Lest you think this entire day was going to be a downer, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to see that Gene Simmons knows how to make the Less Than face too.

Only I think his might actually be Greater Than.  Whatever.  Anybody who can make math with his face is a friend of mine, even though I don’t like how rude he was on that NPR interview a while back.

We had a very nice weekend.  My parents came to town and we celebrated our first anniversary and their 30th; I fear we’ll never catch up at this rate.  We had good food and drink and fun.  Saturday we were thinking about going to the State Fair, but we decided against it, since we haven’t had a full weekend at home since we got back from Norway and needed the recovery time.  We just bummed around the house, did various household tasks, and went to the movies.  Yesterday we bummed around some more and did more household tasks, including cooking up the zucchini blossoms I bought at the Farmers Market on Saturday.  In the evening, we got together with my friend Mose and met his girlfriend Anaïs, who are headed back to Barcelona soon.

That nice weekend makes Monday all the more bleak.  I woke up with a swollen gum, which according to my dentist just Happens Sometimes and there’s nothing I can do about it.  It’s painful and annoying.  I thought about calling in sick today, but I didn’t want to leave my coworkers without my help.  City High is back in session, which makes the drive to work take twice as long with five times as many new drivers being reckless.  Work is going to be crazy all week, and not crazy like last week where there were a lot of friendly, relaxed people who were planning ahead and needed help.  This week will be the procrastinators who waited until the actual first day of classes to work on their websites, and they’ll be irritable when they find out that we can’t just wave a magic wand and have everything immediately perfect.  Certain processes take up to 2 days.  It was in all the communications you’ve received.  Deal with it.

Worst of all, I fear my beloved Powerbook is toast.  I still have a few more tricks I want to try (possibly including a data backup and then a clean install of the OS), but it’s not looking good.  It’s been kernel panicking and forcing reboot before it even gets fully started up.  I don’t know why, because I haven’t made any changes lately.  The only thing I can pin down is that it got banged around a bit in an airplane last month, but I hadn’t seen any problems until this weekend.  I’ve been halfway shopping for a MacBook anyway, but it would have been nice to get Norway paid off and possibly a new water heater before I drop a couple grand on personal computing.

Grump grump grump.