Pisces Moon Studio

My husband has a really bad cold today and stayed home from work. Around midday I took him to the pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions. (He has to do the paying since prescriptions are paid from a medical savings account that only he has access to, and he didn’t feel well enough to drive.) It was going to take a few minutes, so I went to the car to wait for him, whereupon I promptly had a sneezing attack. (I’m coming down with The Cold as well.) Reached behind the seat where I keep the box of tissues… which was empty.

Grumbling and trying valiantly not to drip, I went back into the pharmacy, bought a box of tissues, blew my nose, and waited for him to finish and come back out.

Halfway home it occurred to me: This morning I went to Costco. I bought a 10-pack of boxes of Kleenex.

They were still in the back of the car.

I’ve also moved the comments over, but I haven’t checked yet to see whether they attached to the stories.

Reader’s Digest version of the problems: The old server used an earlier version of WordPress which was no longer available when I moved to the new one. The database structure was different and the automatic import failed completely. I’m still not completely happy with it, but it’s good enough and I am not going to worry about making it perfect.

Maybe I’ll even write a post about the garden sometime soon.

Thank you for calling.  We have just moved to a new server and the database is not home right now.  Please leave your message after the tone and we will get back with you as soon as possible.

beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep…..

… I am here to announce that the rumors of my demise have been horribly exaggerated.

I’m reasonably fine, doing well, just have been incredibly busy with computer stuff: New clients, website redesigns, more problems with the local hacker which may finally be resolved. (There will be a highly amusing story about the hacker sometime soon on Art2Mail. I’ll post about it here when it goes up.)

I also have started the vegetable garden and that’s kept me rather busy.

But unfortunately, there’s been no art. I obsessed about it for a month and finally came to the conclusion that I am in a fallow period. I don’t know why, but if I don’t push perhaps it will come back soon.

Maybe I need to work on paper for a while. Something different. Take a trip into the country with the camera, perhaps.

Anyway, I’m still here. I apologize for letting this languish and will try to be more diligent about upkeep.

Two lovely things from today:

Greedy little light-hogs… my four-day-old dill plants. I turn the pot three or four times a day, to keep them growing fairly straight, but an hour later they are stretching for the window again.

And from this evening: A glorious mystery I noticed while preparing dinner.

It’s after 9:00 pm and the sewer guys are still out there, but it hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be. The repair seems to involve a very long hose, a thing that sounds like a giant vacuum cleaner, and a bunch of guys in fluorescent chartreuse vests wading in the creek. No jackhammers and no tearing up the street.

Still haven’t been able to wash dishes, though. (I shouldn’t complain. Gives me an excuse for a night off, no?)

And so far (touch wood) the internet is behaving itself today. Maybe it was yesterday’s lunar eclipse that had everything so topsy-turvy.

Who knows — maybe tomorrow I will even make some art.

My dear friend Sadie wants to know where I’ve been the last week or so. It’s the usual long story.

About a week ago I started having trouble again with the Internet connection. By Thursday I was completely unable to connect. Spent an hour or so on the phone with a pleasant and helpful young man at the cable company, who made a number of suggestions which all boiled down to “there’s nothing wrong with our signal up to where it goes into your house; try this and this and this and call Microsoft and then let me know if you’ve solved the problem.”

Well… I spent the next three days completely wiping and reformatting my hard drive, reinstalling all my software, restoring all my backed-up files (only to discover that my email from January 27 to the present had gone poof into the ether)… and it didn’t work. Not only that, I hooked up my old laptop and then my son’s computer to the cable modem and they were exhibiting exactly the same behavior.

So I eliminated absolutely every variable I could think of and finally said it had to be the modem. Mr. Cable Tech Guy was positive that it could not be the modem. We went around on this for a day or so before he finally threw up his hands and authorized me to go to the local office and swap out the modem.

Did that Monday morning and everything was great for about four hours. Today it’s been getting slower and slower again. Neither router would work at all for a while, until about the fourteenth time I cold-cycled everything, and then it mysteriously started to work again. For the moment I’m online and doing okay (but I almost hate to say that in case the gremlins are listening).

At any rate… I have done absolutely no fiber work since the ill-fated Labyrinth, and I just haven’t had much to say that isn’t about frustration and dead ends.

Tomorrow the sewer repair guys will be digging up the street in front of my house again, with sewer service shut off for 10 to 12 hours.

I’ll try to think of something more positive to post about soon. I promise. Right afer I go have a good cry.

A quote from the blog of my friend Sadie:

“Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness.”

There is more to the quotation, of course, but that line describes me this afternoon. The difficult web work that has consumed me for six weeks is done for the moment, and I feel rather as one does after giving birth: numb, a little empty, and wondering “what on earth do I do next?”

It’s cold here today. The skies are gray and dark, and it feels like snow. Tomorrow I must find an idea that makes me want to work again.

This ad for Chuck Pennacchio has been running for weeks on one of the blogs I read every day. From the very beginning, every time I’ve looked at that pic, I see:

That’s all. Just had to get that off my chest.

I’m not sure this qualifies as creative, so I’m not tagging it as a 365 days. But hot damn, I am proud of myself.

See, I do all my work on a laptop. With the fibro, I’m no longer an early bird jump-out-of-bed-and-get-going kind of person. Most mornings, though, I can sit in bed and work on the computer and be productive even though it takes me an hour or two to get together enough to get up. I have a wireless connection to my cable, so it’s reasonably fast. I can read and answer email, listen to streaming music from Sky.FM, check the blogs (shhhh, don’t tell my clients about the blogs), and work on websites.

A couple of weeks ago I started having problems with the wireless connection. It would drop out at random intervals and I’d have to go downstairs and kick the router to get things going again. This was annoying.

Research told me that the particular router I had was well-known for doing this after about 18 months in service — the capacitors start to overheat and the thing cuts in and out. Since I wasn’t prepared to open it up and attack it with a soldering iron, I determined that I needed a new router. So I looked around, found the Netgear WGT624, which had good reviews and was supposed to be very fast and stable. Got it last night, installed it, set everything up, and went to bed.

This morning I set up the laptop and connected to the router and immediately erupted into a spate of severe tut-tuttery. The Netgear was indeed really, really fast. It was fast at connecting and even faster at dropping offline. Like every minute or so.

I spent the day in mounting frustration as I searched the internet and tried remedy after remedy. Everything worked fine when the computer was connected to the router by cable, and it even worked sorta-kinda okay on wireless downstairs in the studio. But it would not work, not for toffee, upstairs.

Finally, in a throwaway comment on a tech board, I found the answer. Wireless access points — all brands — ship using a default broadcast frequency (channel 6) very close to that used in most cordless phones (2.4GHz). And I have a cordless phone next to my bed. The commenter suggested changing the frequency to a different channel and see if the interference stopped.

So I did. And the thing has worked like a champ for the last two hours with no dropouts at all. Too cool!