The Not Happy Thread

When I was a kid we had a pile of chickens on our farm and the breed we had was prone to 'Flip-over Disease,' so called because you'd have a big healthy bird, but without warning it'd literally kick itself over on it's back and die of a heart attack. If we caught it in time we could still kill it and clean it, but you'd practically have to be right there when it happened and we obviously couldn't sell the bird after. Apparently it was because the breeding they did to get the birds so massive caused heart problems. God bless the corporatization of nature. Regardless, sorry for the loss of your chicken. At least it wasn't fowl play. (Also yay fireworks!)

 

That's why you don't let chickens play with fireworks. Should have learned that from the original (well, the original was a board game, but...) "Civilization" on the Nintendo: Don't let the sapient avians develop nuclear weapons.

 

My semi-disabled roommate has fallen down twice in recent days because he has a hard time walking. One of the times was fairly serious. We're trying to move to a much bigger house, and it is apparent that he can't do it. We were going to sell our little house after we've moved, but it looks more and more like he's going to have to live in this tiny place for the foreseeable future. This throws a serious and rather ugly monkey wrench into all our short and long term plans.

Capital F-U-C-K.

 

Really haven't been into my story-a-days this week - it's been a rough one overall, between a funeral (no one I was close to, but still far from fun) and the weather deciding to exacerbate my seasonal depression, and making myself write on top of that has been ... kinda crap. So while I've been keeping up on those dailies, the results have also been kinda crap. And feeling like I'm making garbage really sucks the motivation to keep going. I'm fuckin' gonna, though. Eat me, SAD*.


*Which in this case stands for both seasonal affective disorder and story-a-day.

 

My area manager is moving me back to my old post, the mess from the summer has left a fallout that he doesn't think I'm equipped to handle.

To be honest, I'd be lying if I said I disagreed with him.

The problem is that I'm a practical learner, I retain what I've learned in the trenches and not at a desk. I'm also not motivated by crap like numbers and quotas, but by people and helping them flourish in their own positions.

I hate how education is biased towards oral learners...

 

You know that feeling when you're right on the cusp of something big and huge and important happening in your life; like you just raring to get going and make big sweeping changes and start rebuilding yourself and focusing on the things that make you happy, on building a real life that's what you really want it to be? And then suddenly you remember that actually making your life happen is on the other side of Christmas at the very least and you kinda get snapped back into the reality that you're still stuck living your old life with literally nothing to do except climb the fucking walls because can we just get fucking started already?

Being bored when you're just passing the time is crappy. Being bored when you're determined to start fixing all the broken stuff in your life but you just can't start yet is fucking murderous.

I feel like I just won my appeal, I'm finally getting out after ten years stuck in purgatory and just when I packed up my shiv someone tells me it'll be six week for the paperwork to come through and I have to spend it in solitary for my own protection. My head is just... All over the fucking place.

 

My poor dog almost choked to death on a roll-up blind cord. Thankfully I found him in time. He was struggling and the cord just kept getting tighter. I had to cut it off.

These are blinds with a safety release that is supposed to pop off with just a little pressure. My dogs are 13 years old and I've always had roll-up blinds outside over the windows with no safety device and have never had a problem. I replaced them this summer, so much for the safety release.

A warning to everyone, it's not just little kids you have to watch around those cords.

 

My coworkers are a bunch of credulous yammering imbeciles. For the last month or so, they've been going on about how they've found the foolproof cryptocurrency to invest in that's going to make them all millionaires. Since this isn't the debate thread, I'm not going to mention which one except to say that its founder says that it isn't a suitable vehicle for investment.

And then the other day they started up on unregulated pseudo-pharmaceuticals and psychotropic designer drugs that have undergone exactly zero peer-reviewed trials and haven't been approved for use by any medical agency or organization but will unlock your superhuman potential and make things pretty trippy, but completely safe as well. Apparently the fact that they're untested is proof of effectiveness or some such nonsense.

Basically, they're digging their way through the "sponsored posts" at the bottom of Buzzfeed and the like, but these are men in their forties, not frat boys. Still, I half expect them to be discussing guaranteed male enhancement pills before Christmas...

 

Maybe you could make a dime off of them by selling them some instant lottery tickets or maybe fancy magic beans.

 

We got the wife's Jeep back from the shop Friday last week. Now it's leaking coolant.

 

So I just wrote a part of a short story that was so terrible that the characters stopped the story and actually started talking to each other about how shitty of a story they were in and how thank God they were not alive to be in a world that contained such horrifically bad writing. ... think it's time to call it a night and lose myself in a good story.

 

Went into uni today to discover that not only was my student absent without bothering to tell me again, they'd changed the room and I had no way of finding his class... again.

Then on my way home I tried to use a very well known public shortcut that basically everyone in our area has been using regularly since before I was born and go turned round and shouted at by an angry security woman who was absolutely convinced that it was private land. It isn't, or if it is then it's either only just become private or has never been enforced, but it's not worth getting arrested over. So I won't be doing that again.

I'm not having a good day.

 

So, in an attempt to reduce the size of my mounting pile of prep, I decided to stay up until three (whereupon I was completely unable to keep my eyes open) and also make use of my lunchtime to get stuff done. It's been a very productive day - but I'm exhausted and starving, and it's not over yet.

I am one dumb fuck.

 

Firefox 57.0 is damn ugly. Appears they went back about 12 version if its looks are anything to go by.

 

It's supposed to be much faster and use less memory, though. So that's something, I guess.
(Don't use FireFox myself, so I can't confirm if that stuff's true.)

 

Seems pretty snappy, actually, and I just found some customize options. It's now far less offensive to look at with the changes I made.

 

I can't get it to keep my active logins though. Settings says that it should, and it's remembering my usernames and passwords, but it's making me go through the login process for my sites every time I start it up again.

 

Mmm, dunno.

 

So...the Japanese voice actress for Bulma from the Dragonball franchise is dead.

 

As is my grandmother. I'm not sure what to feel, actually.

 

They've been throwing in stuff from Servo and Stylo--which is meaningless, I guess, to 7,000,000,000 people on this planet, but I've been interested in that for awhile.