finally…

my computer broke a couple of weeks ago. it was working when i left for work, and when i got home, it wasn’t, and it wouldn’t restart. after fucking around with it for a couple days, i discovered that it was probably the power supply that had failed, but i didn’t have the time to determine if it was for sure or not, and i had to go play with the hippies for 4 days, so i didn’t get around to actually doing something about it until today. i actually took my computer somewhere, bear computers, and they fixed it for me while i was at work. now my main linux computer works again, which is good because windows, which was taking the place of linux (sort of) during the interim, seems to have developed a disagreement with the monitor – something linux doesn’t do – so i’m thinking something may be wrong with the video card, or whatever laptops have instead of video cards. thrill-a-minute… i get one computer working and another one breaks. i wonder if it will ever end?

the oregon country fair is over for another year – my second year attending, and tonight is the second anniversary of my injury. the hippie ineptitute factor seems to have attacked someone else this year. stuart and i drove to portland wednesday night, and proceded to veneta on thursday morning, i had no problems getting registered, we drove in to chela mela meadow(!) and unpacked the car in record time – i finished setting up camp around 1:30. i still had to wait in line about an hour and a half to get the priveledge of paying the hippie $5 to cut my wrist band off and make a laminated card out of it (the wristbands remind me too much of being in the hospital, and besides, the laminated card is a “collectors item”), but all in all, OCF was excellent. we played at the ritz sunday night, i actually took 5 one-hour saunas in 4 days, and left feeling cleaner than i came. it rained on saturday, but we were more prepared for the rain than we were in vancouver, so it wasn’t that bad, and besides, our stage – the “morningwood odditorium” – was one of the few venues that was covered, and so we got the people who were looking for shelter from the rain right when we were starting our shows. i latched on to the end of one of the parades featuring “The Fighting Instruments of Karma”, a group from seattle(!) which features a sousaphone player who has a really beautiful silver sousaphone, and took a whole bunch of pictures of people taking pictures, which i’m going to post in one form or another once i get my mac working. i got my little sivalingam “wrapped” in silver by a craftsman, so now i’m a “lingayat”, or a “person who wears a miniature sivalingam around their neck”, something i’ve wanted for quite a while. we did a burlesque show friday night that was so well recieved that we did another one on sunday night, after the ritz. hacki was there, who is a clown from germany that was part of the moisture festival, and his acts were sheer genius. it was also really cool to hang out with him backstage and smoke pot. i didn’t even remember that i had a computer until i came home…

of course, i came home and was suddenly struck with how much work there is to do… i still have a couple rooms full of boxes that need to be unpacked, i still have no shelves in the office, so i’ve got nowhere to unpack those boxes anyway, i’ve got 4 incense orders and a murti that i’ve got to order for customers, i’ve got to get the post office box and the billing address for hybrid elephant changed in reality and on the web site, but i still need an ethernet hub so that i can have more than one computer on at once…

and then there’s my job… sigh… i REALLY HATE being a wage slave… i returned to work on tuesday, and majid was frantic because “internet went down on thursday”, the day i left, and majid couldn’t figure out how to get it working again until monday – apparently earthlink changed something and it required that majid reboot his ethernet router – but he couldn’t figure out why his email wasn’t working… he wanted me to reboot the router, and unplug the router and connect the computer directly to internet, and a bunch of other useless tasks, and didn’t think that it was something wrong with outlook at all, until i looked at the server settings and discovered that his outgoing email server was set to 127.0.0.1… and then there was the job that i had sent to proof just before i left, which returned with an approval while i was gone. majid said he looked for the file, but couldn’t find it, so he ended up reproducing the file based on a scan of the file that i had sent out, except that it was wrong, and he couldn’t figure out how to fix it. i found the file in about 2 minutes, determined that he actually hadn’t looked for it – because its name included the work order number, which is how i found it – fixed the problem that majid had introduced by scanning the document and had plates ready for it in about 5 minutes… there were several other jobs like that, which were problems because majid doesn’t know what he’s doing, which i fixed almost immediately… but this is only wednesday! it feels like it should be thursday, because of all the screwups, chaos and hassle i’ve had to deal with since returning, combined with the fact that i REALLY didn’t want the oregon country fair to end just yet anyway…

meanwhile, my physical birthday was monday, big deal, and the cirque de flambe performances at sand point/magnuson park start in 19 days.