Christmas Cheer

Baking the cookies was supposed to be relaxing, a way of soothing my stress. I had parchment sheets, and brown sugar and Crisco in the little pre-measured tubs, for crying out loud. I dumped the Crisco in the bowl and then noticed the brown sugar package had been opened. Had to drop everything to take it back to the store for an exchange. Back at home, I’ve got the Crisco and the sugar nicely blended, and I am ready to add eggs and vanilla. Ooops, there is only a dab of vanilla and I need about four dabs of vanilla. So, back to the store I go, griping all the way, ho, ho, ho, with the cheerful advice of the thirteen-year-old ringing in my ear: “You should get everything together before you start mixing, Mom.” Yeah, well, usually, I do. I finally got my feces consolidated, and got the cookies made, thinking tomorrow would surely be a better day.

And today, I spent most of the day trying to get connected to one of my Yahoo groups. I don’t often go into a bug-eyed, red rage where I can spit nails, crap fire, and lose my religion, but not being able to get to where I want to go on the Internet has been known to bring out the devil in me. Add to that the indignity of having a twenty-something tech-support nephew who treats you like a dumb little woman who can’t possibly understand the intricacies of these damn machines, and bam, you’ve got an explosion waiting to happen.

I had to get out of the house, had to go to that soothing mecca called WalMart, just to settle my nerves. After waiting patiently in line for fifteen minutes to make my small purchase, I was sufficiently calmed enough to come home and try again to hookup with cyberspace.

My Ad-aware program had been telling me for about a month that no new updates had been found. Lies, all lies. I figured I needed to check that little story out. I ended up downloading a newer version, running the scan, and eliminating over a thousand different little bugs by the time I had finished running the scan several times, on each family members’ screen name (with no help from aforementioned nephew, who will now be unceremoniously scratched from my Christmas list!). No wonder my poor computer could not move, it was nearly choking to death. I am proud to report my machine is now running faster than I ever need to go.

I have a teacher who makes these kinds of remarks about our computers at school, as though they are recalcitrant students: “oh, it won’t let me do that”, or “it’s thinking about it”. What drives me bonkers is that this is a machine, incapable of thinking, or keeping me from doing something, a machine, people, which means I should be able to be the boss, and not the machine.

Today at least, I have won.

And I will gloat.

Brave little woman conquers machine.