Tuesday, February 23, 2010

This Evil Future Brough to You By

I am going insane, and more quickly than usual. First of all, thank you so much to those of you who have stopped by to see whether I have dropped off the map, and no, I haven't, though it kind of seems that way. And I'm sorry you haven't heard anything from me recently, but not only have I been unable to write here, but at last count, I had 59 unread items in my Google Reader. So to all you lovely folks whose blogs I read and enjoy, soon you will be getting pages and pages of comments from me as I attempt to catch up.

It started, I suppose, around Christmas, when we got a Wii. You see, my brother is getting married in May, and I have been asked to be in the wedding. Though I am very flattered and honored, I am also terrified of being "the fat bridesmaid." So during nap times (the only free time I have in any given 24 hours), I've been trying to get in a solid hour of Wii tennis. Now, say what you will, I know that you can play a perfectly respectable game of Wii tennis sitting on the couch and flicking your wrist, but I've been trying to run around the room as much as possible (and hiss "shit!" as little as possible). It may not be as good as the real thing, but it's a good deal better than sitting on my ass, which is what I've been doing up until now. I don't own a scale, so I don't know if it's doing any good, so I'm just hitting the hell out of an imaginary ball until my dress comes in the mail and I know just how much I'm going to have to do in order not to actually look like a granny smith apple at the wedding.

Then last week, we got a computer virus, which I then spent--seriously--ten hours trying to remove. Now, I am a child care provider, not a rocket scientist. I think I'm pretty smart, but you can tell me just about anything about a computer and I will believe it, including that they will someday rise up and take over the world. And I got really emotionally invested in proving that I could do this. I eventually got the worst of the virus off, so that it was usable again, but it still redirects almost all Google searches (How else can I find anything out? What do you mean, books? Wait, there are other search engines? Who would dare to mess with my Google?) and periodically pops open random Internet Explorer windows to places like askmehowtomakeamilliondollarsfromhome.com. We've been fighting and fighting with the damn thing and finally just said screw it, it was $300 five years ago, it had a good run, and we're getting a new one.

Matilda's birthday is coming up, so since I like to think I'm all cute and helpful, I decided to make Evites, instead of my usual approach, which is emailing everyone I know the day before the party and frantically trying to convince them they want to come. But our computer it, as I may have mentioned, of the devil. So I spent a good 20 minutes registering with the damn site, trying to choose and fill out an invitation, and then trying to import addresses, which of course did not work because, yes, our computer is of the devil. So I manually entered all the addresses, several of them wrong, and hit "send." The computer then froze up for the next 20 minutes, time I spent shouting nonsense at the frozen screen and listening to Zachary try to read me his latest chapter book, Matilda request "up please" for the bazillionth time so that she could sit on the desk and bang on the keys, and trying to reassure Ezra that I wasn't entirely going crazy. But of course I was, because in the midst of all this, I kept glancing at the (still frozen) screen and seeing the words "This Evite feature is brought to you by..." But in my insanity, it kept looking like "This evil feature is brought to you by..." This struck me as funny, but not nearly as much the kids. Ezra enjoyed repeating it over and over again, but it always came out as "This evil future," which actually seemed more accurate as they kept asking me to repeat it and tell them more things that are "of the devil."

Eventually I was able to confirm that the invitations had been sent, I fixed the email addresses I had entered wrong, and everybody got a bath. A new computer is on the way, and eventually I will get that dress and find out just how many pounds I have to lose by May. And to all the lovely people who have stopped by to check on me and ask where I've been, thank you, thank you, thank you. As my mind slowly slips away, it's nice to know there are people wondering for me where it is. And I promise I'll get it back just as soon as I can.