Passing For Normal

I'm kind of a downer lately, for which I apologize. Working on it (with varying degrees of success). This post, however, is not full of sunshine and puppies.

First, the unrelieved bad news: The hard drive crash is unrecoverable. After waffling for a while, I paid for attempted recovery, but no luck. It is deader than a dead thing that's really really dead. Which means that yes, I really do have to start over from scratch on both "Wide Open Space" and my Summer of Giles podfic, both of which were completed (except for beta). So I'm trying to find the enthusiasm required to start recording again, which has been difficult. I did record a short thing, one of my own (Took Ill on Thursday, a wildly obscure C6D crossover) because that's always the easiest thing for me to podfic, but editing hasn't happened yet because that had to wait for the new monitor to arrive. Speaking of which...

In more mixed news: I have a new monitor for my desktop computer, which is where I live for the majority of my waking hours. I had no idea exactly how much I live on this thing until it wasn't available. Wow. Anyway, new monitor -- an Asus 24-inch LCD -- is here and up and running and I do not love it. I do not, at the moment, even like it. The image doesn't even fill the whole available screen; it's got a substantial black border around the edge, and I have no idea how to fix that. Also, everything is much too bright and the brightness button only goes up; I haven't been able (yet) to figure out how to make it go down. And everything is much, much too yellow, so what should be gray is a really ugly, muddy putty color and anything that should be green is screaming neon yellow-green, and the yellows themselves? Grab your shades and cover the children's eyes. There must be ways to tweak all of these things -- really, none of these should be too hard to resolve, right? But the online help doc is the WORST mangled-in-translation (from Chinese) and least helpful garbage I've ever seen. The monitor was just installed yesterday, so I'm still in a mixed mindframe, an unhappy jumble of denial, moping and woe, and thoughts of returning the damn thing. So I'm giving myself a bit of time to get over the emo phase before attempting to research the issues and see if I can fix them.

The good news: I can start catching up on a lot of things I missed! Like replying to comments, and reading a large backlog of people's posts, and replying to e-mails, and reading the last-ever (*sniffle*) McShep Match stories, and much more. A lot of my sunny-happy comes from wallowing in online fannish community and fannish creativity, and I'm going to roll around in it until it soaks in through the skin, the eyes, the ears, and... well. You get the idea. *g*

HI. I MISSED YOU. A REALLY WHOLE LOT. ♥