Moody Blues

Don't be swayed by my title - I'm not in the middle of "the blues" but I guess, by my one daughter's logic when I grumped to her about some things that were among my "annoyances" today, I am being really moody and just not in a good mindset. Somewhere amongst the things I'm finding annoying this far today, there is an analogy to be found but I'm not just sure what it is.

Maybe it's just that these are some things that annoy me and for what reasons, I don't really know except that they do because they exist.

Okay - lets start with this one. It really irks the living daylights out of me that certain individuals in this household will use the bathroom and use THE LAST PIECE OF TOILET PAPER on the holder and won't bother to replace the roll with a new one. Even when there is a wooden holder sitting on top of the tank of the commode and it is supposed to have three rolls of toilet paper on there at ALL TIMES so when the roll on the holder beside the commode is empty, one just has to reach up and put a new roll on the holder there. Then, when that task is all completed, reach in the cupboard and get another roll to put on the wooden spindle on top of the toilet tank or at least make sure, when you take the last roll off that spindle that you put three more rolls on there. The objective in this exercise (apparently one of total futility) is so that no one will ever find themselves in the dilemma of Elaine on one of the old Seinfeld shows where she is in a bathroom stall and there is NO TOILET PAPER available - and the person in the adjacent stall doesn't have "A Square to Spare!"

I realize this is not a live or death type situation - just one that does annoy me though. Especially since it seems to be two select individuals in the household here who haven't yet grasped the concept of doing things in advance so others will not find themselves in the "no square to spare" type of dilemma. Paying it forward is the analogy that comes to mind there I guess.

Another thing that really irks me is when people put dishes away in the cupboards here and can't comprehend the methods I have been trying to employ with respect to where dishes go, etc. Now I am far from being Martha Stewart and a model of efficiency and neatness, etc., but some things just seem so simple to me and yet, to others are a foreign entity and one of great complexity. The cupboards where I keep serving dishes and storage containers seem to be the big stumbling blocks here. What the heck is so difficult about the process of "nesting" containers? You put the largest container on the bottom and place smaller containers in that and so on and so forth. And you do this according to the type - round containers go together in one stack and rectangular ones in another stack, etc., etc. The whole thing is based on balance. I don't like to open the cupboard and see a large round container balanced -precariously - atop a smaller based square or rectangular one - especially if they are glass - cause I really don't want to have the thing come tumbling out at me, crashing on to the floor in a pile of glass bits and pieces on the floor. By the same token, even if it is plastic storage containers, I really get irritated when they come flying out at me when I open the cupboard doors too. I don't think this little tiny effort I'm trying to utilize here in one of my rare attempts at organization is too difficult to understand but judging by the way others here can't seem to follow that procedure, maybe I need to re-think my ideas on cupboard organization.

And, speaking of "organization" too, if you've been reading my blog the past three weeks now, you know I just got a new computer and you also know I have had some not exactly always pleasant experiences with the new computer and the new-to-me XP operating system.

Now, don't take this the wrong way here as I have nothing to hide on my computer now nor did I - to my knowledge - on the previous computer I had in my possession either. No porn or anything illegal you know. So, how come when it came time to get a new computer, the stuff I had on the old computer couldn't be saved and transplanted on to this one?

My main complaint there being my e-mail information which couldn't be saved and transferred to a cd or dvd and then re-inserted into this computer. Instead, I had to rebuild my e-mail address book by forwarding a kazillion e-mails to a webmail account and then, once this computer was set up and supposedly functioning, I then sent those e-mails back to me at this computer but I still then had to go through a very time consuming process then of re-entering all the data into my e-mail address book. ARRRGH.

And my e-mail software too, is another little issue that is currently annoying to me. I've used Eudora for my e-mail since back in the late 90's when I was working at the university and had my first e-mail account. Generally speaking, I like EUdora although several have commented to me that there are other e-mail software programs that THEY like better, etc., etc. I don't like webmail because I don't like the way it handles attachments and the way it opens them. I have a couple of webmail accounts but only use them when it is a matter of necessity.

And now that one glitch that was occurring between my Eudora e-mail and my computer seems to have been corrected with the most recent illness of the computer earlier this week, I really only have one other item that I have issues with and I can't figure out how to resolve this one. I have - to my knowledge - the most recent version of Eudora on my computer so it should have all the "bells and whistles" that go with that. And I had this problem too with Eudora on my other computer and because on that one I was running Windows 98, I couldn't upgrade the Eudora to the newest version but now I can and I did. However, way back, when I got my first computer and initially installed a much older version of Eudora, I didn't have this problem so why now?

What is it that is annoying me this much you ask? It's petty but to my style of file organization it's annoying. I like to set up mailboxes to save e-mails I receive into them. And I like to be able to set these mailboxes up in a manner that is easiest for me to use but right now, Eudora is preventing that from happening.

After I set up the first four or five mailboxes, Eudora has decided that all future mailboxes now must come under the headers of one of those first four or five I set up and I don't like it that way. I like to have as many general headers as I want and then divide them off into sub-headers as I see fit. If I start to get some e-mails that I want to save and which are perhaps of a political nature, I don't want to put them into a main header that says "Family" or "Friends" or "Writing" or whatever - I want it to have a main header of "Political" and then a sub-header under that as to who exactly the message came from. But Eudora has now decided I can't do that. And, try as I may, I can't find anything in their on-line manual to address how to set up my mailboxes to achieve that goal. Since I used to be able to do this with no problem whatsoever, I can not for the life of me figure out why I can't do it again. Personally, this whole thing is feeding into my own little private paranoia area and says to me that this computer has a mind of its own and it is working in conjunction with Eudora to slowly drive me slightly more nutso than I already am in my own right!

And also, how come if the police find someone they suspect of storing porn or other illegal components on a computer, THEY can go in and dig deeply and pull it all out to use as evidence against a person even though that person thought they had deep-sixed those particular items? If the things people have on their computers stay there in some form or other, apparently forever, why then can't we retrieve simple little things like a word document you might be working on that suddenly disappears or some such thing like that? We've all had things happen to us from time to time - you're writing an e-mail message and somehow, manage to bump a key and it ships that e-mail off into cyberspace, never to be found again to complete it or whatever. But, apparently if that e-mail or word document or picture or - ok you get the idea there - has one little thing about it that could be construed as illegal, immoral or fattening, it could be retrieved by the computer special police task force and used against us the owner of the computer.

And my final issue of the day and one which my daughter says makes no sense whatsoever to her but it is one that is annoying to me, so here goes with the information for you to come up with an answer for me.

Thursday night, I overheard the stepgranddaughter (Kate) ask Mandy (My daughter, her stepmother) if she was still going to need the neighbor's daughter to come over here tonight (Saturday nite) and babysit the two little ones here. Now, my question here was why do we need a babysitter to come over here when I will be here? The answer was "Well, to give you a night off so you can do something." Which brought up another question from me - "Do what? I have no place to go, no one to go someplace with, nothing planned at all, other than to stay home, play on the computer, read, knit, whatever, and none of those things would require that someone else come over here and charge a fee to be here too so there is an adult present to watch the two younger grandkids."

My daughters both tell me that this was meant as a nice gesture towards me to give me some time to myself since I deal with the kids most of the time while their parents work or if they need or want to go someplace and I don't mind doing that at all. Now, if I had somewhere I'd like to go tonight and my daughter and son-in-law also had plans that they wanted or needed to go someplace too and didn't want or couldn't take the children along, I could see the need for a baby sitter. And, yes it is nice that my daughter thought she was "giving me a break" but I'd have appreciated it more perhaps if she'd told me she was going to do that in the first place in a timely enough fashion that perhaps I could have made plans to do something outside the house for the evening. Not that it is likely I would find something to do or somewhere to go or someone to hang out with away from the house on a Saturday night, but don't just spring it on me a day before and expect that I will have something I can conjure up at a moment's notice there that I would enjoy doing - and that I can afford too - as opposed to my normal routine of staying home and doing my "normal" routine here, which includes being responsible then for the grandkids.

Does this make sense to anyone else besides me? My older daughter thinks I am being obnoxious about this and perhaps I am. I told her since she can't comprehend why I feel this way, it's because something like this has not yet happened to her and when it does, to come back and we can then compare notes about it and she can have some empathy patterns then. She didn't accept that answer very well either, I might add!

All of this still makes no sense to me - probably not to anyone reading this either. But, if it does and if you have any answers to these questions that are currently annoying me - giving me a major case of "moody blues" as it were, please feel free to contact me and let's talk about this.


And that's the end of my "Moody blues" report for today - also known as a mini-rant!