somehow nattering TV ad voiceovers are like 20 percent more irritating in French.

And not just because I don’t speak the language any more, either. I think it’s because I have had a lifetime to get used to fake enthusiasm and chumminess and all that from English announcers but I have almost no resistance to the same thing in French.

That, and a lingering feeling that at any second, the male announcers are join to nudge me with their elbow and do the dirty French “oh ho ho HO, eh?” laugh.

Well, the dirty French CANADIAN laugh.

Like their entire ad is actually some elaborate innuendo I don’t get.

Plus, for meaningless colloquial reasons, there is something jarring about hearing a lovely female French voice telling me sweetly to shop at Wal-Mart.

Yes, I of all people have reason to know how the Anglo-North American association of the French language with sophisticated high culture is total bullshit.

I mean, I’ve heard drunks arguing loudly over whose turn it is to do the beer run in French. Trust me, it ain’t the language of love then.

But I can’t help it. It still sounds wrong to me.

---

I keep paying

Well, I tried and failed to resolve my issues with Pay Power and my usual credit cards today. And I am beginning to panic a little.

The grim possibility of having to go through life sans credit card has reared its ugly head and I really don’t like the look on its face.

It would mean I couldn’t order in any more except from places like Pizza Hut that, miracle of miracles, still take cash at the door.

But that’s OK, I spend too much ordering in anyhow.

And it would mean I could not order things from Amazon any more, and that would truly suck. Nothing I get from there is completely irreplaceable but I am going to have to scramble to find another source for sesame sticks.

Bulk Barn, maybe?

When I called the Power of Pay today, I got the same bullshit about “this requires a Level 2 and none are available right now” yada yada.

And I know it’s bullshit, because when I asked the guy on the phone when the Level 2 people WOULD be available, he was completely surprised, did not have an answer, and instead changed the subject.

He suggested I uninstall and reinstall the app. Tried that, didn’t work.

He also suggested I email PayPower tech support. This I have done, but I hold faint hope for this possibility paying off any time soon because their auto-reply promises to get back to me within two business days.

And the next business day is next Wednesday, the 27th of December, five days from now. So I probably won’t hear from them till Thursday or Friday.

And for all I know, they will bullshit me about Level 2 operators to.

“We apologize, but we are unable to process your issue without clearance from a Level 2 support manager, and none of them are available because they’re mythical. ”

I am not a happy camper.

Especially because this means that whatever little comforts I get myself for Xmas Eve in only to make it through the loneliest and (for me) most dangerous night of the year are going to have to be paid for in cash.

Which limits my options considerably.

Why does this kind of thing always happen to me on a weekend?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

An annoying and rather suspicious issue with my usual credit card provider has come up and it has me worried.

A bit more than a week ago, I stopped being able to log in to the PayPower app. That app is the only way to check my balance or register a new card.

And I tried to log in many times, thinking I was just mistyping my password.

A few days into this, I tried one last time. And this time, it told me there was a problem with my account and I needed to contact customer service.

Pain in the ass, but whatever.

Well today I finally got around to doing that, and the results upset me.

After going through the many steps of identity verification (the age we live in!), the lady on the line said that she would have to escalate the call to a Level 2 representative who could give me a temporary password, but there were none available at this time, so I would have to call back again tomorrow.

I grumbled and hung up. But then I got to thinking.

Why wasn’t there any level 2 reps available? Is there no way to contact one? Can I just give you enough XP to level up and become one?

It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this!

Was this some bullshit answer they give to people whose accounts have been flagged by law enforcement to delay the criminal while they call the cops?

Seriously, that’s how my mind works. Went there with zero effort.

And it’s not like I have done anything illegal with the dang card. All I ever use it for is to order food delivered by Skip the Dishes (weird name for a set of dishes) and other things from Amazon.

I would be less likely to come to the attention of law enforcement than I would be to come to the attention of the nutrition police.

And they would be less likely to make an arrest than to stage an intervention.

I walk out into the living room and they are there. “You have been ordering an awful lot of McDonald’s and Donair Dude lately, and we’re worried. ”

Rampant paranoia aside. it is an irritating problem because if I can’t log in to the app, I can’t register a new card, and I have to get a new card every month because the process to make a card permanent asks me for a PAC and nobody on God’s green Earth knows what the fuck that means.

Personal Access Code? Maybe. But if so, I dunno what it is. Didn’t know I had one.

And this is a particularly vexing issue to have right as we swing into the weekend before Xmas. I wanted to use my next card to order some comfort food and other nice items to make my lonely Xmas eve more bearable, and currently, that would be impossible.

So I am going to have to call back tomorrow and hopefully get all this straightened out.

This is stress I don’t need at a stressful enough time of the year.

I ain’t feeling the Christmas spirit much this year.

More after the break.

---

Fawning like Bambi’s mother

Because Bambi is a fawn, so….

Dug into this painful subject with my therapist, Doctor Costin, today.

Hurt like hell and that cold feeling in my chest that I get when I am thawing out large amounts of emotion was going full blast, but I think progress was made.

We got into the reason it is so hard for me to talk about it : because I am afraid to find out that the person I think I am is fake. That it’s just a mask I put on and that the real me is someone I would like a lot less.

And I think that’s true. I really have been fake all these years.

And of course, in a way I already knew this. But mostly intellectually. Now I am facing the true emotions involved in discovering I have been falsifying myself, and those emotions are raw and brutal and terrifying.

Because it means I don’t actually know who I am. The real me underneath the mask is a mystery to me. We’ve never even met.

But my initial impression is one of a much colder, quieter, sadder, and darker version of me. Someone who is bitter and short-tempered and sarcastic who lashes out a lot.

A person going through the tempests of teenage personality formation at the age of 50.

The big problem, of course, is that I want to be the fake me. I love being funny and warm and interesting and such. I am so much happier that way. “Putting on a show” comes so naturally to me.

Dealing with the world as the “real me” would leave me so open and vulnerable.

God, and what about my friends? I can’t tell them that the person they know and love is not real. That this putative “real me” is someone who is way less fun to be around. That would be tantamount to saying I have been lying to them all these years.

To myself too, for that matter. I fooled us all.

I can’t leave Fruvous behind. I won’t do it. I love him too much. I don’t care if he is not the “real me”. If that’s true, then I am perfectly happy being fake.

That’s the thing, though. I intuitively grasp why it is better to just be yourself, but it is hard to make a conscious case for it.

Right now, all I can see is it meaning I head off into a cold, dark, uncertain future without any protection in search of something I can’t even conceive of.

Existential growth rarely meets hedonistic standards, I suppose. That’s why it’s good that most people pursue it instinctively, without questioning it.

But not me, oh no. I had to question everything. I had to quash every impulse and instinct and inspiration that didn’t “make sense” in pursuit of a laughably futile attempt to be “smart” and stay “in control”.

Well I live two feet about the bottom of the food chain and I can’t make myself do any of the things I know I truly want and need to do.

How fucking smart and in control is that?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.