The Ink-Pot and the Palette

Damn mudroom. Damn painting. I knew it would become a remodeling job! I knew it!

I couldn't stand to just slap paint on over the foundation wall and hope for the best. It leaks. It's a problem. There's mildew and algae and water damage. I had to strip the existing coating so I could fill the cracks with hydraulic cement.

Two buckets of stripper later, I discover one of those stupid "homeowner-quality" jobs hidden under the epoxy, requiring the pouring of a new footing not only to prevent seepage in a rainy climate, but to shore up the damn foundation of the damn house!

So, 120 lbs of concrete being the bare minimum to do the job, I borrowed one of the working cars in the family--my former 23-year-old Honda Civic which is now my sister's--to go get it at the corner hardware store. While I was there with a car, I thought, hey, might as well get that box fan and those two on-sale garden chairs I've been needing.

The chairs don't fit in the Honda. So I drive the concrete home, then put on real shoes and walk back to the hardware store.

( Fortunately, the chairs weren't very heavy. )

This is weird and frustrating--and it's probably going to be expensive.

1. My (almost brand new) Dell Studio laptop went on the fritz today when I was trying to back some large files up to my external hard drive. It locked up COMPLETELY in Vista--the push-the-button-till-it-turns-off kind of locked up, and when I restarted I got a message saying no operating system found.

(Notes to my technical friends: diagnostics show no problem with the hard drive. I can boot into Ubuntu off a DVD, and Ubuntu can read the whole hard drive, including the Vista sector.)

2. I drove my car today for the first time in weeks, and it started up sweet as pie, but I could not shift it out of Park. Fiddle-fiddle-fiddle, off-and-back-on again, and it worked. I drove to coffee destination. Repeat. Drove to IKEA. Repeat. Drove my sister home. Repeat, only there, NOTHING I did could get it to shift out of Park.

Turns out it was the starter key (one of those infrared ones). As soon as I tried the newer of my two keys, the car shifted out of Park, no problem.

Weird, though, huh? Both my car and my computer are to all appearances working fine, but I can't make either of them go.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?????