The terrible, terrible angst.

My head is made of lead. Also I forgot to pick up my prescriptions whilst in town. I am terrified that I shall never see my poor little car again, because they were meant to be looking at it for an hour starting from 9:30am and then ringing me, and they haven't. I checked the phone number several times but I can't help but worry that I transposed a digit or something; but I don't want to be pushy (and I don't want to have to walk back across town and collect it right now because I feel very dead).

I haven't felt properly alive since the weekend; I'm not sure whether I actually have some kind of illness or whether it is just the crushing weight of stress. At the weekend I ran a Nobilis game which I think should be the last RPG I ever run because they're not worth the stress; I lost points for running away and going to sleep for a couple of hours in the middle of Sunday. Then on Monday because I had lost my Psion I spent an hour in a doctors' waiting room (I'd got the time of my appointment wrong). Yesterday I attempted to take my car to the nice Cambridge Vehicle Services people and failed because I had an address which was seven years out of date for them (yet still the top hit on Google).

Hence today I had to get up really early to get my car to them, and the freezing cold wind almost killed me on the way back (I also forgot to get a hat; I need a hat so I don't get such awful headaches from the wind, and I left my hat in a church in Lincolnshire). I have also lost another glove and possibly another two on top of that, leaving me with one mismatched pair with a hole in the side of one.

I am not very good at life and suspect I am going to fail it. I hope I have some kind of illness which will go away, because currently I am good for nothing.

(no subject)

I like conferences. They mean I get interesting things like 'guinea-fowl in red wine sauce' to eat in Hall. Even if 'guinea-fowl' is just like slightly rubbish chicken.

Took my poor car to the garage today, had some mechanics do £52 of incomprehensible things to it, which apparently have fixed the boot door and the gear linkage problem that was making it slip out of first gear, but not the squeak because it was doing the whole 'act nice for the mechanics' thing, or the passenger door because that required a part replacing which cost over £50 on its own.

Went to the doctor's on Monday; they recommended that I switch contraceptive pills and told me that the new ones were safe to take for two months in a row. So that was some useful information. Shame I got the appointment time wrong due to having temporarily misplaced my Psion, and hence ended up sitting in the waiting room for an hour listening to old ladies talk about a new housing development and reading back issues of 'Woman' and a National Geographic from 1994. Managed to actually get my prescription on the way to pick up the car, although still forgot to go to the dentist's and work out what Paperwork of Doom I require to get registered with them.

So I did most of the things I had planned for today, although I really need to stop procrastinating on writing CVs. The problem is, I have now written them for the two companies I actually want to work for, so I'm less enthusiastic about doing so for the four or so others which I feel I ought to apply to. The dreaded meh appears to have worn off, though, which is good.

And with the techie things.

Have spent a while today getting CD ripping working; using a console program called 'jack' to do it, because that's the least fuss, but spent quite a while tracking down an obscure error code through several man pages until I found that it was a problem with the ogg-vorbis package not updating because it needed to zot a couple of useless things (midi player, jukebox thing) which I randomly had installed in order to be able to install the latest version of a library.

I was inspired to write this after noticing that it has merrily mis-labelled everything on the Cure album 'Wish' as being by the artist Wish on the album Cure. I wonder if it's actually a freedb problem, or whether the program just got confused and fell over for no apparent reason. Unfortunately I only wonder idly so it probably shan't get fixed.

Talking of things which need fixing, I still need to whine at maintainance about my lightswitch. And work out what's up with Synaptic: some time ago I yanked mozilla-firefox out of experimental because I was bored waiting for them to update my bug-ridden 0.96 to the release version in unstable, and now synaptic has it as 'locked' and I can't unlock the thing (it will unlock just fine but next time I load it up, locked again) - apt works just fine on its own and admits to no pinning of mozilla-firefox (which I'm now getting out of unstable again because they got around to sorting it out). I tried googling on the problem but nothing useful was forthcoming; synaptic doesn't have a proper bug-reporting thing, just a developer list, who I feel probably oughtn't be bothered with it as it's probably something daft I did.