Takes 1-3: Wardrobe Malfunctions
1. On Wednesday morning, we actually got going in plenty of time to get Julianna to her language preschool. Until Alex discovered he was missing a shoe. Not his shoes. A shoe. We turned the house upside down, but we could not find that shoe. Knowing that my two non-verbal children could easily have hidden it (like the cornstarch and the icing from my cake class), I gritted my teeth and attempted not to shout at him as he got his hated yellow Crocs on and went out to the van. We now had eight minutes to make a fifteen minute drive. And in the van, Alex discovered…his shoe.
?????????????????????
2. We got Julianna to school and I rushed her inside. As I patted her bottom to get her moving into the classroom, I noticed a cute little butt crack showing. Uh oh, I thought, her diaper’s slipped. And so I reached down to pull it (and her skort) up. And discovered…you guessed it. No diaper. She was wearing her cute polka dotted skirt, and no diaper. Can we all say, What the….?
3. Then Wednesday night I went shopping for a new swimsuit, my old one being stretched out from nursing the last two children. More proof, as if I needed it, that clothing designers definitely do not make clothes with me in mind! When it was all over I came home with a size 14 top and a size 10 skirt, and Christian nearly choked when I told him it cost $47…and that regular price was $75!
Takes 4-7: The Virtue of a Virus (or: an illustration of our status as total techno lllllooosers!)
4. Last week, our computer freaked out and we had to send it to the omputer wizards, who took about twelve viruses off of it and loaded new malware onto it. We brought it home expecting good things, but didn’t really notice a difference in processing/interface speed. Then last night, up popped the message again, in the middle of nothing at all–as in, I wasn’t even working at the time; I came over to the computer to find the message: “Cannot open file (gibberish).exe. File is infected.”
5. Christian set the software to work. It found 7 more infected files, which for some reason the computer seemed reluctant to delete. Once he finally got rid of them, he realized why: We no longer had internet access. (Sigh.)
6. Two hours and a long call to Century Tel later, Christian got the internet up and running again. And in the process, he and the customer service guy had a discussion about whichlights were and were not lit on our DSL box, and why the shortcut to connect to the web wasn’t working. The guy said, “What do you mean? This is DSL. You don’t need to dial up.”
The long an the short of it? After THREE YEARS of paying for DSL service, we finally have it! Our jaws hit the floor when we started surfing the web, and saw the difference in speed.
7. The moral of the story? Sometimes a virus is a VERY GOOD THING. The pathetic part of the story? That we’ve lived here three years with what amounts to dialup on steroids, and we LIKED IT because it was so much faster than what we had before!!!!
Kathleen M. Basi 
Hilarious!
Once my in-laws asked my husband to figure out why the anti-virus software they bought wasn’t working. Upon examination he found that they had paid for the software online but never downloaded it. This was MONTHS after purchasing it.
Sometimes all you can say is “Oh, well!”
Hahaha! I don’t feel so bad now. Especially since half an hour after posting this morning, my husband had to unplug the computer again to take back to the gurus…because it STILL HAS A VIRUS ON IT!!! Argh!
I often wish we were Hobbits so we wouldn’t need shoes! My daughter lost her white shoes the morning of her first communion!!!! I’ll have to write about that, now that enough time has gone by for it to be funny.
Oy gevalt w/r/t your internet troubles! I once had to call in when my router went down, and the man on the phone told me to check which lights were lit up on the machine. The man was very patient while I told him I had to get a chair to stand on (the router was on top of a bookcase) and then quickly became worried when I let out an ear-piercing shriek. “There’s a spider on the router!” I yelled.
Truly, tech support workers are underpaid. 🙂
So apparently there is something to empathy vs. sympathy because reading 4-7 made me feel as badly for you as anything I’ve ever read of yours. The horror of using dialup for years when you could have had DSL! I realize that this is nothing compared to other things, but my natural reaction was just as strong.
I’m glad that you can use DSL now!
You know what I love about you, Rae? You can always, ALWAYS make me laugh! 🙂
Boy, the shoe story sounds like my morning routine!