Noöcosm

When I think about the foreseeable future, it's all I can do not to break down in tears, because I can't think of the next time when I'm going to be able to get a decent night's sleep.

If it's not Alex, it's moving. If it's not moving, it's school. If it's not school, it's work.

I'm so damn tired. I just want to sleep well, and not be exhausted from the time I get up to the time I go to bed.

My I Aggro Drama T-shirt arrived yesterday. It is exactly as it ought to be.

I have pulled a muscle in my forearm by way of shifting a branch that fell onto my driveway as a result of last night's storm. Said branch was 30 feet long and six inches across at the thickest point. I had hoped to actually get it out into the swamp, but finally I just moved it off the driveway and left it. Now my arm hurts, but in weird ways - it's sort of a very quiet background ache normally, but I can't open a door without it hurting. (Weirdly, vertical stress, like carrying a bag, doesn't hurt at all.)

Also as a result of the storm, and the concomitant power outage, I slept horribly last night. I kept waking up from the heat, and when I did sleep it was restless, troubled sleep. I dreamt all night of code that didn't work right.

I am deeply, desperately afraid of a conversation I am probably going to have sometime in the next few days. There are really only two possible outcomes (well, I can think of several others, but they all boil down to the same two general outcomes) to the conversation; I know which one I want, and I know which one I expect, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

Good Lord, but I slept wrong. I ache from the base of my skull to the base of my spine, and although I was asleep for nine hours, I feel like I got about four hours of rest.

Le ugh. This is my punishment for not getting anything done yesterday, I know it.

Okay, so I'm grooving on LJ's new tags feature. But there's one thing I'm missing.

You can see entries with a certain tag by going to http://www.livejournal.com/users/[user]/tag/[tag].

You can see entries with multiple certain tags by going to http://www.livejournal.com/users/[user]/tag/[tag1],[tag2].

The latter will give you all entries that have either [tag1] or [tag2]. What's missing is that I can't find a way to get all entries that have both [tag1] and [tag2].

http://www.livejournal.com/users/[user]/tag/[tag1]&[tag2] doesn't seem to work; neither does http://www.livejournal.com/users/[user]/tag/[tag1]+[tag2].

Any thoughts from the LJ-geeks out there? Not having the ability to AND-filter seriously hampers the utility of the tagging feature.

EDIT: I went ahead and submitted a support request on this topic, if any of you are interested.

Aside from getting my mother to the airport, this has been almost entirely a waste of a day. Even a reasonably tasty Chilean white wine isn't helping. (It's Concha y Toro, if you're curious. I prefer red wines, but we finished the Australian shiraz - Fat Bastard - over the week, and this is what I have. Well, this and whiskey sours.)

Part of me wants to be really petty and self-deprecating here, but I won't be. You can imagine it if you like.

Oh well. Enough of this.

Imagine a gas-powered push-mower. This mower's handle has two arms that rise from the sides of the engine deck for about a yard and then right-angle in to meet in the middle; essentially, it's every push-mower ever made. The handle assembly has a "hinge" (actually, it's two pieces, joined by bolts) that allows it to fold in the middle for storage or transportation. This handle assembly originally had nuts with large black easy-turn knobs on each bolt, but we've lost several of these over the years and had to replace them with standard quarter-inch nuts.

The last time I mowed the lawn, the nut that holds the left arm of the handle onto the engine deck loosened and came off. I couldn't find it when I searched, so I finished mowing by only turning in the opposite direction and using friction with the bolt to hold the arm on. Since that was really tiring, yesterday I went and bought a pair of quarter-inch nuts - one to hold the arm on, and one as a spare.

When I got home, I discovered that the nuts were not, in fact, 1/4" in diameter; they were 7/32". Such a minor difference - but it meant that they didn't fit the bolt. I did manage to scrounge an easy-turn nut from the other, non-functional mower (its engine died - it may be flooded - and I haven't gotten around to taking it to Sears to have them look at it. Since this is the second time since we bought it this time last year that the engine's died like this, I'm tempted to have my father just return it); the easy-turn nut was the same bore as the bolt, but had different threading, so I just locked it in place and hoped for the best.

That nut held just fine.

But the other bolt on the left-arm assembly - the one on the "hinge" - fell off while I was mowing yesterday, and now I can't find it. (I did find the easy-turn nut that was attached to it, but the bolt was nowhere to be found.)

So today I have to go to a different hardware store with the easy-turn nut from the second bolt - which I checked against the bolt on the engine deck; they're the same size - and say "okay, I need a bolt that'll fit this nut; and then I need a nut that'll fit that bolt."

Meanwhile, Alex is better at Kingdom Hearts than I am.

2:40 AM: I'm awake. Gah.

I got offline at 9 or so. I finally got to bed about half an hour later, due to some last-minute hunting for stuff. I didn't get to sleep until 11:30. So a kinda-solid night's sleep turned into a three-hour nap.

I'm glad I checked my e-mail before I left; it turned out I'd misremembered the hotel we were staying in. That might have led to some unpleasantness when we arrived in Orlando.

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