Peeking into the rock

Seriously I am eating a reasonable amount of food but I feel like nobody lets me near the victuals. What the hell? I'm having to do reality checks on my consumption instead of just following my appetite because it's never satisfied. Maybe I'm missing some important nutrient? "Satiatine!" the vitamin that makes you feel satiated.

I have a new keyboard for my laptop but I can't figure out how to get the thing in. I mean, I understand that all the components of the laptop have to come out but I can't see how that is done--there are a lot and and a lot of screws in there and many odd plastic structures. So I decided I needed a new computer guy because the guy I was using spaces me out all the time and can't be in my presence for more than a few minutes before he tells me what an asshole my son is and how much he disliked my dog (he's in the category of "old friends" but I'm thinking this category might be too broadly defined). I called the one down the street I can walk to and it was a weird conversation in which the guy seemed to be trying to convince me not to bring the laptop and keyboard in. So I guess I'll call the other one a few blocks farther away.

I drafted a new sleeve for that top but I have my doubts I did it right, so I haven't cut  new ones out yet. It's no use saying "use a well-fitting sleeve for a guide" because I don't own any. I have some t shirts that work right, but the woven shirts I own all have oversized sleeves and giant armscyes, whereas here I'm trying to make a just-normal sleeve with a tailored armscye. I believe the reason I own all these giant shirts is that normal shirts in my size are never made so that they actually fit. Usually they are too tight in the bicep and weirdly both too broad and too narrow in the shoulder--to narrow across the back and too broad across the front, even if they are too tight in the bust. That, and for a long time the dropped shoulder "big shirt" was all the rage. I think that the endurance of this style is because it doesn't matter if it doesn't fit.

What else can I complain about? I know! I can't find any more non-Company Kage Baker books! Maybe I'll give up and try the Company books again. What I want more of is stuff like The Bird of the River and the Pismo Beach sort of stories.

I got the student and faculty suite of photoshop and illustrator plus a bunch of junk I don't care about. Now, of course, my computer is infested with demands to register at adobe.com and the update spam I had already turned off (several times) appears to have been turned back on. Damnit.

However, they are shiny!

I am flummoxed in Illustrator though -- when I make a vector object, and I want to go on to a new one, how do I tell the program that the next thing I'm going to do applies to the new vector? So far I have only gotten to the next vector by accident. In paintshop 9, you clicked "apply" to exit one vector and start another. Illustrator seems to have no such thing.

Also, very bad, stupid, terrible manual, which doesn't actually tell you stuff like that. Mostly it tells you how wonderful the program is. I did learn some things from reading the manual, but until I can do this one thing, I won't be able to do anything. Because, as it is, weird artifacts show up between the objects when I go to start the new one, like chunks o'color, or extra line segments, or everything changing to the properties I want the new one to have. Or worse -- stuff I really can't identify and don't know how it got there.

edit: I can't make photoshop do anything either.

On another front, I can say "Muj syn je student na universitu karlovy. Studuje medecinu. Moje datr studuje morske biologie." Only that's missing all the antennas because I'm lazy, and the antennas on the r in "marine biology" indicate a sound that nobody who is not Czech would imagine making voluntarily. You might make it if someone was licking you and you weren't sure whether it was delicious or creepy.

I can even say "Muj manzel je mrtvy." The only thing missing are the antennas. The U in muj has a little tiny O hovering over it to indicate a sound that I cannot distinguish reliably from a regular non-palatized longish U. Or sometimes it seems to sound more like an O. The Z has a little V that turns it into the sound of the S in the English "treasure" (quite straightforward, relatively). The y in mrtvy has an acute accent which makes it sound like the i in atropine instead of the i in pin.

In case it's not obvious, I said "My son is a student at Charles University. He studies medicine. My daughter studies marine biology. My husband is dead."

I had to look some stuff up. Mrtry (dead) was the only word I had to look up for more than confirmation.

I can give terrible directions in Czech, too. I can't say "the station is to the left of the post office," but I can say "Look at the post office. The station is to the left."

In general, I find that I am learning much more Czech philology than useful language, and I wonder if this is a personality flaw of mine.

On another note: Jason's mama offered to take care of the dog and cat while we're gone. I'm floored: it's too much! But I agreed. Now I have to clean the house, out of respect.

On an unrelated note: the keyboard appears to be finally losing its mind -- one key at a time. Right now the letter C is unreliable and I have to pound on it sometimes. So if you see it missing, you know why.

Head thing is a tag because after I realized I had to chage the tickets I had almost a whole week of not sleeping and not doing much of anything else either.