The girls have talking up a storm since their second birthday. I think I probably tell my sister this every single time we talk on the phone, and she’s probably sick of it by now, but: it’s awesome! People said the chatter would drive me crazy, but no, I love it! Because they can tell me what they want, instead of SCREAMING! It was the constant screaming that drove me crazy, screaming and crying because they didn’t have the language to tell me anything (yes, tried sign language and they never went for it). And they are finally getting the attention span for real bedtime reading, which is really nice too. The last few days we’ve been the picture of sickening cuteness, two little girls in soft fuzzy pajamas on either side of mama, petting a rabbit and reading book after book while the rain patters away outside. Go ahead and vomit now. I would.

And now it’s time for a classic twin story. Last week we were out in front of the house, when both girls suddenly split and took off. This is every twin parents’ nightmare. Darcy headed for the street, Saige headed for the neighbor’s yard with the pit bulls. Both toddlers were running full speed and completely ignored every desperate STOP! NO! and COME BACK! out of my mouth. You have about two seconds to decide which kid to go after. Well, I went for Saige, both because she was farther away and because Darcy had already succeeded in making it 75% of the way across the empty street safely while I was frantically trying to decide which way to run. Just as I was returning to the corner with Saige under my arm like a football, I heard a car honking. Loudly. Oh, shit. Darcy had gone back into the street to come to us, and a car was coming. It was a black car with a young woman driving, thankfully not very fast–but boy, was she annoyed there was a toddler in the street. She honked for a good long time—as if Darcy were a deaf and dumb dog—scaring the bejesus out of her and making her cry as she ran across. Then the girl proceeded to pull over and get out of her car, ostensibly to find who this stray whining brat belonged to and yell at the mom. When she saw me coming around the corner with Saige, she got back in her car in a huff and drove off. I weakly tried to communicate to her that I had two that ran in opposite directions, but I know she didn’t hear me and didn’t give a shit either.

It was hard to sleep for the next several nights. I kept thinking about what could have happened, and thought about whether I should try those awful kid leashes. We tried those once and it didn’t go very well. Picture putting feral cats in leashes and you have a pretty good idea of the experience.

Bruce’s only comment, after coming home to hear the tale, was that he was sort of glad Darcy was honked at so that she becomes aware that the middle of the street is not a good place to be. I basically agree with that, though I still feel the girl didn’t need to be quite so obnoxious.

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I’ve taken a break from advertising my small business now to catch up on a few things and recover from the Client From Hell. I’ve had a few “difficult” clients, but last week really took the cake. An old lady called to see if I could “get rid of all the viruses and spyware” on her system. Sounds simple enough. She sounded kind of cranky on the phone though, and I recognized her as the one that called some months earlier, “just to check you out.” Something about the belligerent tone of her voice made me nervous. Anyway, I ignored these bad feelings and went over and attempted to work on it. Unfortunately, it was a complete piece of shit and resisted everything I did. Literally almost every click I made threw out the lovely “illegal operation” thing. We’re talking Windows 98, probably not even SE, 92MB of RAM, and there was enough dust on the heatsink to keep a family of Russians warm all winter. I couldn’t get it to read any CDs and the thing was really acting like crap. I told her I was going to have to take it home to see if I could get it to cooperate. She agreed, and I said I would even give her a computer I had at home to use in the meantime. This is one I’ve been trying to sell and I honestly thought she might like it better. I shouldn’t have bothered.

After I got her computer home, I didn’t really make any more progress—still wouldn’t read CDs, wouldn’t take a network card so I could transfer stuff that way, wouldn’t even take a zip drive. I called old lady and tried to explain in terms she would understand that her machine wasn’t letting me install the tools I needed to use to clean it up, and if she really wanted that stuff off it was going to require more drastic measures. She sounded kind of pissed off (like this was my fault?) and her message seemed to be I should just do whatever it took to get that shit off. So, since everything I already tried failed, that left me with one last option: take the hard drive out and put it in another computer. So that’s what I did. This wasn’t easy—I had to take half her computer apart to get to the hard drive, since it was one of those damned compact systems. Anyway, I finally got it out, and then I was able to run AdAware and clean it up, which found 44 yuckies. While I was doing all this she called four or five times, each time sounding more and more unpleasant and cranky. What was taking so long? Why didn’t I just use the CD her computer club gave her? Old lady is 88 years-old and was not happy about any of this, least of all having to pay someone to fix things she didn’t understand. And she hated the newer computer I loaned her with a passion. Yeah, I guess she really missed seeing all those illegal operation crashes—they were such frequent visitors they were probably like a nice little screensaver for her. Whatever. I think this shows that Persig was right in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance–people and their machines can really start to resemble each other.

I put it back together and brought it back over to her. I had to bring the girls with me because Bruce was at work and had no other choice, but they were great and behaved like little angels (thank you God!). Ok, so I set up her old system and in between her comments about how quiet the girls were and hints that I obviously never let them socialize and kept them locked in a closet somewhere, I tried to explain that her system was largely clean, but since it wouldn’t let me install AdAware, she was bound to get more problems all over again. She really didn’t like hearing this. I told her this sort of scenario was probably why her computer club has been recommending Windows XP and a newer machine to her for a while. She didn’t seem to be getting me. So I tried a metaphor: “A Desoto may be a very nice old car, but the older a car gets, the harder it is to fix. It’s the same with computers. Any computer shop would tell you the same thing.”

Then she didn’t want to pay me, since in her opinion, I hadn’t really achieved a goddamn thing. She seemed to think I was just trying to sell her a bill of goods. Arrrrgh. In the end I managed to get $35, but nowhere near the real time I spent dealing with her machine. I packed the girls up, grateful to have MY non-POS (Piece of Shit) machine back, and went home.

Later I got an email from her, and whaddyaknow she got AdAware loaded and it found about a billion things and since I obviously know nothing about Juno maybe I should brush up on that or not take those jobs. I sent her back a polite note saying Juno had nothing to do with any of this, I did clean her drive, and that I had tried my best. Apparently somebody from her computer club—after much badgering I’m sure—came over and somehow managed to get it to read a CD with AdAware on it. How they accomplished this I don’t know. I did install extra memory in the POS before I gave it back and who knows, maybe that put it in a better mood. It was just some old PC100 memory I had lying around and wasn’t doing anything with, and by the time I brought her machine back I was so sick of her and her attitude that I didn’t want to open up her machine once again to take it back out, I just wanted to get the fuck out of there. That, and I had to keep an eye on the girls. It’s possible the CD drive was dying also, which might explain its only reading CDs when it felt like it. I don’t really know.

She even tried to ask a few more technical questions in her email and at that point I basically told her to bugger off and ask her computer club guy. I know she’s going to badmouth me to her entire computer club. Probably with a bullhorn.

I did a few stupid things, but the biggest mistake was being too casual about my estimate. She acted a little nicer in person and I got kind of fooled by that, I think—fooled into thinking she understood was I was saying, and what was involved. She didn’t. I’m also thinking I need to get some legal help with getting a contract made about “liability.” By the time I see a lot of the machines I work on, they’re so messed up it’s unbelievable, and half the time people have no clue as to what I’m talking about when I discuss their computer’s problems. I don’t want to hear “well it was fine before YOU touched it…”.

That experience and a few others have gotten me thinking maybe I ought to shift gears into the web design end a little more, and possibly do Cuesta’s Web Development Technologies Certificate. Most of that can be done online, which in my current situation, couldn’t be more perfect. Of course, there’s plenty of clients from hell to be had in website design as well (pdf link), so I don’t know what the hell I’m thinking, really.

You can run, but you can’t hide.

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Links! Links!

A beautiful entry on parenting from Childbearing Hipster

Via Very Big Blog: It’s the Generator Blog! Very nifty indeed. One of my favorites is the Business Proposal Generator.

Politics Test

LeTourneau Needs A Pickle Dish