The good news is, my main computer works now.

The bad news is, William and I have no idea why.

William replaced the power supply, which was supposed to fix the problem. Lo and behold, it does the exact same thing it was doing with the previous power supply, namely turning on for just a second then immediately shutting down.

The funny thing is that when this problem first occurred, I was getting way less than that. In fact, I was getting ZZNN (zip zero nada nothing). Hence my immediately diagnosing it with a power issue.

But when William first came over to have a look, it was doing the flash on, flash off thing. We wondered how this was possible.

I said the logical explanation is that my computer has a mutant healing factor.

I’m such a card.

Anyhow, after the power supply swap, we were getting beep on OFF. William kept attempting to turn it on, which seemed futile to me.

So of course, because computers are more capricious and unpredictable than an irritated cat, it fucking worked.

So now the thing works, as far as I can tell. Maybe the mere acting of pressing that power button many times caused some computer doohickey to click back into place. Maybe the power supply WAS the problem, and the thing would have started working eventually even if we had done nothing.

Or maybe I had offended the Great and Mighty Gods of Computing, who rule the world from their lofty abodes in the mystical land of Palo Alto, and when it started working, it was because I had appeased them by bringing in one of their priests.

That would be you, William.

Who knows. It is a strange feeling to have a problem seemingly spontaneously solve itself while offering no possible explanation as to why. You are glad the problem is solved, but without knowing how, you have no idea if it will stay solved or not.

But anyhow, the good news is that the main computer works now, for now.

The bad news is that the Internet on it does not.

See, the end of our Super Long Ethernet Cable that is in my room has a problem. The little plastic tab on the Y-jack broke off ages ago, and it turns out that thing is kind of really super important, as that is what holds the plug in place.

Historically, we have solved this problem by sticking the plug into the Ethernet port on my computer then fiddling around with it till it connects.

And by “we” I mean “not me”.

You see, dear reader, one of the little foibles that make me so endearing is that I have very, very little patience with fiddling with things.

Normally a patient person, for some reason I pop a frustration fuse really fast when it comes with tiny details you have to just fiddle around with til they click.

That is part of why I have trouble editing my own work. Beyond basic proofreading and sentence structure improvement, editing involves a lot of fiddling work, and I get frustrated easily.

I also had the same problem when I was a kid. It’s why I hated anything like arts and crafts. For whatever reason, I just did not have the patience to deal with my own spatio-motor issues in order to overcome them, and so I could never get things even remotely right and whatever I made would end up a humiliating mess.

And I didn’t exactly need any more humiliation in my life, especially not during class, where normally I shined.

And the thing is, I didn’t know why these things were so much harder for me than they were for the other kids. And I was too young to be able to articulate the problem either. All I have is a very long history of my hands not being able to do what I want them to do, and thus there is much of everyday life that I either cannot do, cannot do well, or had to invent some sort of workaround to cope with.

From my adult perspective, it seems like it might at least be possible to learn to be lass of a maladroit with sufficient training and practice. After all, a dyslexic can learn to read. It’s just harder for them.

I hope that works for us “motor dyslexics” too. It could be that if I could just overcome this low frustration point, I could practice certain things over and over until my fucked up brain/hands/eyes work the whole thing out.

Or I can just continue to live my life needing others to do certain things for me because I am just too much of a spazz to do them myself.

Wonder which one I will pick.

Other than computer related issues, not much going on today. Gonna be social with La Gang tonight. Maybe we will go out to dinner, maybe not.

Doing our weekly dinner out on Fridays works because that way, Joe does not have to go to bed early in order to be up for work the next day.

On the other hand, on Fridays, Joe has worked all day, and is therefore tired.

Doing dinner on Sunday means Joe is all rested and perky.

But it also means he has to go to bed at like, 1 am. And for us, that is early.

To me, Fridays seem mildly superior. But I’m not captain of this boat. It sometimes seems like it because I often volunteer to make decisions when it seems like one needs to be made and nobody else wants to do it, but I am just another passenger on our little social vessel.

I just have a big mouth and am kind of pushy. But not in a “my way or the highway” assholish kind of way.

More like an encouraging, caring kind of pushing.

It can really suck to be the sort of person who really cares about getting things done sometimes, ya know?

I will talk to you all again tomorrow.