Tuesday, July 15, 2014

I Wish I Could Make This Stuff Up...



I don't normally believe in this kind of thing, but there comes a point where "coincidence" just doesn't cut it. Ms. Medium, if you are reading, you should probably stop here and sit this one out, just in case. You know Bad Luck Brian? Well this poor guy embodies that meme. Totally. We thought it started last week, when Babe tried to get himself started on guitar; with a bit of 20/20 Hindsight, it started before that. But here's how it unfolded.

As I mentioned, Babe decided that he was going to learn guitar via Rocksmith... Against my advice, because I'm a snob. But he did ask me to help him pick out a guitar, and I was happy to oblige. So we go on down to Guitar Center and pick something out in his price range. Get all the essentials, too. Once we were home, I go about setting up his strap-locks, because they're a clumsy person's salvation. I check the knob on the neck plate, and it literally snaps off in my hands. So, we go back to GC and luckily the same guy is still on shift. Since we were polite he'd be happy to swap it out for us... except that was the last model at their store. We looked around a bit more, but decide that's really THE guitar. So he checks the inventory and calls a store to clear it, and we head on up to the Supermall store to swap out the guitar. The manager there was really cool about the whole thing.

So we get home and start setting up the Rocksmith stuff. He'd read that any USB-to-1/4" should be compatible with the program... buuuuuuut that's not entirely true. So after hours of frustration, swearing, and troubleshooting, I order the name-brand cable off of Amazon. Because of course no stores in the area carry JUST the cable. When the cable shows up from expedited shipping, his input jack comes loose. Easy fix, sure, but another nail in the coffin.

Next day. He has a guitar. He has the right cable. The program is running... for about 20 minutes. My whole desktop freezes. And not only does it freeze, but it doesn't come back from the hard crash. No kidding. I come home and clear out the dust bunny breeding ground, and with some help from an IT buddy, isolate the problem to most likely be the power supply. Well, come to think of it... a couple weeks earlier, the 1.5 tb I had in the tower pooped out. And, by the way, when my computer crashed, it fried HIS 2.0 gig hard drive, where he'd been pack-ratting movies and TV for the past couple years. Grrrrreat.

On top of all of this, we are moving. We do one day of car-loads of stuff. After that, he is in the early stages of a flare-up. Stupid bodies. Then, we have a lovely house-wide miscommunication that is really silly and frustrating. Three of us broke as a joke, stressed, tired, sore, etc etc etc. You can imagine. With my extra time off, we run Babe over to the VA finally. Sounds like everything should be easy and straight forward... turns out it's not, of course. [insert details here].

I'm glossing over a lot, but fast-forward to today. [Side note, come to think of it, my leave for moving also got denied! Luckily they gave me some unofficial time off, but leave would have been better]. Today, he drops a wifi repeater. Done. Mr. Guns, well, as soon as I got home, his Xbox decided it was going to refuse to work. And when I moved the fish tank from the apartment to the house, I squashed John Snow and thought he was going to die. He seems better now, but still may not make it. Babe dropped a LCD monitor, probably trash now. Even though Century Link was supposed to be out to start up internet today, we're still sitting at almost dial-up speeds. He spent all day dealing with them, but without the account info got nowhere. I got on tonight to talk to their support folks... turns out that they need to send a tech to check the lines, but can't do that until Saturday. If they can fix it great, if not, we might have to talk to the rental company and get them to re-wire the house because of how bad the wiring looks.

They say bad luck comes in threes, right? For him it comes in at least 30s. We're fighting through it, but everyone's tired. It's hard when your 'one-thing-after-another' string is running on three weeks of hellish events. And everyone is wound too tight. Hopefully soon things will smooth over. Until then, I'll take the advice that was blatantly shoved in my face yesterday:




In other news the house is GREAT [aside from potentially bad internet], and the kitties are finally bonding. I can't find the photo of them cuddling, but here is Bill being a goof.


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