This morning we got up early and went to the Farmer's Market. I bought a ton of bell peppers among other fun vegetables. Then we went to the Credit Union to open a checking account for Bob. I generally like to avoid doing anything remotely errand like during the day on Saturday but this didn't turn out as bad as I had expected.

I then spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to set up my archives so that they would list on this page. I just can't seem to grasp anything more advanced than basic html. Next will be trying to customize the page a little bit. Later this afternoon I put in some time in the yard and got things pretty much put away for Fall. There is potential to do more but I'm guessing this is it. I watched 1/2 of the Germany v. Finland World Cup qualifier -- I have it on tape so can catch the 2nd half in a second here.

I just connected my DSL. Yay. As of 3pm today I still hadn't rec'd my modem so I got on the phone and was in phonetree/hold hell when I heard the doorbell ring. I opened the front door and there was my box of loot.

The directions said to expect 60-90 minutes for the install which frightened me, but here I am. More on this story as it develops.

I keep scribbling out little notes of things I want to blog and then I don't know where I put them. We saw Douglas Coupland read at Powell's last week. During the day I decided that I wanted to check out the Tour Diary and just punched in www.douglascoupland.com which turns out is some random site that links to this other author -- a squatter on his name. I even tried it again to make sure I didn't screw up. I eventually figured out the other URL and I still haven't had a chance to read the Tour Diary because it takes about 100 years to download so I'm waiting until I get my DSL which will hopefully be very soon and is a completely different story altogether. Back to DC -- at the Q&A or in this case it was an A&Q -- I asked DC about it and he was completely unaware and told me he was going to check it out.

The new book is called All Families Are Psychotic and I read the first 60 pages in line waiting to get it signed. I finished it on Friday. It's over the top and completely funny and, I think, a lot better than Miss Wyoming. FYI -- this is the fourth time I've seen DC read. A little fixation here.

In other news, I tore out all the tomatoes this weekend, and enjoyed doing it. I picked all the green ones so I'll be stocked in tomatoes for at least another month. And I'm processing a few for winter. Next year I am sticking to 2 plants and if one ends up to be a cherry tomato, I'm pulling it out.

I spent an insane amount of time on Friday in Qwest's phonetree bowels of hell. I can't imagine that any company anywhere really thinks they are doing a good thing by making their customers work through a phone tree.

First I had to call and find out the story on my DSL. Actually FIRST I had to call Pacifier (ISP) back and find out what was going on there -- get some additional info and then call QWest. Thank my lucky stars after a couple of transfers and endless being on hold, I ended up with David who was completely competent and was quickly able to see that my order had been screwed up pretty much from page 1 and was able to get me fixed up, anticipate that I'd have billing problems, and told me exactly how to handle it. Yay David.

BUT -- I still didn't have my modem because when the order was put in there was a note that said, don't send a modem. So we had to order it so I won't have a modem for another week, even though my service will be connected on the 1st. But that's fine, I've lived without it this long, I can survive another week.

So my separate Qwest matter was to get that stupid Customer Choice thing taken off. This is some great service that costs $32 a month and I'm not sure if this is the line charge plus all these worthless extras -- or $32 on top of the line charges. I ordered it to get the activation fee on the DSL waived and agreed we'd try it and we loathed it immediately. I don't like call waiting. We don't have a caller ID rig. We still got solicitation calls. And the freaky alternate ring for long distance calls freaked me out every time.

To make a long story short -- I had to be transferred around to at least 5 different people including one jackass who insisted that I should really keep the Customer Choice and learn to like it. What, does this lady get beaten at the end of the day if a customer cancels the special package? We'll see how it all turns out when I get our bill.

I feel like I'm behind in everything. Maybe I am. Or maybe everything isn't that important.

My DSL is supposed to go on tomorrow. Except I haven't gotten my modem yet and I called today and they advised me to call someone else because it should be here right now. I got another call (different person) from Qwest that my ISP isn't signing up new people or doesn't recognize them. And I called my new ISP to sign up and there was some sort of hold up and they would call me back in a half hour and never called back. This isn't looking so good, is it?

Bob found the 9.1 disk so I can update my system now. Better back everything up and disk doctor and that whole tap dance again to be on the safe side. If I can get 9.1 on here and get iTunes and that Gnutella thing figured out and get DSL working all in one weekend I will proclaim myself the technological genius of the century.

We watched Pulp Fiction this week -- I wanted to see it again because I read this article about some different films and I haven't seen it for several years and if you haven't you should go see it again because it's brilliant and Bob and I have had an extended conversation analyzing it. If forced to chose I'd have to pick Harvey Keitel as my favorite character in the movie.

We got the latest MacMall catalog this week and I noticed that RAM is unspeakably cheap. I thought I might try to max Yoda (266 mhz iMac) out and researched whether I could do the install myself. I found a website (which I neglected to bookmark but something imac2.com or whatever) and it had very wonderful instructions with detailed photos which convinced me I'd better pay someone to do this. I'd probably be more adventurous if I hadn't had such a bad time replacing the hard drive in Billy's Compaq piece of crap at the office. (To be truthful, I only partially replaced the item and had to call in a professional to complete the job.)

This weekend I'm going to be as lazy as possible for me and probably start phase one of putting the garden to bed. I've just about had enough.

Do you ever do this? You need to be somewhere at a certain time and you look at the clock and can see you're absurdly ahead of schedule so you dick around a bit and then suddenly you have to rush around and you end up being late?