The calendar says it's November 9th -- it was 90 degrees today in Los Angeles. I'm lounging around the living room in a halter top and shorts with the air conditioning on. It's 11pm. Do the math; figure out why people are willing to brave once in a while earthquakes to live here.
Fernando came over this morning to help me assemble the furniture. In case you can't stand the suspense, he won. True, he was bloodied and bruised at the end, but nevertheless, the fact remains: I now have a bureau.
(When I use the term "we" in the following sentences, I use the term incredibly loosely: Fernando assembled, I watched. At one point I was trying to put in some of the screws on the bedframe and Fernando finished with his side and came over to do my side. "This comes from a lot of practice assembling IKEA furniture," he said.)
First off we tried to do a bedside table. The sides were wrongly drilled; we couldn't put it together and I have to take it back. "Their quality control is going down," Fernando said. He put the second bedside table together quickly.
Then we had to assemble the bureau, which went fairly well, except for when we put the drawers into the frame -- Fernando had to force the metal sliders into the frame, and he ended up gashing the side of his hand. Oops. I had no Band-aids on hand. Mega-oops. Nevertheless, he continued on.
We finished off with the bedframe. I asked Fernando for his opinion of where the bed should go -- last time he was down here, Darin had said that maybe the bed should go under the window instead of against the far wall as it was. Fernando agreed. (Fernando has a very good aesthetic sense, which is why I asked his opinion.) We put it together and put the bed on it -- the bed's already pretty puffy, and the bedframe puts it up even higher. I need a ladder to get in and out of it now.
Somehow I mentioned to Fernando that I was going to upgrade my Powerbook to a PowerPC, and he said, "Oh, I can do that for you, it's pretty easy. I have all the tools in my car." After I took him out for some lunch, we came back and he installed the PowerPC chip that had been sitting around on my coffee table for a long time.
"Should we reinstall the system software?" I said, looking at the CD of system software included with the PPC chip.
"You have 7.5.5 on here? We probably don't have to...yeah, let's reinstall it."
Problem. I didn't have the proper cable to attach the external CD-ROM drive to the Powerbook.
"You haven't gotten that cable yet?...wait a second, I have that cable in my car."
It turned out what we didn't have, either in my apartment or in his car, was a terminator for the CDROM drive. So Fernando took my computer to his home (I had to run off to do some errands and meet a friend for dinner) and finished the job: upgraded the software and fixed a couple of things that were broken. He showed me how to use the new PPP protocol application (OT PPP, which it-is-to-be-hoped more stable than FreePPP) and cleaned up a few other things.
Where does Darin find these people? Fernando was so nice to me today. I apologized to Nancy for returning her husband is "slightly damaged" condition; she shrugged and said it was okay.
Sadly, because all of my applications are for a 680x0 machine, currently everything is running slower than molasses, which is annoying me. But it's nice having the PPC chip in finally.
Last night, when I settled down to watch Homicide, right after posting yesterday's entry, I got hit with a headache so awful I started crying. I thought I was going to die, and for once I'm not exaggerating how awful it was. I thought it was an aneurysm and this was it, I was checking out. I lay in the bedroom for a while and called home; Darin wasn't there.
I called Rob and Laura, because often Darin is over there. They asked me if I was having any vision difficulties (other than severe myopia, no) or tingling in my fingers. No, I said -- not a migraine, they told me. Rob said Darin was at work, checking in some work he'd done. I tried calling there; Darin was gone.
He called me a little while later and we talked about silly little things, but I felt so much better afterwards.
Which may or may not explain why I had yet another Babylon 5 dream last night, in which I got it on not only with Garibaldi (which, as some of you know, is my favorite character on the series, although Morden does it for me in a weird sort of way) but with the Doctor (oh please, I do not think so) and Captain Sheridan. I think there was some kind of plot in the dream too, but hey -- there are plots in porn movies too.
And no, Darin and I did not engage in phone sex last night. Talk about a pointless and frustrating activity.