Why I Have Not Been Around Much Lately
A quick rundown:
Thursday: Rat has some kind of lump on his side. It's not bothering him and looks cauliflower-y on the top, so I figure it's a wart. I am proved right when he decides to yank it out by the root. Have you ever done that? It's ugly. Bleeding rats alarm me. Rat was much more put out by being stuck under the tap and rinsed so I could see what was going on.
Friday: Sick rat. Other rat this time. Might be injury, might be illness; no outward signs, other than rat not acting right, so who knows. They are about two years old, which is considered the standard expiration date for domesticated rats, so to speak.
Saturday: Dead rat. Sick one, not lumpy one. It was relatively quick, I spent most of the night holding him on my lap, and I do not want to think about this right now. He has been laid to rest with the usual funerary rites. Remaining rat is more confused than upset, and is easily distracted by me pointing out that he no longer has to share the bowl of peas.
Also, cable internet died. Comcast would not let me use the modem we already have, and insisted on shipping me a new one. Modem works, but gives the wifi router the cut direct. This is not actually Comcast's fault; Googling reveals that this is a problem had by virtually the entire goddamn internet, which happens only with this model of modem and this model of router together, and a bunch of different companies are named. What is Comcast's fault is that they refuse to provide a support script for it, a fix for it, or access to a tech that understands what a MAC address is and that things other than the modem have one.
The quickest, cheapest way to fix this turns out for me to just buy my own goddamn cable modem, of a model that is willing to make friends with the router. They are available used for $16 + S&H on Amazon. I do not have $16 + S&H right now. The internet works, but only for me, and only if I camp out in the living room with a physical cable running from the modem to my laptop. I imagine the downstairs is unhappy about this, but I didn't see either of them running forth to handle the internet bill, so fuck 'em.
Sunday: Catwalk show. Designer (and therefore wardrobe) is detained by a marathon, turning the art of finding a parking place in a city that is already the size of a postage stamp into one of those 'find a path through this maze where you can turn in one and only one semi-random direction at each intersection' puzzles. Trains run on a Sunday timetable, so my choices were to turn up half an hour early, or forty-five minutes late. I don't even know what I'm wearing, so I spend my free time doing hair and makeup for other peoples' models, in the ladies room.
Half a dozen of our models cancel at the last minute, designer has not had time to re-shuffle the order we walk in, and the venue was not available for rehearsal beforehand. Most of the models are new to this catwalk thing, and I end up having a dozen attractive people in unwise shoes looking at me in bewilderment and asking OMFG WHAT DO I DO? Discover at that point that the designer has never seen the stage before and has no plans at all, so I make a lot of completely arbitrary decisions myself.
This is New England and I'm doing theater here, so I spend almost 12 hours out of the house in order to spend about two minutes on a stage. I feel terrible about leaving the sole remaining rat alone all day, but whaddayagonnado? I narrowly miss the 5pm Commuter Rail back to Boston and end up entertaining myself for two hours in the Providence train station. The T/Amtrak station in RI is cute, but so minor in the grand scheme of urban transit infrastructure that its departures/arrivals board, honest to God, still operates mechanically, flipping all the letters over ever ten minutes or so with the tic-tic-tic noise of a thousand dominoes falling down a set of stairs. Am very glad I decided at the last minute to take the DS with me.
I also have a dance class tomorrow night, a long desk shift on Wednesday, and a doctor's appointment on Thursday, which is good because I am running low on Xanax. Normally that bottle would have lasted me another few weeks, but someone tried to explode Boston last month and then decided to shoot at the cops in Cambridge, which was rather nerve-wracking.
There's a blanket crumpled on the sofa beside me, which has a rat in it somewhere. For some reason the living room is always fucking freezing.
Thursday: Rat has some kind of lump on his side. It's not bothering him and looks cauliflower-y on the top, so I figure it's a wart. I am proved right when he decides to yank it out by the root. Have you ever done that? It's ugly. Bleeding rats alarm me. Rat was much more put out by being stuck under the tap and rinsed so I could see what was going on.
Friday: Sick rat. Other rat this time. Might be injury, might be illness; no outward signs, other than rat not acting right, so who knows. They are about two years old, which is considered the standard expiration date for domesticated rats, so to speak.
Saturday: Dead rat. Sick one, not lumpy one. It was relatively quick, I spent most of the night holding him on my lap, and I do not want to think about this right now. He has been laid to rest with the usual funerary rites. Remaining rat is more confused than upset, and is easily distracted by me pointing out that he no longer has to share the bowl of peas.
Also, cable internet died. Comcast would not let me use the modem we already have, and insisted on shipping me a new one. Modem works, but gives the wifi router the cut direct. This is not actually Comcast's fault; Googling reveals that this is a problem had by virtually the entire goddamn internet, which happens only with this model of modem and this model of router together, and a bunch of different companies are named. What is Comcast's fault is that they refuse to provide a support script for it, a fix for it, or access to a tech that understands what a MAC address is and that things other than the modem have one.
The quickest, cheapest way to fix this turns out for me to just buy my own goddamn cable modem, of a model that is willing to make friends with the router. They are available used for $16 + S&H on Amazon. I do not have $16 + S&H right now. The internet works, but only for me, and only if I camp out in the living room with a physical cable running from the modem to my laptop. I imagine the downstairs is unhappy about this, but I didn't see either of them running forth to handle the internet bill, so fuck 'em.
Sunday: Catwalk show. Designer (and therefore wardrobe) is detained by a marathon, turning the art of finding a parking place in a city that is already the size of a postage stamp into one of those 'find a path through this maze where you can turn in one and only one semi-random direction at each intersection' puzzles. Trains run on a Sunday timetable, so my choices were to turn up half an hour early, or forty-five minutes late. I don't even know what I'm wearing, so I spend my free time doing hair and makeup for other peoples' models, in the ladies room.
Half a dozen of our models cancel at the last minute, designer has not had time to re-shuffle the order we walk in, and the venue was not available for rehearsal beforehand. Most of the models are new to this catwalk thing, and I end up having a dozen attractive people in unwise shoes looking at me in bewilderment and asking OMFG WHAT DO I DO? Discover at that point that the designer has never seen the stage before and has no plans at all, so I make a lot of completely arbitrary decisions myself.
This is New England and I'm doing theater here, so I spend almost 12 hours out of the house in order to spend about two minutes on a stage. I feel terrible about leaving the sole remaining rat alone all day, but whaddayagonnado? I narrowly miss the 5pm Commuter Rail back to Boston and end up entertaining myself for two hours in the Providence train station. The T/Amtrak station in RI is cute, but so minor in the grand scheme of urban transit infrastructure that its departures/arrivals board, honest to God, still operates mechanically, flipping all the letters over ever ten minutes or so with the tic-tic-tic noise of a thousand dominoes falling down a set of stairs. Am very glad I decided at the last minute to take the DS with me.
I also have a dance class tomorrow night, a long desk shift on Wednesday, and a doctor's appointment on Thursday, which is good because I am running low on Xanax. Normally that bottle would have lasted me another few weeks, but someone tried to explode Boston last month and then decided to shoot at the cops in Cambridge, which was rather nerve-wracking.
There's a blanket crumpled on the sofa beside me, which has a rat in it somewhere. For some reason the living room is always fucking freezing.
Sympathies on the dead rat.
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