Angry Day comes to a close

I was grumpy for much of today.

First off, my dad is in Maryland, visiting my mom. Nothing wrong with that, but he's also trying to get the wireless connection working on her computer. Because she has Windows 2000, she's at the mercy of the utility that came with the Belkin USB wi-fi dongle we picked up a while back, and things haven't been going well. It doesn't help that my dad has no experience with wi-fi equipment of any sort. So I spent a good amount of time today and yesterday trying to guess how to fix things over the phone, and completely failed.

This morning, I went to donate blood. I've done it before, and I'm well past the point of being frightened of it, but I swear the needle stung a lot more than it usually does. My arm actually hurt for about twenty minutes afterward, and that didn't put me in a good frame of mind.

Then, this afternoon, Michigan State managed to heroically let Wisconsin run them over for about 58 minutes of the football game. Yes, I know, it's football and it doesn't really affect me, but after last season, I was hoping that I'd be able to look forward to a nice diversion on Saturday afternoons, rather than just having a very long, unstructured period of time in which I know I won't do as much work as I'd like to. I hate having to deal with those. I've survived every semester prior to this one just fine without doing as much work as I'd like to, but I always get this paranoid feeling that I'm going to come up an hour short on some assignment and completely doom myself in one of my courses. A losing football season makes it harder to plan on ignoring that feeling for three and a half hours every week.

But then things got better:

1. I bought a slushie. I like slushies.
2. To refresh my memory on how the network dialogues in Windows look — I run Linux on my main computer — I bought a wireless dongle for my old desktop. Surprisingly, it actually worked. It's a Netgear dongle on a Windows XP machine rather than a Belkin dongle on a Windows 2000 machine, but it still made me feel like maybe modern technology isn't rapidly decaying toward uselessness.
3. Penn State brought their Roflcopter.

I still haven't shaken the paranoid feeling, though. Time for some sleep, so I can at least pretend I'll get back to work tomorrow.

At least my arm doesn't look like it's bruising much.