Choices and Victories

Well, we are still at Zoe Cottage, having had the house on the market for 67 days and a total of 9 prospective buyers, six of which at our first open house. Actually, the small number of buyers is somewhat nice, as it means I am not having to figure out where to stash my project du jour, or race around like a crazy woman to clean things up.  We must prefer a slightly messy look, as that seems to be the norm. I'll have it all cleaned up by Saturday morning, though, as our agent is hosting another open house this weekend.

Meanwhile, we have listed 507 with a new property manager, but as far as I know we haven't even had a nibble on that--or else she is just not going to bother us unless they are serious, which is also nice.  We trotted over there three times for engineer reports and estimates on foundation repairs, and in the end decided we would just get the doors working and worry about the (very expensive) repairs another time. We also forked over a substantial part of this past year's rental earnings to a tree trimming company who did a fabulous job on the two massive oak trees in the back yard over there. All the dead wood and limbs that were likely to cause problems through a hard winter are now cleared out, and Ornery can rest easy about liability and so on. Theoretically, anyway.

Yesterday as I was washing dishes, I thought about my life, and how at every turn there are opportunities to choose happiness/joy or frustration/sorrow. I discussed with myself and the flatware about how happiness is a choice, or rather thousands of little choices every day.  Naturally I was challenged to remain happy by every technological device I own. :(  I am pretty sure there was some sort of universal conspiracy to make sure I had lots of opportunities to choose joy.  I can't say I was always successful!

I decided to join the other gazillion consumers and purchase Taylor Swift's new album. It's cheaper to buy the CD and get the free instant download mp3 than to just buy the digital music. ?? Anyway, I did that. And because my operating system is not supported by iTunes, I have to buy all my mp3s from Amazon, who does not seem to have a problem with it.  Then I spent the next two hours fighting with the "new and improved"  music downloader, a continually crashing Google Chrome browser, and a Firefox browser that would not update. 0_o 

Really?

Having failed at that venture, I decided to update the maps on Naggie, our Garmin Nuvi GPS.  I spent half an hour looking for the chord to plug it into the computer--good thing Ornery had something else that would work because I never did locate it. Then another two hours updating the software and maps. Unfortunately, there was not enough memory to load all the maps, and the map option it gave me was apparently not supported by my model... So I went to bed last night with music I couldn't play, an outdated browser and a now blank GPS, because of course it had to wipe everything clean!

Today I determined to be happy, doggone it! So, I fiddled around with my computer long enough and hit enough buttons to finally get my iTunes to accept my new Taylor Swift music, then called Garmin's customer support line and got my maps to load.  I ended up uninstalling Chrome, and while I did manage to update Firefox, I will send my computer back over to my son-in-law to see if he can administer CPR or whatever geeks do to resuscitate dead computers. Mine's not dead, but I really do prefer Chrome, and all my stuff syncs across the platforms when I use the same browser on all my devices. (check out that techno-vocab!! :)  I'm slowly catching on!)  I'm pretty sure there is a virus or something.

I think I may need some beach time. :)