I NEEDED A WIN

This is a dumb story.

I know it's dumb, because it's so very common and trivial and anticlamactic, but still, I'm going to tell it because I needed a win.

Things have been...weird...for the past few months. Not necessarily bad, just...weird. I won't go into it now, or maybe ever, but suffice it to say that when there isn't something to post on social media, life is different.

Anyway, so that happens and then something very small and stupid happens, in my case, my tub got clogged.  A clogged tub is no big deal, but sometimes it can feel like a big deal, ya know?  Our house is old, the pipes are old, and the thing clogs up every once in a while, but this time it felt personal. I was having dreams about it, even.  I tried very hard to fix it the way I normally do, with caustic chemicals and bad language, but it didn't work. 

It wasn't just a regular clog, oh no.  This one was sentient and sneaky.  I thought I fixed it, but it came back with a vengeance. I considered asking Steve to fix it, but he's so busy all of the time I knew it would be a week or more before he would be able to do it.  It got so bad I thought we were going to have to call a plumber and I didn't want to do that!  I should be able to fix this! It was just a clog!!

OK, so after the chemicals and long bouts of fruitless plunging with the various plungers we had in the house, I finally gave up and asked my pastor, who has rental properties as a side hustle, how I should fix it.  He told me I needed a specific kind of plunger and how I needed to go about plunging it.  So I went to Wal-Mart and spent $30 buying the plunger and one of those drain snakes (for extra insurance.) I went home and did what I was told to do, and it didn't work.  If anything, it just made things worse! I also couldn't get the snake thing down the drain! I was down on my knees for I don't know how long using a hand plunger and I'm not going to lie, I almost cried.

I already know it was nothing to cry about, but that's just where I was. 

So I stopped, had dinner, and fell asleep for a little while.  I had given up.  I was done.

But when I woke up, I decided to try one more time.  Of course, this isn't a Hallmark movie, so nothing had changed.  It still didn't work.  I don't know how long I hung over the edge of the tub, plunging and cursing into the pipes, but all to no avail.  I still couldn't even get the damn snake thing into the drain!  WHY?!

I decided I would need to find out what old-ass pipes, installed in the 50s, looked like so I could figure out which direction I needed to stick the drain snake, so I Googled it.  Lo and behold, there was a video that, I swear, looked like it was taken in my bathroom.  Literally, if I didn't know better, I would have thought a strange man had been filming in my house, so I clicked on it.  Basically he said I needed to remove the flippy bit, you know, the thing that you flip so you can take baths instead of showers, stuff a plastic bag down into the empty space, and plunge the drain.  I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard, but I was willing to try anything at this point.

Y'all, it worked.  In less than 10 seconds, the clog broke free and the tub drained, and again, I almost found myself in tears over the stupid bathtub!  I have no idea how plumbing works, and I had no idea that the flippy thing (which has not worked in years) was a vent, but stuffing a freaking target bag down the flippy bit hole created a vacuum that allowed me to do the thing! I'd spent almost a week and more money than was necessary to fix it, and all it took was a plastic bag! 

So now I'm pretty sure I can do anything.  If you need your house roofed, or your windows replaced, or whatever, let me know.  I'm sure I can find a how-to video online and take care of it for you!  It's amazing what one small win can do, isn't it? : )

IT'S OFFICIALLY OFFICIAL

DAMNIT!

Ok, so you already know that when my computer died a few years ago, we had to send the hard drive and the failed backups to a place where my files could (hopefully) be recovered.  I needed to be able to access my graphic design files. NEEDED TO.  We've talked about this. You know this.

We got the resulting files back from the place, and it was thousands and thousands and thousands of weirdly named, coded files in a series of folders that had no distinguishing names or categories or anything else that might tell us what the heck we were looking at.  I have sifted through them over time, and most of them were completely useless. I didn't know at the time that the computer was saving low res images of just about every button, avatar photo, arrows....just whatever garbage that pops up on your screen while browsing the internet, there was an individual file for it in the folders.  You might already know that too, I have no idea what I've talked about as far as this goes, because it's been an ongoing battle and I'm sure it's frustrated me before.

I'd given up trying to sort through them time and again, because it was just too tedious, and I was getting nowhere. However, knowing I needed and wanted to recover my work from this haystack of suck kept me going back to try and sort through them periodically.  I kept thinking that I could find something usable.  Maybe it would just be fonts, or photoshop brushes, or elements, or anything that could help me, but I thought that eventually I'd find something, ya know?

There was one file folder that, could it be found, would give me at least some of the stuff I'd been looking for. It was a classic case of putting all of my eggs in one basket, I know, but I didn't realize at the time that I was setting myself up for disaster.  Today, I found it!  I was thrilled, because...well, it was my stuff!  I'd have something to get back!  Yay!

BUT NO! PUT AWAY YOUR YAY.  I opened the folder, and inside were files. All of them, save three, were corrupted. The files that would have brought back 15 years of work were useless. They aren't even recognized as anything my computer will open.  All I have is a photo of Mr. Lee, a to-do list from 2011, and a weird photo of myself that I was using to practice an Illustrator technique on.

I kept thinking that I'd find something that still worked, but no, everything else is broken. I am, officially as of today, done trying to find any usable files because there are none. Three years of sifting through files to find out that the files I was looking for wouldn't work.

I'm disappointed of course, and I had a moment today where I was even nauseated about it, but I think deep down I knew they were gone.  It was just So. Much. Work. To. Lose. UUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

But, at least I know now. I don't have to sit and click on hundreds of files one at a time anymore. That's something, at least.  Onward and upward from here, right?  Oy.

IT'S NOT OK

Last night I went to the spring concert that Steve had with the community band that he plays with.

The spring concerts are always held in the gymnasium of the church where they rehearse, and so it's a little more loose and informal than say, the Christmas concert that is held in the sanctuary. Also, because it's being held in the gym, the acoustics are not so great and when the band is warming up (which isn't part of the concert, obviously) it's harder to chat with the people sitting next to you.

The organist from our church had driven out to hear the concert and she and I were sitting together talking about this and that. The band was doing the warm up, so we had to talk a little louder than usual just so we could hear each other, but we weren't talking any louder than anyone else in the room. I saw her expression change into one of confusion in the middle of our conversation, and she pointed to herself and mouthed "me?" at someone sitting beyond me, the way you do if you aren't sure if someone across the room is waving to you or not. I had seen a guy out of the corner of my eye waving his hands like he was trying to get someone's attention, but since we didn't know him, I did think anything of it. When I turned my head to see who she was looking at, I saw that same guy that was sitting a row ahead of us and several chairs down looking angry and pointing at us. So I did the same thing and pointed at myself to see if it really was us he was talking to and he said, kind of loudly, "Yes, you, both of you. Shut up. SHUT UP RIGHT NOW."

Ok, so my first reaction was to think "Who the fuck are you to tell me to do anything?"  Also, I don't like being told to shut up like that, by someone I do not know and who I could not be bothering in the least. So I flipped him off and went back to my conversation.  I mean, the hell, right?

The hell indeed.  The man got up, walked in front of us and went off on a tirade about how we were being rude and disrespectful, and how we needed to leave if we couldn't shut up.  I was completely baffled, because we were literally two of probably 100 people in that room talking, and we weren't yelling or making anymore noise than the rest of them, and the concert hadn't even started yet!  I have a pretty quick temper, so my instinct was to jump up and get into his face and tell him to leave us alone, but for some reason I didn't do that. Just looking at this goon, I realized if I did that, he would have hit me. I have no doubt of that. He was scary.  His face was all bruised up like he'd recently been in a fight, and he was wearing a wrist brace, and something about him made me realize that he wasn't all there in his head.  He wasn't like the mentally disabled people I deal with at work, but he was not mentally OK.  I'm not sure what I said back to him, although I couldn't stop my smart mouth anymore than I could stop a train with my bare hands, but I do remember telling him that sure, we'd stop talking, would that make him feel better?  I guess it did, because we walked back to his seat like he'd just told us what for.  That made me mad, because now I knew he felt vindicated for yelling at two women who were literally doing nothing, and something like that would make him feel comfortable doing it again to someone else.. It was weird and scary, because it came out of nowhere.

Halfway during the concert, the man got up and walked behind us and put his hand on my shoulder and leaned down and apologized for being rude. He did that to both me and Karen, and I have to say, that was just as scary and weird as the yelling thing. All I could say was that it was OK, and he went back to his seat.

But you know what? It wasn't Ok. He yelled at us for no reason, he picked us out of a crowd of others to...I dunno... make himself feel big and important.  He scared Karen, and she is the kind of nervous tempered woman who would let something like this upset her for a long time. Also, and what I didn't know until later, was that Anthony (who was in the back of the room and saw what was going on) walked up behind us while the guy was yelling at us to leave, and that was when he walked back to his seat. So that guy was the kind of asshole who doesn't mind yelling at women and telling them what they should do, but when a man comes by, he acts as though everything is fine.

The worst part to me, though, is that he scared me. He had no right to do that. I should be able to go to a fracking concert without some random dude deciding I'm talking to loud for his taste and jumping on my case. I shouldn't have to tell a person like that that everything is OK when it isn't, just so that nothing else happens. I am angry at myself for being scared. It makes me feel small and weak and ineffectual, and I am none of those things. I shouldn't need a flipping bodyguard to listen to music!  I'm tired of being afraid someone is going to hurt me all of the time. I have to deal with that at work, I shouldn't have to deal with it anywhere else.

I wish I had a clever way of ending this, but I don't. I am still embarrassed that it scared me so badly, and I'm mad that such a small and unimportant situation, which is fairly tame in the scheme of things, unsettled me so much.