holiday parental i.t. dept, reporting for duty

commence Operation Gay Wingman in 5, 4 ....

oh, and haha, my mom just told me that because my youngest bro is having some bad kidney problems (ok, not the haha part), the doc gave him a bunch of demerol! demerol christmas! ah, but not for me...

xpost to laurel - yeah, i would think that if you're looking for a gay wingman, that working in publishing is pretty ideal! i have never really had a gay friend designated as 'wingman' though and i really don't know how i feel about the idea of that or 'wingman' in the first place

My family drinks together now! My mother is a little afraid she's turning into "a lush" but it only takes equiv of 1 drink to put her away so it's a moot point.

the strict marm i remember from my teenaged years is gone and there's a nice old mother living in my house. also it makes me sad that my dad is definitely not a middle-aged guy any more, that he's crossed often into ornery oldish guy years.

-- nuneb

same, also source of free hand-me-down computer components and gadgets

re. kids dressed as lambs on christmas services:

me (simultaneous): my friend kate was dr....
dad (simultaneous): in the paper, a la...

[pause]

dad: can't you be quiet when i'm talking?
me: oka --
mom: he was talking!
me: fine, go ahead, don't make a big deal.
dad: (sarcastic) no, we really all wanna hear about kate. we all wanna hear what you have to say.
me: okay, don't be rude.
dad: alliwasgonnasayisakiddressedasalambfellasleep.
me: cute
mom: you shouldn't interrupt.
dad: he doesn't care what anybody else has to say.
me: omigod, just get over it.
dad: i already am. (big fake smile)
me: all you do when you make a big deal is get people upset like you just got me, now i'm all pissed and i'm gonna storm out.

(i storm out)

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/6302874262.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

road trip!!!

or are they back in NJ for the holidays yet?

okay i am squeeing at a kitten and a boob

um, correct me if i'm wrong, wouldn't this be your uncle?

ian, he is just drunk. thanks, though.

my brother has been sending me camera phone shots of himself on the bus to t0fin0 haha
i am going to send him shots of my (failed but delicious) gingerbread men (nb. not in shape of men. at all. i think sugar cookies will work out better tho.)

i'm having a pretty good christmas without family (have already had one turkey dinner, one fondue dinner, one dinner+pass-out-on-friend's-couch, and tomorrow is big christmas do.) but i miss my family, truly.

Rrob, I wd miss your family, too! What's the youngest doing? Anyway, you had FONDUE! I saw instructions for raclette in catalog yesterday and WHOA HI DERE MOLTEN GOODNESS.

youngest bro is surfing and pretending his kidney issues aren't as bad as they actually are, oh yeah, and going through crazy break-up (they own a house and cars together! i don't even know how that happened) by starting relationship with new girl (she is nice though, i am told)

i'm catching up on eps of the o.c. and degrassi tng

The lady gave birth to you and made you pancakes and this is the thanks she gets? Sheesh!

I am deleting lots of really old backups. It is taking many hours. Still more than 300k files left.

*this* is the app store, it's where you get apps. app is short for application

Drove 25 miles roundtrip to the parents' house to hold the power button down on their tv for five seconds.

Parent's purchase of a new laptop earlier this year has surprisingly reduced the amount of IT support I'm called upon to do.

signed mom up for fb

-dad, by far the most computer illiterate person in my family, has surprisingly become pretty deft w/ an ipad

-showed parents where the disc goes in their new blu-ray player.

-helped dad figure out how to turn on and put treats in cat toy ball.

a pretty low impact christmas for the parental i.t. dept.

- told Dad that if people ring him from India saying they're from Microsoft and can tell his computer has errors again he should just hang up and not run anything they ask him to

- he complained abt old software not running in Win7 and I nearly volunteered myself to try compatibility mode, but decided it would take too long, so I just said "mm, how annoying" and went home instead

will probably just email instructions about compatibility mode instead, so I don't have to hear an hour-long story about what he wanted to use the software for before he tells me what it is (and then spends another hour looking for the installation CD)

signed mom up for fb

― river wolf, Monday, December 26, 2011 9:33 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

just had 20 min phonecall about how to work facebook

No computer fixing necessary this time but did have to explain to family and friends what blogs are, why twitter and facebook both exist, and why anyone would use such worthless heinous services.

Likewise - didn't need to tech support but did give a detailed description of how to set up a Twitter account, follow people, how to RT, what the social graph looks like from a graph-theoretical perspective, what hashtags are...Dad was very interested in all this though we both know full well he will never even visit twitter.com.

• reset mom's wifi password since she couldn't remember it and had been running her iPhone on 3G for 10 months.

• the tv's sound system was "hissy" because the actual television's volume was jacked to the top, but the stereo was plugged directly into the cable box. Fixed by turning the volume down.

I'm thankful that neither of my parents has shown any interest in social networking sites.