Okay, last post of the day. Promise.
Unfortunately, this is gonna be a bit of a whiny post.
Part 1: Kill Your TV
Yesterday I made a comment to Chris about how dumb I feel lately. The synapses in my brain don't quite connect, I feel like I can rarely hold my end of a conversation, because halfway through I'll completely forget what we are talking about and what I was going to say. Names and titles and simple words escape my vocabulary. Collegues are almost afraid to talk to me knowing what they'll get themselves into. Why am I getting so dumb? Considering I've never tried illegal substances, it can't be blamed on pot. And I don't drink enough to blame it on liquor. I would blame it on sleep deprivation, but I feel that's only part of it, as I'm at least getting 7 hours of sleep a night (better than High School, when I was pulling all As in AP classes). So it finally struck me. It's the TV. Television is making me into a moron.
For years I hardly watched any TV, if any. It's only been in the past two years that I've started turning it on randomly, to relax and not worry about stuff. The past few months it's reached its peak, though. I get home from work around 5:30 and I have nothing to do for the rest of the night. Chris is gone most the time with school or work. Almost everyone else I know are students, so they never have time to get together (and I got tired of making plans only to have them cancel on me). Plus, I'm usually kinda tired once I get home and don't really care to go back out. So what do I do? I turn on the TV and I work on the computer (usually simultaneously). That statistic about people watching 7 hours of TV a day? That's me. There are about 7 tv shows I really care about seeing in a given week, but I'll watch useless TV if it's my only option. And it's rotting my brain.
Lucky for me, I tell Chris, the seasons are ending. Half my shows have had their season finale... the rest are one or two episodes away. So I tell Chris "As soon as these season finales air, I need to stop watching so much TV." (I cannot state with enough emphasis how much 22 year old Kendra would have scoffed at 25 year old Kendra for her TV dependence).
Today, Chris and I walk into the apartment at the same time after work and school. Something smells really weird. We scour the house looking for the culprit, and can't find anything, but that strong smell is still there. Finally, Chris goes to turn on the TV.
Nothing happens.
We had a storm about an hour earlier. The lights flickered at work. I notice that a couple of clocks are blinking, so obviously the power went out here, too. Nothing else on the same power strip has been affected, though. Just the TV. My beautiful, 27 inch TV is gone.
No Gilmore Girls for me.
Now, believe it or not, I think this is hilarious. This kind of stuff happens to me a little too often, to tell you the truth. Whenever I have an addiction-of-sorts that I can't seem to control, or don't really care about controlling, God steps in and makes it impossible for me to continue. I had a $25/week espresso habit in college. One day it dawned on me that my espresso addiction was a little over the top, but I wasn't concerned about it, and certainly didn't plan to cut back. Soon after I became completely intolerant to coffee. Not just regular coffee, not just espresso, but decaf, too. I shake, my vision goes weird, and I feel like I'm going to pass out. And my veins HURT. I still can't drink much of it... maybe a decaf with lots of milk once a week or so, and that's only after I had to stop completely for 2 years. So when my TV is destroyed a day after I realize it's making me into a dumb sloth, I'm not all that surprised. It's just par for the course.
Chris is taking this a little harder than I am. He's more concerned about the destruction of a good piece of electronics (that should have lasted another 15 years), and the cost of replacing it, especially with our tight budget. Even worse is the knowledge that I have no intention of running right out and replacing it.
Especially considering I can't tell you how many times in the past two hours I've almost reached for the remote.
Part 2: Good Grief!
The second part of my saga is the fact that one other thing has been damaged due to this storm. Our router no longer sends signals through the ethernet cables, but somehow the wireless portion still works. I'm thanking God that my computer wasn't fried, but it's pretty frustrating that now I can't get internet to my Mac. I had some business to take care of, too, and there are all sorts of things on my Mac (emails and email addresses and such) that are on there, and do me no good without internet. So I've had to keep transfering files to my thumb drive and over to Chris's laptop, only to discover that Microsoft's e-mail program for a Mac (Entourage) is completely incompatible with Microsoft's e-mail program for a PC (Outlook). Can you believe it? How is a person supposed to be convinced to switch from a Mac to a PC if they can't even properly transfer their contact lists? Entourage only exports contacts as a Tab-delimited file, which amazingly is complete incompatible with Outlook's "Import Tab-delimited file" command, or ANY OTHER Outlook Import command. I tried converting the tabs into Windows-friendly tabs, I tried importing it into Excel, saving it as an Excel file, and then importing it into Outlook... nothing works. Nothing. So back and forth I go. Stupid computers.
I want to close this sob-fest by pointing out how blessed we are that neither computer was injured in the storm, that at least wireless internet works (and that's what we use 80% of the time), and that absolutely nothing more major happened than a busted TV and a loss of internet to one computer. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to whine about the things that go wrong. I mean really, what fun would that be?