This week I was so busy that time actually slowed down, and I felt like I was trying to do lunges across the bottom of a pool. Now, overall, it’s good to be busy because it distracts me from feeling guilty about converting my disposable income into frivolous things like teeth whitening strips and manchego cheese. But yesterday was especially terrible and unholy, and I shall exhaustively detail it to impart just an iota of the suffering to you, gentle reader.

First, I discovered that the Mac OS 10.3.6 update is a lulu, in that I got the kernel panic curtain of doom when it was 80% installed, and my powerbook refused to start up past the chime. I had a presentation that afternoon and needed to burn a CD of stuff I had not backed up yet. I called to berate Apple, and an unflappable woman named Shalonda mandated that I use the system restore disc. So there I sat, shrieking “Twenty-nine minutes!” at the progress bar. Luckily, it turned out to go much faster. I cursed the Fins and the Danes and all the Asians as their language packs were installed, holding up American ME, ME, goddammit, ME. In the end, I did not lose any data, and I know this is because God approves of the high moral standards of this great nation.

Then I almost got killed by some BeUro trash driving a black Kompressor, but luckily MY German car, assembled in Mexico, is sufficiently maneuverable to compensate for total idiots being allowed to do things like drive. I still could not reach my intended destination because a marching band was, well, marching down the street. They were followed by a band of Morrissey impersonators, waving handmade banners decrying our reliance on foreign oil. I made that last one up, but it would have been great.

Then I had to sit in a small office and teach someone how to use Dreamweaver, something I had stupidly promised about nine months ago.

Sample dialogue:

oaf: “So these pages are Word documents?”

me: “No.”

oaf, later: “So we measure things with pixels because everyone has different fonts on their computers?”

me: “No.”

It is hard to be the caretaker of the little creatures of nature. I realized that I am almost a year into my retirement, and I should really stop being eccentric and “working.” So from here on out, I only do work that I like, which means no more front-end coding whatsoever, even if you lit a match under my left foot. And Mai Tais, we’ll have lots of those. It’s about setting limits, America.