Arrrgg!!!

The results of the eye exam today were great and I was given the go ahead to order new lenses which we will do on Friday (payday) and best news of all: it should only take four working days before they are ready so I have an excellent chance of having them in time for Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon on the 24th.

When I sat down here after dinner and dishes I was pleased at the early start I was getting, at how ambitious and energetic I still felt even after the stress and energy expended today to get ready for and then go to my third post-op eye exam. I was planning to prepare a book review for one of the books I had finished and which had to go back to the library this morning. I'd spent last night's session taking notes on two of those books and know that if I'm going to prepare a review without the book beside me it had better be within the next 20-50 hours or so for the longer I wait the less reliable my memory will be.

I'd spent the hour of kitchen clean-up thinking about and composing sentences and paragraphs and outlines in my head. I was eager to proceed. I have too many barely begun book reviews in my files as is, sitting there waiting for me to re-order the books and when they wait too long the chances are I'll have to practically re-read the book. And they often wait and wait and wait because my library card is full to bursting most of the time with 40-60 items checked out and 20-40 lined up in my requests queues.

So I was motivated and eager and had the energy and my eyes weren't fatigued (partly because I hadn't already spent hours and hours reading because of the eye doctor appointment) so I opened a draft in Blogger. But then decided to first finish dealing with my email inbox which project had been interrupted when I was called to dinner. This involved opening a PDF file linked in one email. Which took endless minutes to open and then crashed the browser. After which I was sent to a Microsoft error report page which recommended I download the latest version of Adobe which had addressed the bug that caused the crash.

During the download I was informed that I needed to give Firefox permission to install add-ons from the Adobe site and that took me a good fifteen minutes to figure out how to do. And just as I got the website added to the permissions list the Adobe program proper alerted me that it had a download ready to install. I thought it was the same one I thought I'd begun from the Microsoft error report page but I'd not looked at the edition numbers closely enough as the download the Adobe program was asking to install was 8 point something while the one recommended by the error report was 9 point something but I didn't realize this until after clicking install.

So I waited patiently through the install of 8 point something, following its directions which included closing all open PDF files and all Adobe windows other than the download/install window which meant I had to close Firefox with all tabs including email, blogger post draft and several others relating to tasks I had lined up for this work session.

Then when the install was complete I was informed that there was another update available (9) and highly recommended so I started the download (over 40 MB) and waited patiently for it to complete and then install.

After the install I was informed that Adobe need to restart my system to complete the install. I do feel lucky that it at least asked first. Because that gave me a chance to close the other programs I had open properly. Especially WhizFolder which when not closed by its protocol will not remember which windows (files) were open and their positions on the desktop and when that happens it can take me up to 30 minutes to recreate my preferred arrangement.

And then there was iTunes which had a video podcast on pause which if I had not been able to mark it as new before closing the program might have been auto-deleted during the shutdown or reloading of the program.

Luckily I didn't have a Free Cell game in progress so I could just close that along with Live Messenger and the Onscreen Keyboard which I keep up sometimes for the convenience of being able to mouse keystrokes when editing or surfing or using keyboard shortcuts.

So. Once I had all programs closed properly I clicked 'restart' on the download dialog that I'd left sitting there and waited patiently through the shutdown and then waited patiently through the reloading of my desktop. And by the time I was free to open Whiz (where the notes for the reviews are stored) and the browser again I'd lost 90 minutes and all my oomph. I heard the echoes of a wailed 'Arrrggh!!!' in my head which reminded me of the picture I'd recently seen on art.com (click the pic to see its catalog page) and I decided to go with a flat out whine post for tonight.