One of the cats investigating the water dripping from the ceiling.

First world problems

All in all, my life isn't that bad.  I'm not homeless, carless, phoneless, friendless, foodless, or familyless.  Armed people who don't like me because I'm me aren't in any way a component of my everyday worries.  My water is clean, my trash gets picked up.  Climate change has been a problem as the persistent drought caused the house to shift, opening a wide-enough gap for the arctic cold to seep in and freeze the outside spigot on the north side of the house where the garden hose is usually attached. The cold also caused the sunporch's normal expansions/contractions in the sun and shade to pop a seam its roof allowing ice melt to become porch drip.  The cats were fascinated with that one.  Still, we were able to pay our way out of both inconveniences, so all we've suffered is an adjustment in the numbers on a bank statement.  All in all, life isn't terrible.

Pebbles

Although life, overall, isn't 'terrible,' it has its chronic annoyances. One, at the moment, is that the remote control to the space heater on the sunporch has disappeared. Early in that day, it was in its usual place. That evening, it was gone.  Knees & flashlight searches of the porch and various rooms have come up with nothing.  The cats are the usual suspects, but they're not talking.

The pebble of the moment is online passwords. Logging in to various sites naturally requires a password of some sort.  We've all seen the spamfests on unprotected chat lists, Facebook groups, and blog comments. Ugly.  Despite the usefulness of passwords, keeping them up-to-date isn't a task for the end of a work session because, invariably, when a site that didn't like the password you told it (but let you log in anyhow with Facebook), you need to fix the problem. Too bad that when the previous password is needed -- the one you thought you knew, but apparently don't -- the fix for that is to acquire a new temporary password by sending a request to your email, coming back, pasting that one in, then changing everything once again.  

Time to go home (log off)

At that point, the pebble of a misremembered password has become a boulder and it's all too much. The heck with finishing the task. The heck with changing the password.  The heck with doing anything else that requires fiddling around with cyber-guts you can't see.  At this point, all I want to do, because this is me I'm talking about, is work only with solid 3-D real stuff.  No more fiddly bits and bytes of invisible programming.  Yes, cyber-stuff is a modern miracle.  No, it's not something I want to deal with day in and day out. The virtual pebbles in my online shoe have raised a cyber-blister and I'm going to hobble away, wishing poxes on all things in the ether.  

I'll be back online tomorrow, but for today -- I've had enough of the pebbles and I'm done.