There should be no reason for a man of my age and capabilities to feel so... incompetent is probably the best word... so constantly. I've been feeling that way for a coupla months not, and it kinda worries me. Well, OK, let's put things into perspective: I hit the snooze alarm twice this morning, and on the third time I turned the alarm off, thinking that I was gonna bound out of bed and have a glorious day. I was wrong about the bounding... I just went back to sleep. Until 08:45. And I've been off all day. Not off so much that I can't get the job done, but enough so that nothing just really *seems* right. You know the feeling, right? Just a kind of dysphoria, the feeling that if something really bad happens that you should have been able to figger it out before it happened and prevented it from happening. But you couldn't, 'cause you're just not sharp enough. Kinda like when you've got a cold, and have that cotton-in-your-ears feeling, only the cotton is in your brain. So anyway, the phones have been bad since Friday. I called the phone co and they came out and left a note saying that the problem was on my side of the box. Well, yes, it is, but it's the screws on their box, but it's on *my* side. But that's another fight. What I did was go out to walgreens and buy 100' of phone wire, and I came home and drilled another hole in the house and ran it from my internal box to their box, not using the loose terminals but using the service plug-in. And that didn't work. So I had to think about it for a coupla hours, then I got a brilliant idea: I had unhooked the old line from the outside box, but it was still attached to the internal network. I cut the old wire away from the box... and everything works wonderfully now. So, what had happened: the wire between the boxes had shorted out some way or another. It's a fairly old wire, and probably had a nick in it somewhere and got wet. And disconnecting one end still left the other end of the circuit shorted. Sadly, it took me three days to figger this out. And now for the good news: payroll at St Francis got the letter from the lawyer and they're cutting me a check for everything that they took out last payday. I'm not doing very good about getting to bed early tonight, either... it'll be damned near 23:00 before I get to sleep if I hurry....
Callie in her
favorite place