I got my Tim Kaine bumper sticker in the mail yesterday. Awesome. It would be on the car already but we haven’t had a good rain in like four years and my car’s so dusty I’m afraid the sticker wouldn’t stick. So I’ll put it on after I wash it before we go out of town tomorrow. It better not get stolen like my Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker did, or someone’s going to bleed from where I CUT HIM.

Or her. Whichever. I don’t know which gender is statistically more likely to steal a bumper sticker from my car, but for some reason I always assumed the Kerry-Edwards sticker thief was a guy.

So, yeah. Tomorrow, after Sammi goes to class and I run some errands, we’re driving to Bristow to see Coldplay and Rilo Kiley. We have GAs for the pit directly in front of the stage, so that ought to be awesome unless there’s a 6-foot-tall dude in front of me, which may happen as that kind of stuff seems to be my destiny lately. Let’s hope it doesn’t, though.

The bad part is that we have to drive back here the same night, because Sam has to be at work at 8:00 the next morning. It’s a three-hour trip, although as often as I have to stop to pee it will probably turn out to be a four-hour trip, and it probably won’t be so bad, but I’m concerned about being tired after rocking in the pit for five hours or whatever it turns out to be.

Even if it’s tiring, though, it’s going to be a break from the rest of my week. This week has worn me down beyond belief. And next week? Next week may quite possibly turn out to be a 70-hour week. It’ll be at least 60 hours for sure. This is the price I pay for getting a week off at Christmas.

Did I tell you that I broke the power adapter for my laptop? Yeah. I have a Dell Inspiron laptop, and this particular model has a power adapter that has about two inches of weak skinny cord behind the plug before it goes through a fat thing and then gets bigger on its way to the power pack. I’ve been unkind to the weak skinny cord and allowed it to bend under the computer one time too many, and now the computer doesn’t know it’s plugged in. For a day or two, it would work on A/C power if I held the cord just so, but then even that failed. Its last gasp was on Tuesday night, when if you looked through my window (please don’t, ever) you’d have seen me sitting on the couch with the cord threaded between my toes waving my leg around in the air, because I was hoping that if I got the cord out straight behind the machine and put it in just the right position, it would work. It didn’t, and the battery died. So now I have to get a new one on eBay for like $30. Grr.

Of course, I could pay like $80 to order a new one from Dell.

I also have to replace my copy of Achtung Baby, which is equally inconvenient and annoying. It’s one of the oldest CDs I own, and I appear to have worn it out. For a while, it was just skipping on tracks like “Acrobat,” which I don’t even like anyway. But then last week it skipped on “The Fly,” and that’s just unacceptable. Of course now that I can’t play the whole song, it’s the only song I want to hear. It’s the song that’s stuck in my head all day. It’s the only song that seems right for driving. “The Fly” isn’t my favorite U2 song. It’s not even my favorite track on Achtung Baby. But now that I can’t hear it, it may as well be the only U2 song that has ever existed. Dammit. I’m going to look tonight and see if I can find it out anywhere, because I’d really like to have it for the trip tomorrow.

Of course, I could always download it on iTunes and burn it to a CD tomorrow except OH WAIT MY LAPTOP DOESN’T WORK BECAUSE THE POWER ADAPTER DIED. Besides, that won’t be acceptable in the long run, because I’m weird and anal and need to own the actual CD.

Is it weird that I feel weird about replacing a CD, especially one I’ve had for a really long time? I feel guilty throwing the bad one away.

And that’s certainly a weird and abrupt way to end a post.

Those of you who are always trying to get me to throw away my TV might be happy to know that I also read all the freakin’ time. I’m a woman of many talents. And I’ve been reading a lot more lately because, duh, I recently noticed that the college campus where I work has a library, and then I learned that faculty & staff don’t have to pay late fees, which is right up my alley because I am a serial library privilege abuser and tend to avoid libraries for that very reason. In June when I was packing, I found a copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany that was due in September of 2003. Eep. Also, I was never able to make it through that book, which may be why I trauma-blocked its existence. Not finishing a book, even a book I hate, is a personal failure near the level of wetting the bed, and I haven’t wet a bed since I was very, very small.

Along those lines, I want to share that I finally read The Chronicles of Narnia for the first time, in anticipation of the upcoming movie. It’s a good thing I actually went ahead and bought it (the big one with all seven books included), because it took me six arduous weeks to finish the damn thing. If I love a book, I will drop everything to finish it in a day or two. If I like a book, I’ll read some of it daily for a week or two until it’s finished. If I can’t possibly bring myself to give a shit about a book, evidently it takes six weeks to finish.

I feel like a traitor to literature. These are classic stories, stories that lots of children and adults have cherished and read over and over again through the years. And I really tried to enjoy them. I took the book with me everywhere I went, and I tried to read at least a little of it every night, and I tried desperately to absorb myself in the lives of the characters, and I just totally did not care about them at all. The plotlines were tedious. The characters were flat. The Christian allegory was overdone. And also? Sometimes I thought Aslan was kind of creepy. I’m just saying.

Then I thought, well, maybe it’s because they were originally children’s books, and I missed them as a child and am now seeing them through jaded adult eyes and so I’m missing out on the magic or something. But then I remembered that I borrowed many of the books from the library over and over again in many different years of my childhood, only to find that every time I tried to read them, I was as bored with them then as I was this time around. Clearly there’s a reason I didn’t read these as a child.

Besides, there are plenty of series I devoured when I was younger that I’ve gone back to as an adult and loved just as much (and sometimes even more), like Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence, and the Little House on the Prairie series, and the Anne of Green Gables books and others.

But on the other hand, although I loved The Hobbit as a kid and read it several times, I could never get into The Lord of the Rings. When I heard that film adaptations were being made, I asked for the trilogy for Christmas and read it all and found it utterly captivating.

I don’t know. I guess I’m just trying to say that I kind of thought The Chronicles of Narnia were boring, and I’m pissed that I spent six damn weeks reading them, hoping they’d get better, and although I probably did end up liking The Last Battle best of all the books, overall there was never the payoff I was hoping I’d find. And it appears that I’m in the minority with this opinion, but that’s okay.

I became seriously spoiled with TiVo when I lived at Family Headquarters. I’ve really wanted to get it since I moved, but it just doesn’t fit into my budget right now. It doesn’t help that I’m picky, and I specifically want a TiVo-brand TiVo so I can see the friendly little guy and hear the patented “bu-doop!” sound, and ideally I want DirecTV too so I can TiVo two shows at once. But it makes no sense at all to sign up for DirecTV right now when I’m already tight on money and I’m still getting free cable (fingers crossed).

Upstairs, I have one of those little TV/VCR combos, and now that the fall season has begun and I’m pretty busy, I have to tape my shows with an actual VHS videotape.

This is problematic because I have apparently gone stupid since living with TiVo, and have completely lost the ability to program and use a VCR.

I tried to tape something a couple of weeks ago and forgot to rewind the tape first, so then it taped for about five minutes before reaching the end of the tape. Duh.

And then another night I set the timer wrong. I’m used to starting a few minutes early and ending a few minutes late, just in case the show runs over or my clock is off. So, for an 8 o’clock show, I set the timer to start at 7:57 and stop at…8:03. Those six minutes of television were really exciting.

Last night was the killer, because I’d worked really hard to get the timer set right, and had actually set it on Wednesday night before I went to bed so that I wouldn’t miss Survivor and CSI, because I knew that I’d be out last night and wouldn’t get back in time to see them. I double-checked everything before I went to bed on Wednesday, and checked it again yesterday morning, and when I got home last night I ran upstairs all excited and pushed play.

And I taped two hours of effin’ NBC.

Which would be fine except that Survivor and CSI are CBS programs, and have been for quite some time, and probably will be for quite some time.

And that’s an awful lot of messing up considering that I only watch about three hours of TV a week (not counting news and The People’s Court, which I’ll write about later) right now.

I’m hoping TiVo will save the day this time, because I called home last night and asked Dad to transfer the shows from TiVo to a videotape so I could watch them this weekend, but still. I’m stupid.

I think I need to find a way to get TiVo.

I had a terrible time falling asleep last night, and I don’t think I fell fully asleep until about 3 in the morning. I’m fighting a little cold, and it always seems to get my sleep schedule out of whack. I’m sure that conking out on the couch for an hour earlier in the evening didn’t help, but I was hoping the “may cause marked drowsiness” cold medicine would knock me out. It didn’t.

And the problem was that I really was sleepy. I did all the stuff you’re supposed to do when you can’t sleep (except the warm milk, because ew) – I walked around for a while, I did other stuff, but then I’d be tired and I’d get back in bed and I couldn’t fall asleep.

So I was back in bed, tossing and turning, and I’d been hearing nuts hit the door and windows all night long and it hadn’t been bothering me much. But all of a sudden I heard what must have been an absolute flurry of nuts falling against the door downstairs. Like, a bucket of nuts. And it was so loud and so alarming that this time, I was SURE someone was breaking into my house.

All logic immediately left me. I was on my belly at this point, so I carefully slid the pillow out from under my head and off to the side, so I could press my ear flat against the mattress. Because that would TOTALLY make me hear the intruder better. So I lay there and listened and I didn’t hear anything. But the carpet downstairs is deep and quiet, so maybe I wouldn’t hear anything.

I had a brief, bizarre moment of wondering if my intruder would look in my fridge, and then I started thinking about the knife.

There’s a knife upstairs, see. A big-ass stabby knife. I didn’t put it there, but it was there when I moved in and everyone encouraged me to leave it where I’d found it in case anyone ever broke into my house, so I could get the knife and stab the fuck out of the person before s/he could hurt me.

My increasingly ridiculous train of thought went racing down a track kind of like this:

Okay. So maybe I should get the knife. But my door is closed; what if he’s outside the door at the top of the stairs, and when I open the door to get the knife, he’s there? Maybe I should have put the knife in my bedroom. SHIT. Okay, this is okay. The stairs are creaky so if he were coming up the stairs I would definitely hear it; there’s no way to come upstairs quietly. I’m not wearing shorts. Should I put my shorts on before I get the knife or is that wasting too much time? Should I just go in my underwear and get the knife and stab him? Do I have time to put on a bra, too? Could I really stab someone? If I go out to get the knife and he’s coming up the stairs can I just kick him at the top of the stairs and make him fall down to the bottom? Oh my god oh my god ohmygod.

And so on.

Finally I realized that in my hyperaware super mattress-enhanced listening mode, I hadn’t heard anything at all since the flurry of nuts. And I reminded myself that I didn’t hear any glass breaking, and that my back door has a very distinctive sound it makes when opening and that I didn’t hear that sound, so chances are the back door hadn’t been opened.

It was just breezy and 2 in the morning and there were nuts hitting the windows and duh, I totally wrote about them just that day, so I needed to chill already and go the hell to sleep and quit freaking out about a bunch of stupid nuts hitting the window.

After several minutes of similar mental talking-down, I managed to convince myself that really, they were just nuts, and then I still couldn’t go to sleep for another hour or so after that but finally, thankfully, I dropped off.

I seriously don’t know if it was the cold medicine or the insomnia or the fact that I’d just written about the nut thing yesterday, but it was majorly scary last night, and it seems majorly silly today.

Perhaps I am the nut.