No work on the house yesterday. I've mentally given up on moving when we're supposed to. I mean, if they actually finish on time and we get to move when we're supposed to, that'll be great, but at this point I'm just grateful that I thought to extend our apartment lease.

Matt and I agreed last night that when (oh, excuse me - if) Nancy comes to us and tells us that she needs to move the closing date back, we're going to make her sweat for a while by saying "No." I mean, I don't think we can get away with it for very long - After all if the house isn't finished, we can't move in, no matter what the contracts say. But it would be nice to be able to calmly and quietly say something like, "Well, since we signed the paperwork back in February, but you didn't start work until April; and since we called you numerous times with concerns over the fact that no work was being done for weeks at a stretch; and since we asked two months ago to move our closing date and you told us no; and since you've been saying steadily for the last six weeks that you had plenty of time to finish the house... Well. I'm sure you've got plenty of time to get it done. "

I feel all warm and fuzzy just thinking about it.

The longer this goes on, the more I share with Matt his fantasy, even if they do manage to finish on time: At closing, after we've signed the last piece of paper and they've handed us the keys, we'll look up, smile beatifically and say, "Oh, Nancy? Get out of our house."

---

Ah, well. We thought the cat was going to actually sleep through the night last night! He didn't wake us up until 4 o'clock, which was fantastic. Especially since I'd been having a spider dream again.

I think I've figured out that I have spider dreams when I'm feeling stressed and trapped and there's no way out.

This time, I was walking through a park when I noticed that all the trees were up on little hills, and each little hill had a steel fence around it. I didn't ask for the reason, but I overheard it: The park was home to a bunch of "field tarantulas" which I knew in the dream were hand-sized spiders that lived in underground burrows. The reason for the fences was that the hills were places where the burrows were close enough to the surface that the weight of an adult could cause the ground to collapse. After that, I was practically paralyzed. I couldn't walk anywhere without worrying that I'd see the spiders. I couldn't stand still because then they'd know where to come get me.

I was grateful when the cat woke me up, and then it took me a while to shake the feeling of the dream enough to go back to sleep.

---

So I've been having this weird situation at work, where there are two different ways to log into my computer. I'm supposed to log in one way most of the time, but I have to log in the other way to get my Zip disk out of the machine. (I keep all of my personal stuff, like my web page, on my Zip disk.)

Yesterday, I was playing a game when I started having trouble making backups of my save file. I tried simply rebooting, but that didn't help, so I thought maybe I needed to defragment the disk and check it for bad sectors.

My defragmenting program lost all of its settings when my operating system had been re-installed a couple of weeks ago, so it needed to be re-installed itself. So I located and downloaded the installer and ran it. The installer told me that I needed an update to the operating system (called a Service Pack) - in fact, I needed Service Pack 2 or higher. Well, I know before the re-install that I used to have Service Pack 3, so I just needed to get that and install it.

After half an hour of network permission issues, I finally get to the machine on the network with the Service Pack installer, and run it. That installer tells me that I've got something newer installed already. I try it again. Same message. So in desperation, I reboot. While it's rebooting, I check the status line where it tells me what OS version I've got - and sure enough, Service Pack 4 had been installed. So why did I get the message from the defragmenting program saying I needed to install the Service Pack in the first place?

Well, naturally, I needed to be logged in the other way to install that program. Finally, I got it all installed and ran the defragmenter, and was told that it was impossible to completely defragment my Zip disk because its pagefile was fragmented.

My Zip disk doesn't have a pagefile.

I gave up. The minimal defrag that had been done seemed to fix the problem of not being able to copy files. And it only took me two hours. It's about all you can ask for, on a Microsoft-based machine...