Burn Baby Burn

Damn, my hands are burning. I must have little microscopic cuts or something on them that soap has gotten into. I was putting the plow blade on my John Deere riding mower since winter is coming and that involves tools and mucking around under the machine. I have a couple of obvious scrapped knuckles but I must have some unobvious abrasions too. It's not really very painful. I just noticed it as I began to type. I don't work too often with tools in such as manner so I have no idea how to avoid such burning hands.

But anyway... there are lot of things that I don't know how to do. An air freshener almost outsmarted me this week. I've never used much air freshener and am not wise to their ways but I decided to try one out since I never liked the stale air of a closed up house in winter. I got one of those cheap cone shaped ones. I figured I'd start out with the dollar model and see if I liked it. It has a long cone of plastic on top and a short base. I sussed out to spin the cone but then nothing. It didn't seem to open. There is a small hole on top and if you squeeze it some scent comes out but that hardly seemed to do much. I put it down, came back latter and managed to figure out to pull the cone upwards with quite a bit of force. I had tried this earlier but it didn't budge. The stickiness of the gelatinous stuff inside keeps the cone in place and you have to break its seal before you can pull it up to open it. Now plenty of scent comes out and the room smells like a chemical toilet. I might go with the stale smell of winter.

I still have to do a bit more work with my hands tomorrow. I have to put the wheel weights and chains on the tires of my riding mower. Without them I won't get much traction as I try and clear my driveway of snow. The wheel weights are cumbersome but not much of a problem to put on. The chains on the other hand... With the advent of snow tires and then all weather tires I don't think most people have anything to do with tire chains anymore. That's a good thing. They are a pain in the ass to put on. Maybe a pro working in a garage snaps them on real easily but I don't. They have to be wrapped around the tire and then hooked on just right. There is no give in chain and if they're too loose they'll fall off with the first plow. That's what happened to me last year. In the middle of clearing the driveway both tires had their chains fell off on me. I was so aggravated. Luckily my aggravation was relieved when I was able to put the chains back on quickly and easily. To this day that baffles me because they've never gone on quickly and easily before. I have no idea what I did right. Life is a mystery.

Computers are a mystery too. A few week ago I installed the new operating system, Leopard, on my laptop. About a week later my trackpad stopped working. I had no idea why and I tried everything I could think of to get it going. I restarted multiple times, ran disc utilities, repaired permissions, did a safe boot, booted it off of the original install disk, and even tried some trackpad software that is supposed to add extra functionality to it. Nothing worked. All my computer would tell me was that there was no trackpad installed. I tossed out the preference pane from the third party trackpad software but that didn't deinstall the program. I know this because every time I emptied the trash it told me it couldn't throw out the preference pain because it was still attached to something. This annoyed me for a couple of days before I tracked down the deinstaller and got rid of the program. Next restart the trackpad worked fine. Why? Who knows? Computers are a mystery.

It's all a mystery. Isn't it?