Teresa has decided to become a full-time groupie.

Not just the type who gushes about her band online, pins posters around her room and writes “Mrs. Bon Jovi” on her notebooks, although she does that too (not the Mrs. part, she said she has no interest in leaving our marriage or breaking his; I believe she has in mind more of a sophisticated arrangement, like a time-share). No, she plans to be the one who follows her band, concert to concert, city to city, country to country, becoming friends and confidant to the road crew. The fact that we’re broke has no bearing on this. You can’t deny your calling. She has already begun looking into which countries allow you to sell your children.

Yesterday, on an extended and carefully planned last minute whim, she flew to Boston to see Bon Jovi in concert. She’s even now in the air on her way back, possibly without waiting for the plane. With her are the well-wishes, advice, and (in some cases) open envy of the other ladies on the Bon Jovi forum she frequents. They have kept up on her doings from other forum members at the concert who are calling in song-by-song updates, and from me, as I’ve been hearing from Teresa and posting on her behalf with her account. (I am, apparently, “Mr. Teresa.”)

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Well, that was fun.

Dreamweaver was giving me problems yesterday so I rebooted. Or, rather, I turned my computer off and it came back up partway. The graphic image of your motherboard logo or graphics card that you see for a second before your system starts loading? It stopped there. That’s kinda weird.

Memory was fine, checked it in different slots and tried different memory sticks.
Blew out all the dust everywhere.
Video card was fine.
Unplugged all the drives, same thing.
Had it down to either the power supply, the motherboard, or the chip. None of which I could easily test without buying the components.

Here’s the difficult bit: Office Depot has a clearance price on an HP Pavillion computer that’s better than what I have now: $399 after rebate. Tempting. Read the rest of this entry »

According to my daily balance e-mail, I was suddenly about $200 down. While it’s possible it could be from backed up gas station charges, I checked anyway.

And lo and behold, there were 5 pending charges from companies I’d never heard of and have never done business with: passhlp.com, kdeweb.net, fileservicehelp.com, com-pay.com, and userhelponline.com. The charges were all for amounts around $39.

My bank can’t dispute them till they actually charge against my account, so I have to wait till they clear and then get them taken off, right before a banking holiday and long weekend. In the meantime, I killed the card to prevent more of my money being siphoned and now I get to wait for the new card and the fun of updating anyplace where my old card appears.

And I’m not one to throw my card number around. Amazon has it, and PayPal, and a few companies I have standing orders with. Mostly I use PayPal. So somewhere out there, someone I trusted has spread my card number around.

It also just reminds me that there are companies out there whose standard operating practice is to openly steal from me. Always a good thing to remember. And to check my balance regularly.

Bastards.

Teres is curled across the top of the bed, surfing the web on the laptop. I come in and lie down perpendicular, with my head touching hers. She’s lying with her head on her right arm; her hand is now in front of my stomach. She tickles it, and this happens:

“I do believe I was just tickled.”
“Did you get a good look at the culprit?”
“I’m still waiting for the field team to finish their work, but I’m pretty sure that it was… you!”
“No, I’m sure you were mistaken. It was a wooly worm.”

I grab the offending finger and hold it (carefully) up.

“You are a wooly worm? A four-foot-eleven wooly worm?”
She pouts. “All the other wooly worms made fun of me. They wouldn’t let me join their wooly worm gam–”

Now we are both giggling, trying to get our words out.

“You’re remarkably woolyless, for a wooly worm.”
“I thought you’d prefer it if I shaved.”
“That’s very thoughtful.”
“Thank you.”
“So you’re like, what, the Godzilla of wooly worms?”
“It’s a lonely existence.”
“So there should be a young Japanese wooly worm that will become your friend, and then be the only one who can stop you.”
“Why would I want someone to stop me?”
“Good point. If a wooly worm comes up to you and speaks Japanese, gish him.”
“I don’t know if I’d recognise Japanese or Chinese or Korean or… or… any other…”
“…ean,” we finish together, giggling again.
“So any wooly worm that speaks anything to you other than American, gish him.”
“What about an English wooly worm?”
“Better play it safe.”
“Canadian?”
“You can let him go, he’ll be more polite than the American ones. In fact, come to think of it, the American wooly worms are as likely to shoot you as any oth–”
“This is how Godzilla gets started!”
“Excuse me?”
“I totally get it. You never know which tiny creature is going to betray you and it gets easier and makes more sense to just start gishing all of them until you get fed up and go back into the ocean.”

She crossed her arms over her chest, outrageously indignant and red-faced from holding in the giggles. I hugged her and assured her that I would protect her from all the attacking wooly worms who would dare treat her wrong. She would be free, I promised, to do whatever she wanted without fear of military reprisal.

She said, “Oh, good” and started tickling me again.

This sort of thing happens a lot.

I turn 40 this year. I was joking with my friend Dave (who passed that milestone last year) today and mentioned I was just waiting to see which part would drop off. We made some crude speculations along those lines and laughed about it. A few hours later I bent to open a bag of dog food and got some nice stabbing back pains that settled into a steady ache, which hasn’t gone away yet. Usually my rhetorical questions don’t get answered quite so quickly… Before the medically-minded mention it, this is not an age-related thing. Lower back pain is a common ailment, especially for people like me with lifelong bad posture who spend the vast bulk of their lives riding a desk. I just enjoyed the irony. I’m off to take a nice 4-in-the-morning walk around the woods and a hot shower, just thought I’d bitch a bit. Ow. Ow. Ow.

Happy New Year! It’s that magical time of year when the witty columnist dives deep into his or her own personal pool of boiling creativity and emerges, dripping, with one of exactly two of the only possible column topics available: resolutions for the new year, or predictions for the new year. It’s enough to make you long for February to come, just to get past them all.

I, however, am far more imaginative than that, and so I’m going with the third topic: predicting what will happen with my resolutions. Ready? Let’s go!

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So Christmas is coming fast. And you haven’t shopped. And your loved ones will recognize, from painful experience, anything from the somewhat limited gift selections available at your corner gas station. What to do, what to do?

You can try pulling off the old “Christmas has become too commercialized so I’m donating to charity in my friends’ names at the very last minute instead” routine, but it doesn’t work for everyone, especially when the charity listed is mostly famous for its happy hour and all-you-can-eat wings.

Instead, try performing some useful, thoughtful kindnesses for your friends and family that they’ve put off, never knew about, or would never consider. Show that you’re really thinking about your friends’ well-being by making their lives easier and less stressful in some small way. Some examples:

Do their laundry. Take away your friends’ tired feeling of dread of looming household chores by sneaking over to their house to wash, dry, and fold all of their clothes. Take them out to a laundry service if you need to. Wouldn’t that be great to come home to? Especially if your friends have never had anything dry-cleaned before, and you just know that some of those delicate items you found stashed in secret places in their closets will need careful attention. Fold their clothes, add a touch of lilac, and get them back by Christmas morning for a delightful and unexpected surprise.

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I’ve always been amused at the notion of trading in your car. People actually do that, I’m told, cleaning and painting and fixing up their existing vehicle to get a little money toward the new car they’re eyeing, even though the dealer most likely gauged the worth of their wreck as soon as they pulled into the lot and mentally adjusted his invoices to match before ever strapping on his smile.

Trading in a car, for me, would be an exercise in futility, and I hate exercise. I shed them instead, casting them aside only after I’ve wrung every last ounce of usefulness out of them. Something like a hermit crab whose previous home started smoking and stalling at stoplights.

I’ve rarely stuck with a specific type of vehicle; when you buy based on an immediate need and whatever’s in your pocket by looking over the ads while sitting in your half-ton, still-pinging paperweight, the choice of make, model, or color rarely enters into your figuring. A wheel on at least three corners and some way to make it go and stop more or less on demand would be the high bar, with anything else an optional extra.

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I’ve always prided myself on being a minimalist traveler. Going away for a month? Give me a pair of pants and two shirts — three, if formal wear is required — and I’m good. I’ll take only as many shoes as I can comfortably wear at one time, and whatever necessary toiletries that cannot easily be gleaned from a motel bathroom, 7-11 or local shelter. I want to travel light and, short of losing weight, this is the best way about it.

There are many excellent reasons to limit your encumbrances to one bag. Packing is faster. Getting through security is almost trivial, as is getting out of the airport. You have fewer things to accidentally leave behind and startle the housekeeping staff. It’s suddenly much easier to be caught up in an exciting cross-country web of intrigue since you won’t have to ask the mysterious blonde stranger to wait while you find your garment bag and collection of multi-colored totes. There’s a quiet satisfaction to be had, knowing you can stand up and go anywhere at a moment’s notice.

And it’s a satisfaction I relished, before the electronic age. Now I’m finding I may have one or two extra things to haul along.

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