Blog Archives

Periodically, I clean out my life. Whether it’s deleting files from my hard drive, emptying my iTunes library, selling oil clothes on eBay or finally throwing out bottles of shampoo that I’m never going to use, it feels great. A while back, I went through my laptop and external hard drive, deleting bookmarks and emails that I no longer needed. Especially when it comes to my digital life, I’ve often attached myself to things–files, data, etc. It’s easy to do this with documents and emails, because they don’t require any physical space, but because of my anxiety, I keep some sort of mental tally. I see the number of files and the names of folders fly past my eyes, and it makes me nervous, restless.

At first, deleting always causes me to feel a little fear. I think “What if I needed that again?” “What if I can’t find that file again, when I need it in the future.” But once the cleanup is done, once I convince myself to get off my ass and take out the trash or clean out that drawer or just to open that folder and start clicking, I feel such a sense of relief and lightness. I love clearing up that mental space. Spring cleaning helps to defragment my mind. I know what I have and where I have it, and I don’t worry about losing things, and part of me likes being somewhat-unencumbered.

I will never be completely free. I’m not the type who can pack a bag and travel the world, but I do like having just what I need and knowing that everything I need, I have. I don’t like clutter. My uncle recently asked me what I liked to collect and I said “Nothing! I hate clutter.” In fact, things like my computer and Kindle let me live with even less clutter. I’ve been cleaning out books and movies. I can honestly see a point in my life when I have neither.

But I haven’t always been organized, so while I’m making strides now, there’s a lot of past clutter to go through, or so it feels like. And I get pretty frazzled, or fragmented, when I try to keep track of things in my head. Other people simply forget about things until such is the time when they need to remember, but I’m not so good at forgetting. I don’t have enough back burners for all the mental flotsam and jetsam, so the only way I can feel less anxious is to get rid of as much as possible, which results in me literally getting rid of stuff.

So while I certainly love the remaining material things perhaps more than some people recommend that we do love things, I also recognize how unhealthy it is to love those things more than people. Because things are replaceable while people, for the most part, are not. Things provide me with tools and solutions, but people provide me with companionship and happiness. Still, both people and things can make my anxiety go crazy, so one thing I’m really trying to work on is to preventing myself from letting in and becoming close to people who are  toxic and bad for my mental health. Just like the clutter of files or material things, they take a crazy toll on my mental faculties.

For the most part, I don’t have a lot of baggage, but I do tend to look at things in my life as though they are more baggage-y than they are. I suppose this is why I clear out as much as possible, so the remaining people and things are the type of baggage that, at the very least, I want to handle.

nor can you live without them. Depending on your sexual orientation, you may think I am talking about men and/or women. I could be but I’m actually talking about computers!

I caught a trojan the other day and I have been battling ever since. It was stupid that I got it in the first place because Avast did warn me but I didn’t respond in a very.. cautious way and got infected. Since then, I’ve run over a dozen programs (at least!). Things have gotten better but not perfect. At first, I had horrible, fake Windows alerts and a pseudo-antivirus program that wanted me to download crap. I managed to get rid of the pop ups and fake program but I kept getting Google results hijacked and my comp was lagging like hell.

Now, the lag seems to be minimal (it is eight years old, after all!) but my results are still, sometimes hijacked. It’s annoying but not completely debilitating. I’m still running daily scans. The frustrating thing is, many programs have caught something but it’s obvious this thing has opened a back door and keeps letting more in anyway.

Like last time, Dez has been a great help coming up with suggestions but I’m pretty close to just buying some protection software.

Despite my isolation from friends and family, I am inundated with requests and queries and messages. My inbox, answering machine and mailbox never stay empty. If anything, I have developed a very clear stance on spam: I hate it.

I have resorted to letting the machine pick up every call and I’m sure Ryan doesn’t appreciate it but I am sick of taking calls that want something (I tell you, you donate once and they won’t leave you alone. They’re like stray cats!) or for people who don’t live here, never have and no, I don’t know them, thank you very much. I am not Nadia, Melissa or Erica and the Ryan you want is not my husband so stop calling! These people must be going through the phone book and calling everyone with the same last name as we have which is ridiculous. I mean, our last name is in the top 20 in the entire country so that tactic is absurd to begin with. For reference, there are over 10 pages of Martinezes in the phone book.

Car insurance companies down here are also really good at making their ads seem like real mail. They’re vague enough that you have to open them, just in case it’s something you’ll regret tossing. I get those kind of letters at least once a week. Think of the trees, people!

In fact the calls and mail make me happy Thunderbird does so well with fielding spam and that my computer doesn’t “ring” every time I get a knew message. I’d have to kill myself then. I already hate the sound of our phone which also has an insanely loud ringer even on low. I’d hate to hate my computer.

In summary: gtfo spammers.

In my case it’s technology and, sometimes, my kitty Phantom.

Not too long ago I asked for ideas for keeping him out of places and one response was to use double sided tape. Apparently cats don’t like the feeling of it on their paws and if you put it over the entrance to a place you want to keep them out of, it should help. Well, I went to the extreme when I used some double sided tape; I put a grid of the tape over our entire fireplace.

It didn’t work.

That’s right. When faced with this barrier, Phantom simply chewed through it and made a hole big enough for himself. Since then, we have resorted to zip tying the chain link metal “curtain” over the fireplace. This seems to have worked. But, it renders the fireplace completely useless. Pah!

I also needed suggestions for how to get the kitty to stop going places we don’t want him, like near the computer, behind the TV and on counters, tables and dressers. Ashe suggested I get a can of compressed air and this has actually worked really well. I’ve only had the air a few days and Phantom already knows not to fuck with me. If I even grab the can, he scrambles.

Still, if the cat can’t be kind of naughty, he tries to be really naughty. He is now spending time on top of the fridge. He originally went up there because he could smell a ziploc bag of treats I had. He proceeded to chew open the bag. Now, I tihnk he just likes being up that high and he reaches down to play with the magnets and papers on the freezer door. This is especially problematic because I can’t spray him very well up there and we moved everything to the freezer door because he was jumping to get everything on the bottom door from the floor. I guess no magnet is safe.

When it comes to technology, I really like my computer and my MP3 player and the internet but when it goes wrong, it’s so costly. I caught a trojan (W32.Renos) the other day which was redirecting my search results and slowed down my internet as well as blocking potentially helpful sites and webpages. It took over 2 days to finally find a trojan scanner which fixed it. I am very grateful to Dez for finding, downloading and sending me the program since I couldn’t fully utilize my internet.

A lot of people had the same trouble with Renos and similar trojans which fall into the family of Smitfraud. I downloaded/used at least a dozen programs and only 1 of them detected it. I even used tools specifically for these type of infections like SmitFraudFix which did not help. The program which finally did the trick is Simply Super Software’s Trojan Remover and I highly recommend it to anyone with Renos or a similar invasion.

I hope that anyone with this problem stumbles across my site and finds a solution that works for them.

There you have it, the things I love to hate.

Monday was a very weird day. It started off not too bad with some episodes of Stargate and then Ryan received a call that one his troops has fucked up so he jumped in the shower and ran to base after being screamed on the phone. Of course, it wasn’t his troop. It was someone else with the same name who is now his troop and Ryan basically wasted a trip. Bah!

We spent the day doing a little shopping, including brand new bras for me, and grabbed dinner at the mall and ended up with a trip to Wal-mart for some necessities. We returned to a hot apartment as our electricity had partially shut off while we were gone and I hopped on the phone with the answering service who told us to check the breaker box, which we did, and flip the switches for the living room (where the electricity had been off) which we couldn’t find. OF course, after I hung up Ryan found the switch and I had to call them back to say never mind.

If only it ended there. I went to turn on my computer to find that it didn’t work and assumed it was the power supply because I’ve had the same problem before. Unfortunately it was too late to call anyone so I waited until yesterday where I made like 4 calls to Best Buy before someone answered and gave me a ridiculous price. We also talked to someone else who quoted a better rate but wouldn’t have been able to do it the same day so we went a little out of our way to a great shop that was sort of hidden away and were greeted by an extremely helpful chap who even gave us some free service. We took the time to browse their shop as well which had a variety of used and new computers and accessories for some damned good prices so Ryan is now considering getting a laptop from there.

Although it all turned out okay, it was a harrowing experience. I was very worried of having additional damage done to the computer so I’m very grateful that it wasn’t. Of course, I am not impressed with our electricity which has already gone out twice since we moved in. Ick.