Schlump day

Some people call Wednesdays “hump days.” To me, they’re more like “sinkhole days.” I do a lot of chores and errands on Monday and Tuesday–a holdover pattern from my former job which is slowly disintegrating–and Wednesday is sort of like my Monday. It’s hard to get focused.

I’m sure people are thoroughly bored with the Account Cancelation Saga by now, so I’ll keep today’s update brief. Nada. If the nice man in Tech Support yesterday did give the message to Billing as he promised, Ms. Billing saw no reason to attempt to contact me today with any follow-up, not even to leave a message. Maybe she didn’t make it to work this morning. Pepperell’s official snow total for today was seven inches, largely washed away by deluging rain, but Fitchburg logged fifteen inches of the stuff, and Leominster is right next to Fitchburg. According to the tracking number, my certified letter was not delivered today. Maybe they tried and no one was there to sign for it.

I called Verizon and after wandering the voice mail menu wilderness for a while and waiting on hold for a while longer, I talked to a live person to see what’s involved in canceling the second phone line, when I’m ready to do that. Fortunately, Verizon does not require 30 days notice or any other such nonsense. I just need to call them and ask for the line to be disconnected.

I haven’t even walked down for the newspaper today. My driveway is a lake on top of ice. We’re getting a respite now, but tomorrow it’s supposed to pour rain all day and evening. Flood watches have been posted.

I’ve been finishing the xhtml and css coding for my author website. I’m using the W3C Markup Validation Service, this absolutely wonderful free online tool. You write your code, upload the file to the server, go to the Validator and enter the URL, and it immediately tells you…how much you suck, basically. But I have long experience in debugging code, so I know that most of the time, “48 errors and 17 warnings” means you left a quotation mark out somewhere and created this cascading domino effect down the whole page. I’ve gotten everything fixed, and three times the file was perfect the very first time. My author website is still pretty small, too.

I’m also reading PHP and MySQL tutorials. Sometimes simple logic is just such a relief. That’s why writing code is a form of relaxation for me! No beating up the muse, no creative blocks, no gut-wrenching emotion (except for throwing things at the monitor because I can’t find the last bug in my code)! All my f-lists seem to be an unending wail of woe this week. 🙁 As norda said, this has been one hellishly long February.

I’m writing this LJ post because I need to break and do cycling, and I don’t wanna. :-p But I’ll have to say a few things about True Blood and my opinions of it. I’ve pedaled through five and half episodes now.

I hate the opening credits–hate the music, hate the visuals, really, seriously hate them. Ptooey!!! I’ve been surprised that the show deals so little with vampires per se. I’m up to the sixth episode and Bill is just starting to evolve as a character; the other vampires so far (the ones at Bill’s house and the Fangtasia club) have all been mind-bogglingly cliched and hokey. I thought the show might push the envelope a little more creatively, but I guess TV vampires are restricted to a very narrow rut, even on HBO. I’m kind of enjoying the human characters, but I feel like I’m watching Southern Exposure more than Angel. I love Lafayette, he’s my favorite character in the show. 🙂 Jason is…come on, no one can be that dumb, he’d forget to keep breathing! True Blood does keep me pedaling, which is all I ask of exercycle videos, but I expected a bit more from it, from all that I’d heard.