URI: Yard raking; Door shopping; Computer weirdness

Since the beginning of last week, I've felt overly depressed. And felt very tired during the day. I'd sleep but not feel refreshed . I told a friend, Tuesday, that I was certain my serotonin levels were off.

Well, I should have guessed it was an upper respiratory infection. I woke up yesterday morning and was very congested and achy, and in general felt lousy. I went back to bed and finally got up around 2. By that time, I'd decided I needed to go to the clinic.

Certainly nothing new to report about that procedure. Although the doctor and I had a brief conversation about which antibiotic is more potent. I was under the impression that Levaquin was the more potent, but he indicated that Avelox was. (Not to confuse the issue, but I'm also certain one of the other doctors had told me it was Levaquin. But I know better than to say that absolutely.)

He said that just about every other person, he'd seen during the day, had something like I did. He mentioned is was the "illness of the day." I immediately commented "illness du jour." As I drove off, I thought that I really could have said, "mal du jour."

So I walked away with a prescription for Avelox. And was so grateful that the life insurance account info had arrived last week. One of the first things I did Monday was to transfer a thousand dollars to my bank account, which was down to around $59. So this allowed me to pay the doctor, have lunch, and pay for two prescriptions without going into overdraft at $39 per transaction. (The second prescription was for xanax, which I'd called in Tuesday night.)

I've moved my exciting outdoor work to the front because it is desperate need of cleaning. I'd raked it several times in the fall, but it was an endless task. I would rake a section, and a couple of hours later, it would be covered with leaves and straw. At some point, I decided to wait for spring.

So far, I'm finished with the main section. The roughly ten-foot strip between the drive and the property line still needs help. This is an area devoid of grass, I don't really know what to do with it that would not be overly expensive. Sod is the simplest solution, but it would be very costly. Ground cover? Artificial grass? Pebbles?

Monday, I stopped at Lowe's and looked at doors. I've got to replace the front door; it is in terrible shape.

Of course, I could get a solid wood door for 3 or 4 thousand dollars.

Lowe's has a couple of solid vinyl doors in my semi-inexpensive price range, but they are not very attractive. And there's a good selection of more attractive doors with beveled glass insets. But they're far too fancy for my humble cottage. And doors with lots of glass are a security risk.

I've been through this several times before, and the most sensible option is a simple white door with a semi-circle beveled glass inset at the top. This would match the outside door in the kitchen, except that the kitchen door contains ordinary glass.

I also glanced at storm doors. They have a security door that I asked about out of curiosity. It looks like a plain glass door, but the clerk showed me one that they had tried to break. It's actually two pieces of thick glass with a very tough piece of plastic mesh between them. The glass was cracked and shattered but still intact.

As I learned before, the door itself is the cheap part, the delivery and installation cost are more than the price of the door. And this assumes the height of the door and the height of the slot are the same. Which was not the case with the kitchen door. The door was several inches taller than the slot, so this involved an additional fee. And I'm sure the front will be the same.

Within the last couple of months, I've upgrade my anonymous surfing software; replaced my security suite with the newest version; moved my DSL connection from 1.5 Mbps down/256 Kbps up to 6.0 Mbps down/512 Kbps up.

Firefox automatically downloaded version 2.0.0.1. I'm not really happy about automatic updates, I want to know about it, then let me decide. And I did discover there's such an option in Firefox. In fact I just checked and version 2.0.0.3 was available, so I downloaded it. (I wonder what errors it corrects.)

Even with all this, I was having a terrible time with downloads. I tried some minor changes that didn't seem to help. Then I read about the log files. There are hundreds of logs of what you do squirreled away in some nook or cranny of your hard drive. (Visit Start -> Search -> All files and folders -> All or part of the file name: enter "log" -> Look in: select "Local Hard Drives (C:;D:) -> select the "Search" button at the bottom of the panel. You'll get 700 or 800 hits, at least.

I did some cleaning up in this area and that helped - a little.

The real problem is when you go to a site with several YouTube videos embedded on the page and a number of graphics. Test is not a problem, unless there's a ton of it, or it's in pdf format. Large graphics can be a problem, especially it they are numerous. However, Firefox does allow you to turn off the automatic downloading of images (Under Tools, Options, Content: Uncheck "Load images automatically.) The real problem is trying to link to a popular YouTube selection. Most difficult. The other evening, I tried to watch a YouTube on towleroad, since this is a popular site, it's presence means there may be lots of other people also trying to look at it. It would not loads. All I could get were sporadic words. And once this process starts, it's almost impossible to stop. Even after leaving YouTube and towleroad, the system still tried to download it. A YouTube video is stored as an Adobe Flash file, which has a life of its own. Nor are you able to bring up the task manager to kill the process. Frequently, I have to resort to a reboot.

This is absolutely the most irritating task I've encountered on the web.

PAX! Erin Go Braugh!