Something In The Air

Bad luck and weird events come in three's; I'm convinced of it. Years ago, when I worked in the life insurance business, I knew that if I got a report of the death of a policyholder, I could count on two more within 30 to 45 days. It never failed. And this week, which has been weird to begin with, gave us three strange events within 24 hours.

It all began last night as I was getting ready to prepare dinner. I reached into the fridge for a cold lemon-lime seltzer water. I drink them all day long and I've come to expect them to taste particularly frosty cold when the first sip passes my lips. So, I was a little disturbed when this one tasted slightly warm. But, because I was so busy preparing dinner I pressed on and forgot about the temperature of my drink. After dinner; however, when I went to retrieve a pint of Baskin Robbins jamoca almond fudge from the freezer and found "soup" instead, I realized that we had a problem. All the lights were on, but the computer panel of our fridge had flat lined. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I'd run into that problem before with a similar refrigerator and I knew to "re-boot" it by unplugging it and then plugging it back in and resetting the thermostat. Crisis averted.

Then, this morning, I received a phone call from the Fraud Investigation Unit from my credit union. They just wanted to ask me to verify a few recent purchases with my debit card and promised it would only take a second. Since I have not used this particular debit card in more than two months, I knew it was going to take more than a second. Sure enough, they reported a fistful of purchases with my card in the past couple of days; most of them originating in California. Needless to say, these are not my purchases. Someone had gotten a hold of my debit card information and was trying to make the most of it. Since there's less than $10 in that particular account, they're not going to get far and I sincerely doubt that that new Apple computer they ordered online will be delivered to them. So that card has been canceled and I've been instructed on how to dispute the charges. Another crisis averted.

So, just to top things off, as my husband was working from home this afternoon his computer crashed. I mean it just stopped in the middle of what he was doing and he lost all his program files. Fortunately, he's in the computer repair business and only had to take his computer across the street to be fixed. As yet, we don't know the extent of the damage, but are hopeful that the files can be restored.

On our way home from dropping off the computer we did a little recap, realized that we had reached 3 events and feel confident that, for now at least, our troubles are over.

Alien Attack

I love technology! Whenever I learn something new and accomplish what appears to me to be a daunting task there's that feeling of "YES! You can teach this old dog a new trick!"

I was feeling pretty smug the other day when I figured out how to let the followers of my blogs subscribe to them by email using Feed Burner. I couldn't wait to announce the news and I quickly wrote a little announcement on my blog, a crabulous life!

Within the hour my new post rolled over onto Facebook and I was horrified to discover that my blog had been hijacked by an alien and it looked like this:

Tulisan ini saya buat selaku seorang newbie, jadi sorry-sorry aja kalo anda merasa yang udah senior menerima tutorial ini. Jujur, saya adalah seorang newbie, newbie yang imut dan newbie yang lucusangat manis, enggak percaya

Only it was worse because it went on and on and on. It was much longer than what I had written.

Of course, being a red blooded, middle aged, American female, my natural reaction was to point a finger and blame someone else. "Facebook has messed up my blog post!" I angrily announced to the world. I was sure that Facebook would discover its mistake and correct its error and everything would be all right. After 24 hours things not only still looked the same, but my subsequent blog posts refused to feed to Facebook. Now I was starting to wonder if the problem could be my fault.

I had been so sure that what I was seeing was some sort of computerese gibberish, but upon closer inspection I began to suspect that maybe it was a real language. I found an online language identifier and discovered that, in fact, the language was Indonesian. Then I got help from the cute little Word Monkey that I keep on my Google home page, for just such an emergency, and learned that aliens hadn't hijacked my blog; instead, I'd managed to hijack someone else's blog.

This particular blogger is named Keren and is a self described "cute and sweet newbie" who is humbly giving instructions to more experienced computer users on how to overcome a certain obstacle they face when using computers in an internet cafe. She apologizes profusely for her audacity and doesn't want to insult anyone, hence the "jadi sorry-sorry" in the first line.

Great! So now what?!? It took me another two hours of experimentation to fix the problem, but I managed to figure it out and once again I'm feeling pretty smug.

But, gee! Of all the blogs in the world, how did I manage to cross lines with this one? How did it happen? Just like I'll never know why my husband's sound dock plays reggae every morning at nine, I'll probably never know the answer to this question either. It's just another Question for the Universe. Jadi sorry-sorry!

Sunday Morning Reggae?

I didn't sleep well last night. My son and girlfriend drove down from NYC and tried to sneak in to surprise us with a visit at 4:00 a.m., but their plot was foiled by Emmett, my ever faithful watchdog.

I finally fell back asleep sometime after 6:00 a.m. and at 8:45 Emmett decided he'd had enough of that stuff and he encouraged me to get up and let him out. While he was outside taking care of business and digging up old bones, I decided to check out my email in my sun porch converted office.

All of a sudden, my husband's sound dock which is located in the bookcase between our desks (we share an office) came alive filling the room with the sounds of reggae. I looked at the time on my computer and it was straight up nine o'clock. I swear this has never happened before. I just stared at the sound dock in complete amazement. Then I sort of got into the groove.

Our landscape is still a frozen tundra from an unprecedented amount of snow that was dumped on us a couple of weeks ago and I'm really feeling the winter blues. The sunlight streaming into the sun porch and the sounds of the tropical music nearly transported me from Siberia to a sunny, sandy beach with the sound of quiet waves in the background, shady palm trees and suntanned, muscled gods serving fruity drinks with tiny umbrellas. Ahh, what the right music can do for you!

My husband finally put in an appearance and I asked him if he'd somehow set his sound dock to play reggae at 9:00 a.m. and he was clueless. So what happened? I realize that I may never know. But I like to think that someone or something out there knew exactly what I needed to help cure my winter blues.

Lone Silver Sequin

I stepped out of the shower today to find a lone silver sequin twinkling up at me from my fluffy turquoise bathmat. Hello, I thought, how did you get there? I haven't worn sequins in ages and I haven't used it in my artwork in eons. And then I started to mentally kick myself for swearing off Facebook during Lent because I wanted to pose this question to my friends online.

I could already imagine their responses. The ladies would definitely answer. I already know whose answers will be imaginatively funny and whose will be sarcastic and borderline lewd. The men, however, will remain silent on this subject. None of them will want to risk revealing their secret sequins fetishes.

It's a shame that in our society sequins can only be respectably worn by straight women, gay men, figure skaters and ballroom dancers. Look at the number of supposedly straight football players who have participated on Dancing With The Stars and have confessed to loving their be-sequined costumes. I mean really, wouldn't our lives be much happier and brighter if everyone could incorporate sequins into their every day wardrobes?

I want to know the answers to questions like these, but more importantly; I want to know why that lone silver sequin wasn't on my bathmat before I got into the shower.