struggles

There's nothing major going on, just a lot of minor, kind of irritating things that are keeping me not so much grounded as submerged.

It may sound like a good thing, but it's very, very bad to have skinny mirrors in your dressing area. I always forget that the mirrored doors in our bathroom are, indeed, skinny -- so it was quite a shock when I got a look at my backside's actual dimensions in the dressing room at Eddie Bauer last week. (No wonder those jeans didn't fit!) The tape measure at home confirmed it, my hips are now wider than they have ever been, other than when I was pregnant or recovering from delivery. Yikes!

Time to get serious and stop and eating so much carborific food (I'm looking at you, Trader Joe's Veggie and Flaxseed Chips) and get back into an exercise routine.

The first three days of doing lunges put me in a state where walking and sitting were about equally painful, but that's worn off now.

Interestingly, I found that exercising at night before bed does not interfere at all with my sleep; I think I fall asleep more easily since I've released any tensions. I also wake up more or less without pain, which is astonishing. This leads me to my latest rule for life: exercise is not optional. I'm sure I'll blow it off from time to time, and for longer stretches here and there, but for now I'm sold on the benefits.

Windows Vista has several annoying quirks. I'm still not used to all the software that came with this machine, and I miss the stuff we had on the XP machine that had simple, clear interfaces. The new Vista HP PhotoSmart is horribly non-intuitive -- why do I have to put a check mark under the photos I want to edit? Isn't that ridiculously clunky? Why can't I just click on the Edit tab and have it edit the photo that is currently highlighted? Who designed this hideously unfriendly interface? Can I slap them? Oh -- is there no unzip utility for Vista? Because Vista is entirely ignorant of files with the ".zip" extension, and that's inexcusable as far as I'm concerned.

There's just too much new. In addition to the new Vista computers, there's my new camera, which takes forever to store photos -- seriously, about 4 seconds, which is way too long. Is it the memory card, which is supposed to be high speed but is some brand I never heard of? I have no idea. I need to check the settings. But it's really annoying.

Then there's the new all-in-one printer/scanner/fax, which doesn't communicate properly with Vista even though they are all HP machines. I've had to re-install the software twice, and I've had to "add a printer" from the Network page about a dozen times. I'm sorry, but WTF? Jeez. At least the people on the online chat at HP Service are knowledgeable and have been able to get everything working again... so far.

Remember I had to port my website a few weeks ago? Well, now I have new website management software which reports everything in a completely different format than the old software. It's way better, of course, but it doesn't seem to have the one report that let me figure out what images of mine had been hijacked into discussion forums. I'll figure it out... eventually.

Even freakin' SiteMeter went and upgraded over this same time period!

School is rapidly drawing to a close. My in-laws are arriving the day after school lets out for another of their whirlwind visits, this time made even more crazy by the fact that DH and my FIL will be attending all three Diamondbacks-Red Sox games over the weekend. Whee! A few days after they leave, we leave for the summer.

I'm not ready for any of it, and a bigger part of me than usual is actually dreading going. DH will be back home here for nearly a month! That's too long for us to be apart. I'm worried about my mom and what the situation will be at her house, with us, plus my sister-in-law and her children, and the random nephew or two. I'm sure it will be fine when we get there, but there are too many things squeezing me right now for me to look forward to the trip with nothing but pleasurable anticipation.

Sorry for the extended lament -- it's all small potatoes, and I know that. We just have to get through the next couple of weeks, and then I can exhale.