Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

This has been a pretty darned sucky day. Bandaged my toe so I could go to work this morning, it bleed through the bandage (ugh). Got home to take care of it, and the gauze was stuck in the nailbed? Whatever you call the flesh that your nail used to cover. Soaked it 10 minutes, couldn't get it off. Soaked another 10 minutes, still stuck. Soaked 30 minutes. Nope. Soaked in hydrogen peroxide, no help. Decided it might be old, so went out and bought a new bottle, soaked. Nope. Sent message to doctor, she helpfully told me not to use gauze...

I still haven't gotten it out. I have no idea what to do. I'd assume that if it were a horribly bad thing, the doctor would have told me to come in and she'd deal with it. I guess if I can't get it out tomorrow, I'll message her again.

So sick of dealing with doctors. Saw her yesterday. Have an appointment with a different one tomorrow. Stupid toe.

To make matters worse, recall how happy I was to get my taxes finished and submitted? And for the first year ever, I was getting almost $1,000 back? Yeah, well my mother's retirement account guy only sent out his forms today... I didn't even want to use him, but my mother kept wanting me to, so I gave in and let him invest a couple thousand.

So now I have to do an amended tax return. He sent three new forms, one of which you can't even do through TurboTax (not unless you upgrade to their $60 premier version). And to make matters worse, I now owe $1,000. Really, the money I gave him made $2,300 in interest, and now I have to pay $2000 in taxes on it. Where's the value in that?

After I finished redoing my taxes (joy, took as much time to do as the first time), TurboTax's success screen said:

Filing feels good! Share your tax triumph with your friends.

With the $700 and $300 I owe next to it. Triumph, TurboTax? Really?

So grumpy. Stupid toe. Stupid taxes. I just want to hide in bed and not come out.

After Phil Robertson, star of Duck Dynasty, said awful things about homosexual people (saying they're the same as terrorists and other such hate-filled things, see my post about it here), A&E rightfully kicked him off the show.

But now they've changed their minds.

They're going to let him back on the show because: “While Phil's comments made in the (GQ) interview reflect his personal views based on his own beliefs, and his own personal journey, he and his family have publicly stated they regret the ‘coarse language’ he used and the misinterpretation of his core beliefs based only on the article. He also made it clear he would ‘never incite or encourage hate.’"

"Coarse language" makes it sound like a 'damn' slipped out in front of small children. And he'd never incite or encourage hate? Isn't it just a bit too late to make that claim?

Sigh.

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Also, since I'm posting, a totally unrelated topic. I got my latest Graze box!

salsa fresca: "tomato salsa fresca with cheesy sombreros" I really worried I wouldn't like this one, but once again I discover that I actually like salsa! Thanks, Graze, I found a new food I like!

cherries & berries: "cherries, lingonberries, cranberries and jumbo raisins". Not just a yummy mix of dried fruit, but it seemed like I got a lot more food in this packet than I get in most of the others. Overpacked by mistake?

banoffee pie: "fudge pieces, almond slices, pecan nuts and banana coins" Never heard of such a thing, apparently it's an English snack. The "fudge" pieces tasted more like butterscotch (maybe butterscotch fudge?). Surprisingly, it was too sweet for me -- a really rare thing.

fruit and seed flapjack: "rustic rolled oat flapjack with mixed seeds and dried fruits" The only one that I haven't tried yet. It's got these really big green seeds in it that scare me. Pumpkin seeds maybe? But those are usually white, right? I love flapjacks, but it has so many of those big green seeds in it...

Don't forget, you can click here to join Graze. $6 per box of four snacks, shipping included, first and fifth boxes free.

Edit: Bonus WTF. Esquire Magazine has named the Pope as the best dressed man of 2013. c.c

Has anyone lost their LJ style and other assorted settings? I noticed it last night, but I was hoping it would be fine in the morning. Nope. Some other ugly style is in place in my LJ.

I have a permanent account, so it's not like my time ran out and they cleared my style.

Google has nothing about this in the last 24 hours/7 days, so I suspect this is just me. Maybe I'll open a support ticket instead of searching through the hundreds of styles trying to find my old one...

What a horrible, terrible weekend thus far. My computer's been doing something bad: Screen goes black, programs all crash in 15-ish seconds after that (I can tell by the sound they make as they die). I thought this was a hardware issue (my graphics card runs really hot), but googling around, it's a WoW issue. WoW + nVidia = not happy.

I didn't want to go get a new graphics card right away, so I thought I'd try updating my drivers. Everything I read said you should uninstall your drivers before installing new ones, so I did. It then asked me to reboot. "Hmmm, but if I reboot, will it work after? You know, display anything with no video card drivers? But... it wouldn't ask me to reboot if that wouldn't work, right?" Idiot that I am, I rebooted. Black screen. Rebooted. Tried for safe mode. Black screen. Nothing.

Gah. It was about 9 AM by now, I struggled to the extent of my highly limited knowledge to try to fix this. Nothing. Oh well... I was semi sort of thinking of upgrading my machine anyway? Not really, but... Off to Best Buy for a new computer.

Arrived there at 10. By 10:15 had a new machine picked out, was going to upgrade the video card. Since I'm an idiot, I have no idea how to do that. They told me to come back in (2|3|4) hours -- different people said different things. Sick of being offline, I went back at 2 hours. Not ready. Sat out in the parking lot, checked in every half-hour, didn't get finished until nearly four hours.

BUT! "Finished" was not finished in a good way. They couldn't make it work, they thought the computer itself was broken... and it was the last one of its kind. Sigh. Next closest machine cost $100 more...

Got next machine. Waited in the parking lot 45 minutes while they installed the graphics card AGAIN. (Really? It takes you people 45 minutes to do that?). Went back in. "Oh nos! Your power supply isn't strong enough for the new video card! You need to upgrade that too!" Another $100...

So, five hours later, I finally headed home with my machine. Hooked it up. Didn't work. Black screen. GAH. WTF! Hauled out my old monitor (thing must weigh 100 pounds) and hooked it up, no image. At least I wasn't wrong to think that it wasn't a monitor issue!

Took it back to Best Buy. Apparently the new graphics card meant I needed some adapter. Silly me, I had been plugging my monitor into the color-coded slot marked "MONITOR". Wacky! It went a totally different place!

So, finally I'm on the new machine. WoW has been installing for hours (I haven't been on all day, grrrrrrrrr). And Windows Vista-- Ooops, 7, sucks so much god damned ass. It's Windows Vista. Seriously. Looks the same. Acts the same. STOP HIDING MY PROGRAMS FROM ME! I AM AN ADULT! I KNOW WHAT THE HELL I WANT TO CLICK ON MY OWN! AND WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN, I DON'T HAVE ADMIN LEVEL PERMISSION BY DEFAULT? AND NOT ONLY THAT, YOU ***HIDE*** HOW TO SWITCH TO ADMIN? Fuck you, Windows 7. Seriously. XP was nice. XP was non-intrusive. XP worked. Fucking Windows 7.

It's now 5:30. I've still done nothing online. I've cut and bruised myself multiple times lugging the damned new computer around and trying to set it up. Thankfully I did a backup about a week ago so I can get most of my data back, but still!

And thankfully I have enough money to make up for my utter cluelessness about computers. I've been kicking myself all day, that the fix for my old machine might be something simple.

Blah. What a stressful, annoying day. Computers are great things... until they stop working.

PS: I better not lag in Dal anymore, otherwise I might throw this new machine out the window. New graphics card is a Radeon HD 5770 and my computer is quad-four something or other, which is hopefully twice as good as my previous dual-something or other.

Edit: I've been using this time to watch The Watchmen. Other than being too violent for me, it's not half-bad. I don't get what all the uproar was about the blue penis though. I was sitting here expecting it to be six feet long or mutated or something, for all the uproar there was online about it. (I'm only two hours into the 2:45 movie, so maybe there's some wacky blue penis panic coming up!)