Ok, car problem is very nearly solved at this point. And thank God it's working out in my favor now.

About a half an hour ago, as I am starting to write this anyways, husband called me. Apparently the officer on the case had called him to let him know he had talked to the owner of the truck we suspected, and they admitted it was them.

Well, actually he said the two occupants were blaming each other, but that they both admitted it was that truck. And it is insured.

So on Friday we can go down to the police station and get a copy of the report so I can give it to the insurance, and hopefully get everything finalized.

This news came at a good time, because I had talked to my mom earlier today who had talked to her agent (I could not get ahold of mine. I guess she does not work Wednesdays) who said that if no one could be found, this incident would count as an accident for me, and my rates would go up and I would lose my accident free discount.

So I'm very glad that this is working out, and I feel so happy and relieved they admitted to it. That's one thing I can stop worrying about now.

Ps: new apartment is ready, just have to sign the paperwork and we can start moving. Praying that it will work out better.

Well, I guess chronological order is usually best.

Thursday around noonish, I hear upstairs neighbor throwing a huge fit with screaming, swearing, loud crashing/thumping, and complete with death threat to unknown person(s). Police notified, office notified. Police come and talk to him for about 20 minutes, but leave. Office does not give a rats ass, however does tell me that a different apartment is available.

Friday morning, leave with husband for doctor's appointment to see that my car was involved with a hit-and-run during the night. Go for craptacular doctors visit in which they screw just about everything up and are stuck there for 2 hours. Doctor unhelpfully tells me I need to see 2 different specialists, have a test for something she doesn't believe that I have, and need to take anti-anxiety pills because I had a total meltdown in her office on account of the shitty day I was already having. Oh, and I have high blood pressure. Big surprise, right?

Come back to apartment, contact police about car. Officer takes pictures, measurements, and runs my DL. No points, no priors. Go me. Unfortunately after he inspects all the other cars in the parking lot, he determines that none of those present looks like a likely candidate. Call insurance, get sent to repair shop. Get estimate for $2000 worth of body damage, and some minor structural damage to the door that they think they can just hammer back into shape.

Decide to take the other apartment. Begin shitty process of packing and looking for moving helpers. Very happy we made this decision though, based on what comes next.

Saturday evening neighbor goes for the superloud music again. Call cops. When officer arrives the music is still playing. Hear neighbor screaming at him. Then suddenly there was a several minute long scuffle with much pounding and yelling, sounding like they fought their way down the stairs. Neighbor is escorted away in handcuffs. It looked like every on-duty officer in the city was in our parking lot. Scariest experience of my life.

He came back to his apartment roughly 12 hours later, but I think it was just to get some belongings, because (with a prayer) it is remaining quiet since then.

This morning was filled with unhelpful phone calls about my car. Although we do think we have found out who did it, have to wait until tomorrow for the officer we made the original report, since he was not on duty today. Insurance is being frustrating, I guess I should not be surprised. Have to take car in for an estimate (again) because the repairman did not take pictures the first time and would not submit anything to the insurance without an assignment for repair from them. I'm not going to get any repairs done until I get the police report, because I don't want the insurance to be able to back out on me and stick me with a huge bill, when I'm not sure I want to have everything repaired to "good as new" condition when I'm mostly concerned about just the rusting.

I feel like I am taking this all rather well, considering I have not had to be hospitalized yet. Just standing here with my broken umbrella, waiting for the pouring to stop.

Closest thing you'll get to a drunk post from me is this one... Decongestant post.

I've got some sort of thing. It started off as a chest/cough thing for a few weeks. I think it has migrated to the sinuses now. Took some decongestants for the first time in probably a year. Now I remember why I don't like them. Totally brain-fried. They should be wearing off soon, but it's kind of screwed up my day.

I guess since I've admitted to husband's entire family that I am writing now, I can admit it to the rest of the world. Kind of embarrassing really, especially since they will probably continue to ask me questions about it. (holy crap, it just took me like 5 tries to use the spell checker to fix the word "embarrassing", I am that out of it from the decongestants.) It's killing my word count, which I am already behind.

Context: http://nanowrimo.org/

So now everyone knows but my family. I'd feel bad about that, but whatever. Reading that book that everyone's always suggesting to me made me realize it's kind of their fault that I don't really know what I'm doing.

I want to take a nap.

I was wondering if anyone else was using the new Minefield Firefox beta. Husband "upgraded" mine last week, saying that it ran better on his computer than the full release version before it did. Not so much the case for me though. Today it crashed and burned twice, which the other version had not done for me in quite a while.

Anyways, main question is memory usage. Husband said that this was supposed to correct a lot of the memory problems that Firefox has had in the past. On his computer (64 bit ubuntu I believe) Firefox has a bad memory leak which caused it to crash and eat all his memory etc. Firefox did slowly eat memory on my 32 bit ubuntu, but not to the excessive rates the Minefield is doing.

I have the system monitor for memory set up, and it shows that I am using 66% of memory (before I would not use above 50%) and Firefox starts saying that it uses less than 100 mb, but then jumps to 400 or 500 on the tally sheet. But closing it does not return the 400 that it is using, only the 100, and the system monitor continues to say I am using up a ton of memory.

This has only happened since using the Minefield version. But husband has looked at it and says that the new memory usage reports are correct. I think he thinks I am misremembering the usage from before.

I am not sure what else would be causing this, or even any reason Firefox would be doing this unless it is using the ram as cache even after being closed. And closing out all active programs does not return me to low memory usage. I have not tried to run blender since this has started going on, because I am pretty sure it would crash a lot.

Second part: Is there a way to download gmail chat messages off of the gmail web interface thing? I've noticed that apparently all of my messages sent by my gmail account on pidgin (I hate pidgin, I much preferred gaim. I can tell a difference) and gaim before it show up on the web interface, but not vice versa. I much prefer to have them on my computer where they are more easily searched and whatnot.

"Good feelings gone."

All though the rage is slowly disapating as well.

I am so frustrated right now with the apartment people. Again.

We had a few days without music, but then last night it was blasting again. The general loudness never stopped.

So I go back to the office with a pair of complaint forms filled out. I have to talk to the bitch office lady because the nice one was on the phone.

I'll have you know she raised her voice first. She's always so rude. The "you don't stand a crap's chance" phrase will stick in my mind forever.

Essentially she's now passing the buck onto her boss, and she wants us all to have a nice sit-down and work things out.

I don't think he'll be willing to do this because he doesn't answer his door when we go to ask him to turn it down.

I am unwilling to do this, because then he will know for a fact what we look like and that it is us that have been complaining, and I fear retribution.

I also know that this meeting isn't going to solve anything and that things will be the same way afterwards as they are now. Experience with other assholes taught me this.

Besides, husband made our desires known to the idiot upstairs in a notice he left him our second week here. "Quiet between 11pm and 7am." Not unreasonable.

Also, I call bullshit on him "only having a little am/fm clock radio" because it is louder than that. He must be playing it through his TV on a dvd player or something, and his TV must have very large speakers.

Or else he never did remove his stereo. Or he has it back. And I'd bet money that no one went up there to check on it.

So now office bitch wants us to work out "some kind of 50/50". I don't want to work it out. I shouldn't have to be the one to compromise when I am not bothering anyone.

Why do nightmares always repeat themselves?

First of all, sorry everyone for the rather emo posts last week. I had an epiphany this morning. I feel a lot better now. So hopefully I'll be able to get on track now.

Now to the tech questions. I had two, but for some reason I can only remember one now. It's about the new release of Ubuntu.

My upgrade to Feisty had gone off without a hitch earlier in the year. The one thing that it kept prompting me about was the fact that it couldn't load my icons, which I guess had just been relocated, because on reboot everything was fine. The upgrade to the new release, which I will call Grumpy (I say they should have named it Grumpy Groundhog, which ended up being more appropriate anyways) was not smooth.

During the install, which husband had me do from a disk, it continuously prompted me about things that were broken or missing, etc, and husband had to set the installer back on track several times because it was messing around and not using the right repositories.

Anyways, to the point. I didn't use any of the terrible eyecandy for the desktop effects. They make me dizzy, so it should not have been installed for the computer to upgrade. But it apparently went and installed and activated Xgl anyways. Even though I don't have desktop effects on (that I know about, it may have gone and done that for me too) this nice little Xgl is eating my ram up. And it keeps taking more and more. And then it crashes X so I have to log back in again. Today it didn't do a very "clean" crash so that when I logged back in, I couldn't use firefox or anything that had been running before because the computer helpfully informed me they were already running, and I had to restart.

Has anyone else had this problem? (I don't know how many Ubuntu users there are on my list here, and I'm beginning to think I'm the only one who does not want to use these fancy desktop effects.)

The reason it makes me so mad, is that it crashes every time I am using blender, and sometimes I don't get to save my work before it goes bye-bye.

And it was released with a nearly non-functional "Release candidate" for the Gimp. There's probably more. They shouldn't have been so chained to their release schedule. If they had just pushed it back a couple more weeks it would have been much better. I'm hoping that Hungry Hippos will be better.

Here's just a couple of things I prepared the other day, but didn't get a chance to post up until now due to slow internet.

Finished Sword. I like it. It's shiney.

Finished Wine Table scene. I even surprised myself on this one. I think I forgot to mention in the dA description that the floor material is modified from one I got from Meta-Androcto on the blender artist's forum. The rest I did all by myself though.

I like the word finished. It makes me feel like I'm actually accomplishing something.

Humorous article I ran across last night. 100 reasons Vista will leave you speechless. It's from the microsoft website, so it's meant to be taken seriously. I was speechless from laughter a few times. Plus, I thought the old media player was atrocious, so the 50% of entries about that failed to impress me.

Plus I really hope that number 90 does mean what I think it means. If you can still access your computer while it is off, then you are never really safe.

Writing this because real life is really disappointing, stressing, frustrating, and all other negativity, right now. I guess I had too good a time for my birthday. Now everything just looks like shit.

I'm having mine at apparently half of the average age. I always matured a little fast.

Cue the insanity:

WHAT AM I DOING? WHAT SHOULD I BE DOING? WHY AM I NOT DOING IT? AHH!

Specifically, how far should I really be pursuing art. How long is joblessness acceptable. Should I get a job instead, because essentially art and anything else time consuming will probably be mutually exclusive. (like when I was in school, I didn't really do much serious art.) Should I have gone to gradschool (oh please God no!). [/insanity]

But like seriously. It freaks me out.

I have a complicated relationship with organizing. I enjoy sorting things. Whenever we buy something that has to be assembled, I hijack the little bags of parts and sort them all according to type, size, etc. I sorted my crayons by color so that they would be (more or less) in rainbow order. (I do this with my socks as well, periodically. Yes I am aware that is weird.)

So I have some sort of OCD fixation with organizing some things. And then you look at my every day life. Piles of randomness. I understand it, but no one else could. Basically everything is a mess. My computer is probably one of the best examples of the worst. I have hundreds of folders. I can't even keep one type of item in any particular folder. There is no unified system.

Basically I will start storing things on my desktop for my frequently used items. The problem is I stop using them and leave them there. So when the desktop gets too cluttered, I move everything not associated with a current project to the home folder. The problem with that is, I will ignore them (out of sight, out of mind) and now my home folder is overwhelmingly full. So then I start putting all the files into random folders that sort of relate to what the file is.

So I've ended up with lots of duplicate type files, miscategorized and/or lost files, and just general mayhem.

Husband has been harping on me for my various organizational disasters (digital and physical) and made me check out this organizing book from the library last week. I also read that "getting things done" book earlier in the year, to no avail. The problem with these books is that they assume you have some sort of overarching theme to your life, which I don't really have.

I've decided to try to make some sort of organization. I started with the linen closet shelves. They already had a system, it just needed straightening up. So voila, one project down. I still have to do the floor, which will be a more serious undertaking. The way I reorganize usually consists of spreading everything out, and thus making a bigger mess than I had to begin with, before I put everything back in neatly. I don't have time to do that with the closet before husband gets home, so it will have to wait until tomorrow, since I don't really feel like being yelled at for making a new mess.

My first personal project is reorganizing my computer files (which is why I mentioned it in depth). The current book suggested to start with an area that you see and use everyday, and my computer definitely qualifies. So far I've cleared all but 3 files off of my desktop (I know where those are going, but that folder in my home directory hasn't been organized yet, and I don't want to make that folder worse). I've eliminated lots of duplicates. I've created new folders so that I can better group items.

And most importantly: I found a folder full of photos that I had thought were gone forever! I actually thought I had accidentally deleted these photos in a purge earlier in the year. Honestly, I was about to delete them thinking they were duplicates (for some reason I don't like deleting duplicate files) when I noticed a specific picture that I remembered taking and couldn't find in f-spot. Huzzah! So I imported them into f-spot and moved that folder to the trash. I still haven't "permanently removed" them due to my duplicate obsession, but at least they aren't in the home folder anymore.

I feel pretty excited about the organizing, if for no other reason than I found those photos. Hopefully I'll actually finish this organizational attempt, and stick with it.

I am violating my rule of posting a JE before responding to all comments received, for today. And no this entry is not about South Park.

Towlie is what husband and I have decided we would call our upstairs neighbor (aka The Man Upstairs, aka Neighbor From Hell). We call him this because he generally has "no idea what's going on" due to his various conditions and addictions.

This time the office ladies are on my side. He doesn't really seem to be taking his warnings and notices very seriously. Probably because for at least 2 years of his tenancy the office ladies were on his side, and his behaviour has been pretty much the same according to my talks with my other buildingmates. I wonder why the office ladies are finally taking this more seriously. At least, I hope they really are taking this seriously and not just stringing me along.

I've sadly not been much in the producing of my own art lately. Inspiration for creating things at my level has left me, and my attempts at hard things usually end up in frustrated quitting after about 2 minutes. Hopefully I'll reach the end of the desert soon.

Pictures of the Day

Truck Through a Fence by =CrazyMonkey-Ben. Because I have a strange fondness for industrial equipment.

Welcome, Mr. Smith... by *Rockmount. I think it's the lighting that I like most.

Below the Falls by ~antipex. I like water pictures.

Silver pink by ~Swaroop. Water and flowers in an interesting composition.

If you haven't done so already, please check out my most recent art posting: http://slashdot.org/~queenofthe1ring/journal/181191.

Anyways, I don't think my health problem is solved, but I know what the answer is now. Hypoglycemia. Which would explain why I am very crabby if I don't get to eat on time, and will become dizzy.

Last weekend, husband mentioned it to his family. Apparently his older sister's (ex?) husband is also hypoglycemic, and he mentioned some of his symptoms to me, which match with things I've been noticing that are not mentioned in the book I've read or on any of the websites. His mom (who is diabetic) gave me her extra blood glucose meter, and I've taken some readings. When I feel bad, my blood sugar readings are in the hypoglycemic level. So I feel like I've made a correct diagnosis. I tried to get an appointment with a doctor here in G-town, but the one that specializes in blood sugar disorders is on "permanent hiatus".

This seems to be something that can be completely managed by diet change. According to what I've read thus far, I need to follow a diet similar to the one that I think Samthebutcher recommended. Lots of raw veggies and fruits. Lots of snacks during the day. No sugar. No bread/pasta/other white refined wheat products. I'm an Italian with a chocolate addiction. This is going to be hard. I'm going to try to ease into it, mostly so that we don't have to throw away all the food we just bought the other day.

The worst part is that the book I read says that most people develope food allergies after eating on this diet. It says that people "don't even realize they have a food sensitivity" until they've made so many changes. One person who wrote in it says that there are only 12 foods that they can eat. Scary.

Anyways, I guess that's enough blathering from me. It is time for my first snack of the day. I'm feeling kind of tired.

Other people's art to make sure it doesn't get confused with the above link, which is my art.

Cowtrail Waystation by =CrazyMonkey-Ben. I like the softness.

Shimmery nymphaea by ~Swaroop. I like the colors.

Pikes Peak from the other side by *crazymonkey-christy. I like the composition.

Here is a little update with a couple of the pictures I have been working on.

primary colored vases. I LOVE this image! Probably my fave so far, even given it's flaws.

klein bottle. Blame johndiii. :-)

cute fuzzy alien. You get a cookie if you can figure out his inspiration.

I also finished my sword from the very beginning. I just haven't gotten a good angle on it yet.

The two scenes I have completed so far are linked below. Read the descriptions on dA for more info about them.

Reflected Marbles

Wine on the Table

I'm pretty proud.

Well, we moved to a new apartment in the next town over. This is good for many reasons. Husband's drive to work has been cut almost in half. No more having to call the cops because the section 8 people are out beating each other in the parking lot again. The place was actually clean when we moved in. Laundry is only 1 floor away. And much more flexible lease, so if we should find a house to buy, we only have to pay 1 month beyond what we actually stay, rather than having to buy out the rest of the lease.

My love-hate relationship with blender continues. I made one really cool scene on my own, which I just haven't gotten around to posting yet. Other than that, I am working through more of the assignments in the book and being thoroughly frustrated that it was written for a earlier version and that since then all of the buttons have been moved.

Pictures of the day follow. I'm kind of mad that if I had actually kept up with this I would have cleared my inbox by now.

Jet Liner by =CrazyMonkey-Ben. When I was little I could see that well. Not anymore.

camels by ~Swaroop. Places different from ours are interesting.

Waiting For Her Hero - Malon by *Adella. I don't know what it's from, but it's a nice execution.

First Light by ~antipex. I like the dew drops. Is there an easy way to reproduce the black background/lit foreground with a point-and-shoot?