Not such a good day

• My neighbors' house, the one with the bright green door, was burning this morning. There was a plume of white smoke coming from the center of the roof, like cotton batting being pulled from a small hole. I smelled it in the shower. The firefighters knocked out windows with their axes, and shot out the roof from within with high-pressure jets of water. When I got home from work, someone was throwing garbage bags full of sodden possessions out the third-story window. (I think nobody was hurt. & I think most of the house survived.)


• Barack Obama performed as expected in Pennsylvania, which is to say not well enough to put this limping, snarling, finger-biting primary out of its misery.


• adfamiliares's laptop is experiencing kernel panics whenever Airport is on. This is apparently a known problem with G4 iBooks, because the soldered-in Airport card cracks its solder after a while. It's a $1000 repair, because Apple isn't acknowledging this design flaw anywhere but in Denmark.¹


• I've spent the day disagreeing with Jeff VanderMeer, who I respect highly, about boob-groping. [To clarify: Jeff was the one saying it was dumb and immature; I was on the side of the gropers, provisionally.]


• I've been generally down for the last 36 hours or so. Not sure why. Things seem stressful and insurmountable. There are barriers between us all.

¹The solution may be to buy a cheap USB wifi dongle. Any suggestions from the tech crowd?