"There's only one hard and fast rule in running: sometimes you have to run one hard and fast."








Saturday, January 15, 2011

Bitchslapped by Karma

As if, after having little nice to say about my father on his 100th birthday, he reached from beyond the grave to teach me a lesson (and keeping pictures from posting), everything sort of fell apart for me in the past 24 hours.

The furnace motor has a bad bearing - I think - the motor either squeals or rattles when starting. It's 7 degrees. It started Friday night of a 3 day weekend. I don't have enough money in my checking account to cover the repair if I have an emergency call, so I'll live with the noise until the rates drop. That holds true even if the thing just seizes and I have to resort to space heaters.

Water from ice dam melt - yes, I've been chipping ice for two weeks straight and, again, it's 7 degrees, yet the ice seems to melt (and yet grow larger, defying laws of reason, if not nature) - is running between the shingles on the outside of the house. Not yet on the inside, fortunately. But there's going to be damage, and probably mold. Not covered by insurance.

My mold allergies haven't been too bad lately. Because... it's 7 degrees. Remember? I've said it twice. Yet, I seem to be wheezing again. I should get it checked out. My health insurance has lapsed, however.

I've been getting in the miles of training each day, more as a sanity check than anything else. I've ripped my favorite tights, my favorite wind pants, my favorite turtle-necked tee and one of my favorite gloves all in the past week. Being able to afford either heating the house or new clothes, I'm digging out running clothes that are from companies that haven't been around in 20 years (remember Bill Rodgers wear? New Zealand?); I should be in a lime green polyester tracksuit by Friday.

It's supposed to be cold today, tomorrow, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. [This site says 26 degress Monday! Woohoo!] I'm looking forward to seeing weather reports tonight to see the predictions for next Saturday already. My favorite indoor places to run are all closed. I can't get to them anyway. The car won't start.

I am not handling the little stressors well. Gonna be a rough week...

4 comments:

PiccolaPineCone said...

SteveQ. Thanks. Really. I replied by e-mail.

Glaven Q. Heisenberg said...

Yikes!

I can't really help with the rest, but with the pix ...

I've never posted the the way you're trying to. It doesn't sound like a reliable method and it doesn't surprise me that it's failing you. I'm more surprised that it ever worked, actually.

Can you download the pix to your desktop and upload them to blogger from there? That is, post them the normal way? If you're doing this from a public computer that doesn't allow downloading to the desktop, can you save them to a flash drive and upload them from there?

Do you have even a rudimentary graphics program into which to paste the graphics when you cut the pix from the e-mail? Windozes usually has something - MS Paint or some shit ... I dunno. Because then you could save them to your desktop or flash drive as jpgs and upload them to blogger from there.

It kinda sounds to me as though the way you're doing it now, the connection to the original source of the picture is being maintained and the source is unavailable unless you're logged into or connected to it.

I just looked at the code of you last post, and that seems to be the case, because the source for the first picture is this:

""http://64.4.56.7/att/GetInline.aspx?messageid
=e0796df2-1d07-11e0-a48d-00215ad582c4&attindex=0&cp=-1&attdepth=0&imgsrc=cid%3aX.MA1.
1294698027%40
[...] _aebf137f8dd830a5991a856bd3d468
ad47b5f991810f8d7fabea86feaf900c
9a&oneredir=1""

I edited about 100 characters out of that because it includes some of your hotmail login info, and so it seems the post is trying to retrieve these images directly from your account and, of course, is failing.

This is NOT the way to do it.

Also? Just in case, delete this comment after you read it. This will be the one and only time I'll ask you to do that. :-)

Good luck!

And good luck staying warm. It's in the mid-30s here, but started out as 10 degrees this morning.

shannon said...

Hang in there, Steve. I'm sorry to hear that this week has been a tough one for you. Not that it's any consolation, but everyone has days/weeks that are best forgotten.

A bit of levity here, ... you may start a new fashion trend with the green polyester track suit! :)

Beth said...

I'm sorry you were having a tough week. The weather stinks. I'm starting to think that anything over 10 is not that bad.