March 03, 2005 - 6:59 p.m.
Ha ha, if I was still looking for cosmic excuses not to ever update my diary, I would have totally given up on it for all time after last weekend. Ach, it was horrible. It was early Saturday morning and I was looking forward to a weekend full of diary-updating opportunities. I was "surfing" over to the Diaryland site in order to tell the story of my genius sister (which, knowing me, is probably a story I will forget to tell), and suddenly my hard drive made a scary noise that sounded like something score-boosting happening as part of a game of pinball, then my computer locked up. Since I got Windows XP, my computer has NEVER locked up. I restarted and it wouldn't boot.
DEAD DRIVE! AAAAAAAAUUUGHHHHH but actually it wasn't that bad, all things considered. My father was able to clone the partition with all my system stuff and applications on it, but unfortunately the other partition was the culprit with the Sector of Ultimate Doom on it. It also happened to have a lot of valuable things on it, like MP3s that I ripped from my CD collection which took for friggin' ever argh, Photoshop documents, game ROMs and archives from previous computers. So, crap. But my other drive is fine, and it had most of my music on it. If my MP3 playlist suddenly went from 14,685 files to zero, I think I'd snap and give up on listening to things altogether.
BUT, this also happened: while I was shutting down my computer and waiting for my father to take a look at it, I decided to play a video game. I noticed that there were three ants roaming near my pile of GameCube games. Well, as anyone who's ever lived in a poorly-converted garage with a lot of cracks around the perimeter knows, where there are three ants there are probably more. So I moved the stack of GameCube cases back and
A MILLION BILLION MILLION ANTS! AAAAAAAAUUUGHHHHH but unlike the computer situation of that morning, it was even worse than it appeared. There was a mosaic of ants in the area where the game stack was pushed up against the wall, and also coating the side of the stack. Most troublingly, they were running panicked in and out of the holes in the bottom of the game cases. I got the vacuum cleaner, which I honestly think I use more often for ant removal than actual vacuuming, and sucked up the ants on the wall and on the side of the cases. But they just kept coming out of the holes in the bottom of the games. I picked up the top game and opened it. There were a couple ants inside it, freaking out. I ate them with the vaccuum. Same thing for the next game, and the next. But then, I opened up the next game (Pac-Man World 2, Player's Choice edition) and
WRITHING DVD-CASE-SHAPED MASS OF ANTS! AAAAAAAAUUUGHHHHH and I flung the case away from me in startled horror, which was a mistake because when it hit the ground a couple feet away it snapped half-closed and flung ants everywhere. The grossest part: most of them were carrying ant eggs, which they were storing in the little corners and crevasses of the game case. GROSSNASTY GROSS EW. But nothing a lot of quick vacuuming couldn't handle. For some reason, they had chosen to nest inside half my GameCube collection and make more ants from there. For the record, it is a pain to disassemble 23 game cases and suck ants and ant eggs out of them, never knowing if the next one you open will be another ant city or not. (Of course, even when I was expecting it, the sight of hundreds of ants all crawling over one another would always cause me to make a squeaky noise and shove the game away from me, causing another antsplosion.) The absolute nastiest thing was when I lifted the game disc for Pac-Man World 2 (the other copy, don't ask why I have two) and found a cache of ant eggs underneath it and stuck to the data side of the disc, and when I went to suck them up I POPPED A BUNCH OF THE ANT EGGS AND THEY SMEARED ACROSS THE GAME DISC OMG EW EW EW EW.
Anyway, I eventually got that mess cleared up (although it took all day) and when I followed the ant trail I discovered that they were coming from a hole in the corner of the room behind the cart with all my game systems on it. So I had to disassemble the cart to move it away from the wall and plug the hole, and if you know how many game systems I have you'll know that I'm not kidding when I say it took all day. It took no less than another hour of solid sucking and three different ant-killing products to stem the flow of ants from that corner. The most effective was a mound of ant-killing powder right under the hole; it seems that they were very determined to check on the status of their eggs because the next day there was a pile of dead ants on the dust dune trap by the hole.
So yeah, that's a gross story, but I really hate ants and you should know that life is not always fun and games when I am not updating.
The ant story took a long time to write so I'll totally rush the important other stories that I intended to write about:
1) Laurie's friend Tomoko visited from Japan, and it was fun although I was not around for most of the fun that was had such as a trip to Las Vegas. I did however get to watch an actual Japanese person perform the kanji-writing minigame from WarioWare Touched!, and she also was kind enough to translate the MuuMuu Rap from Jumping Flash 2 for me, which is a mystery I've been trying to solve for years. Also we went out for drinks (I was the designated driver, naturally) and Laurie politely drank despite not really liking to drink, and I really wish she hadn't because she was incredibly adorable (and, bizarrely, fluent in Japanese) when she was drunk. I mean, she's always adorable, but the cutou-factor was magnified by ten, and I really don't want to want her to get drunk. I mean, I had to help her walk, which is the sort of drunk I normally find abhorrent, but she was SO CUTE. They also gave me a sip of some blue concoction that tasted like an Otter Pop, so I'm thinking maybe someday I'll have some alcohol with Laurie. Just that once. But yeah, Tomoko was great and I want to go to Japan ARGH.
2) My sister Carol is a genius and I saw her perform many of her musical works at her "senior recital," a lot of which was done on an organ. And this organ was not messing around. It had the three keyboards, the knobs on the sides, the three foot pedals, the bass keyboard you played with your feet, and an array of foot-activated switches. It was NUTS and it was amazing. Hooray for my way-talented sister! Also, the drive down to her college, with my mom and dad and aunt and girlfriend in the car, made me re-realize that I totally love my family. I had a really good time and I wish I could have written about it in a more timely manner, because I would have made it seem more awesome. Did I mention it was great? Because it was.
In my next update, I will probably have nothing to say but I will have a terrific digital photograph to share with you that I've been waiting to share for a time when I had nothing to say. HA HA HA I BET YOU CAN'T WAIT.
