December 11, 2000
I need a weekend to recover from my weekend.
This weekend was no fun. Just no fun at all. All work, no play. I have a big paper and presentation due Thursday, and until this past Friday, I hadn't done any work on them at all, so I was chewing my nails and generally stressed out. (And I know it was all my own fault, and I have thoroughly kicked myself for it, just like I do every time I have some major project that I've put off until the last minute. And you know what? Next time I have an assignment due, I'll procrastinate again. At least I'm realistic...) Friday night, after my roommate told me she doubted I would be able to use her computer to write my paper, I holed up in my room with my books and articles, and hand-wrote about 20 pages. I only meant to take notes, figuring that I'd just take the books and the notes to school and write the paper there on Saturday, but once I got going, I just kept going. By the time I was done, it was 1 a.m., my fingers wouldn't uncurl to let go of the pen, and I could barely see straight, but the majority of the paper was written. Saturday, my roommate told me I could use the computer for a few hours after all, so I said "Yippee!" and settled down to type the whole thing up. I worked for just over four hours -- wrote a nifty introduction, clarified some points, added the conclusions, and saved the whole works to a diskette. That's where the fun started. I tried to save the paper to my backup disk, and apparently hit "Save" instead of "Save As," so I didn't rename the file. I learned that that's a bad thing. At the time, I didn't know I'd made a mistake -- I just thought there was something wrong with the backup disk. "Whatever," I thought. "I'll just check to make sure everything's saved to the first disk, and it should all be fine." Popped the first disk in, tried to open the file, and... error message. No such file. "No such file? What do you mean, no such file? It's right there!" Tried again. Same error message. Small bits of panic ensued. Called Lee at work ('cause she's much smarter about these things than I am) and she had me try some tricks to try and get the file to open. No dice -- it seemed that the disk was corrupt. (I can hear some of you asking "why didn't you save it to the desktop, you ninny? It's not my computer, that's why. Turns out my roommate wouldn't have minded if I had, but she wasn't home to ask at the time.) Got off the phone with Lee, called my mom and had a hissy fit (even though she couldn't really help -- having hissy fits at my mom is generally my first reaction in times of stress. She's a calming sort of person.) Called the tech lab at school, where there was no staff person to help. Brooded and sulked and swore and kicked things, and then went and rewrote the whole thing. All 15 pages. What took me more than four hours the first time took me just over an hour the second time. I type faster when I'm furious, apparently. It didn't come out as good the second time -- that first draft was a really good one, and wouldn't have needed more than a bit of proofreading -- but at least it's done. That finished, I took my tired, headachy self to bed, where I had a very tall glass of wine and watched The Sixth Sense for the umpteenth time, and went to sleep.
Sunday was all about being productive -- perhaps to make up for the four wasted hours the day before. I woke up, cleaned my disgusting room, mopped the floor, changed the catbox, and went to do laundry. Helped the roomie with some of her work -- basically reading numbers off to her while she input them into a spreadsheet -- until 4 o'clock. Chatted on the phone with Lee while waiting for my groceries to be delivered -- they give you a two-hour window, and our doorbell is possessed by demons (it rings when there's no one at the door, and remains silent when someone does want to come in) so I have to sit in the front bedroom and watch out the window. When the food arrived, I set about making a truly lovely beef stew, which cheered me up a lot.
So. I got stuff done, in a frustrating way, but I'm more tired than I was on Friday. I need another weekend right about now. I did get my student loan papers, and discovered that I'll have about $1,700 to use to buy my very own computer -- woo woo! The checks won't come for a while, but I'm still looking at websites and drooling over all the lovely machines. And telling myself very sternly that I do not need a laptop. No, I don't. A nice sensible desktop, that's what I need. No fancy-pants laptops. (I'm mostly looking forward to having a computer so I can get The Sims. I know, I'm a dork.)
Oh, and last week was my grandparents 59th anniversary, not their 56th. I knew that when I was writing that entry, too -- I just kept typing 56. Hi, I'm a dumbass.
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Posted by Mary Ellen at December 11, 2000 04:46 PM