The day started out with so much promise: I awoke before my alarm, my legs weren’t on fire, and Ed brought me a bagel. Big plans were afoot for the day, so I hopped out of bed to shower and start the first item on my to-do list: dollar store henna. The beginning of the experiment was kind of scary, as the prepared henna was a brilliant shade of green (a green I would naturally gravitate to if it had been on an inappropriately cut shirt or a pot of sparkly eyeshadow, but was wholly unprepared to slather on my head) and smelled .. strange. Henna doesn’t smell that great to begin with (although I kind of like it), and this smelled like flowers planted in soy sauce – still, I had roots to cover so I slopped on the goo and fashioned a turban out of Saran Wrap to await my fate.

Things started to go wrong the instant I sat at my computer. The night before I swept everything off my desk in a dramatic gesture to make room for my recently repaired iMac, then started the restore process from an external drive. I went to bed before the restore had finished, so I assumed it would be done when I sat down .. and technically, it was. Unfortunately, I had restored from the wrong drive, so none of my content was back. Okay, no biggie – I could start the restore from the correct drive while I tackled the next several chores on my list. It was then I discovered that the Apple store had given me a hard drive with Snow Leopard on it instead of Lion, so I had to upgrade before my backups could be read – another couple of hours. Upgraded to Lion, restored my files – more waiting. Finally, I had everything where I wanted it so I could stop messing with files and user accounts and look into the next problem: my wireless mouse wasn’t working. After a lot of swearing and troubleshooting, I narrowed the problem down to the machine itself – yay! I can’t see any devices or machines with Bluetooth, even though it was working fine before I took my computer in to the Genius Bar. More troubleshooting, an attempt to update the firmware, an upgrade to Mountain Lion, far too long spent wading through Apple support forums, and nothing: my Bluetooth is dead.

It was right around this time that I also discovered my brand new 1TB hard drive somehow had a mere 490GB free. Digging through the machine I found that almost 250GB were taken up as “other”, and that there were some locked directories on a machine I’m the only user on. Okay, time to unlock those – can’t; no permission to. I’m the sole administrator, but who cares about logic – I’ll just .. do nothing, because there’s suddenly a master password on the machine that I don’t know. I never SET a master password on the machine, but there’s one there now. Hooray! What a great day this is turning out to be!

I worked in Desktop Support for years, and I’m pretty good at it. There’s nothing I like better than finding a way around a stubborn computer mystery .. unless the computer I’m working on is my main machine. If I’m dealing with my own broken computer, I become useless and frustrated and incompetent and likely to burst into tears for no reason – and while I didn’t get to that point today, I am so fucking annoyed at my iMac that I’m starting to wonder what it would look like if I threw it out the window.

I did manage to unlock those folders, but the master password is still eluding me. Also, the locked folders don’t fully account for the missing HD space. Also, none of this may matter: I have to take the fucking machine back to the Apple store and have them figure out why Bluetooth is dead. I may have to do every single part of this over again: upgrading from SL to L, restoring from a backup, then upgrading to ML – and I kind of want to scream.

It’s not just computers I want to punch right now, though. After a long cold achy day of Doing Things, I thought to order in some food for dinner .. except what I want isn’t available because they’re not delivering right now (and Ed is out so I can’t go pick it up). I needed to eat, so I did up a crappy substitute in the form of a frozen pizza that I both managed to burn AND drop face down on the kitchen floor. Yay!

Ed ended up doing one of the tasks on my list today, which was to destroy my favourite chair and take it to the dumpster. Yay? I know the chair had to go – the cats had ruined it and it couldn’t be reupholstered – but it was the very first piece of non-essential grown up furniture I had purchased, was comfortable as all hell, and isn’t made anymore. I am sad that it is gone, and I am going to miss it.

The day wasn’t a total wash, I guess: the dollar store henna experiment turned out quite well, I managed to find a place to contain my fabric stash, and you can almost see the floor of my office. Also, I did four loads of laundry and cleaned several sinks. I got a lot done, but I am very hungry and grumpy and cold and I hate my fucking computer.

I need a do-over for this Saturday.