a better day. sort of.

I discovered that most of my crankiness comes from leaving Anna, just as we're moving in together and getting into the swing of things. There's other stuff, of course: I have a lot of packing to do (I hate packing); I have to buy a lot of clothes (I really hate buying clothes). It feels exactly like there is a tremendous amount of stuff to do, and by the time it's all done, I'm lugging some bags to South America to spend 9 months doing something that scares me, in an unknown place in a foreign country, under unknown circumstances.

I feel like that last part, at least, is appropriate to the situation.

Bullet points from the day:

• Explosion of ants entering the house to get away from the rain. They were wiped up, smooshed, or removed outside.
• Getting a portable storage unit into my driveway, so we can juggle my and Anna's stuff during packing and moving. The storage unit only rolls in a straight line, and is almost exactly the width of the driveway, so I got to lever it with a 2x4 to move it side-to-side as needed. This amounted to leg presses of many hundreds of pounds, so my legs and hands are sore, but I got to be both clever and manly, so that was fine.
  
• My Mac had a stretch of being unusable today, because the battery and my remaining A/C adapter died at the same time. (The previous A/C adapter did some combination of melting and fraying and would no longer adapt A/C.) I didn't need a trip to the Apple Store on top of everything else, but they gave me a free adapter because of the melting, and I got out for the mere $130 of a new battery.

I think I hadn't realized how much I rely on the Mac throughout the day, and a few hours of trying to work with the Asus netbook I bought makes me think it's worth the extra money to buy a "cheap" refurbished MacBook and bring that instead. Windows gives me the rage, and the whole reason I switched to Mac was because I was tired of the constant tinkering needed to make Linux do what I wanted. (The tinkering isn't always necessary. As with so many things, as a computer user I am very particular and maybe a bit difficult.)

At any rate, Anna took good care of me all day, and the rain stopped for a bit while I got to lift something heavy, and then we had some lovely dinner and did aikido. And that's a fine way to end any day.