photo friday: street faces

bright faceback street muscle

dredd facesgreen girl

blue happinessnewtown dexter
It's been a bit of a stressful week this week...

Things started out well on Sunday with my "made up from out of my brain" chicken soup... and I now realise the secret to a good quality chicken soup... lots of black pepper. That and shredding the chicken with forks and fingers.

And I started Assassin's Creed Rogue... which I'm already going to suggest isn't going to be a particularly good or memorable game, and I'm only a couple of hours into it... it's essentially a continuation from Black Flag with a large amount of AC3 thrown in. Like literally thrown in... they've just taken the assets from both Black Flag and ACIII and put a slightly updated skin on some of them. Despite the fact that I really enjoyed Black Flag, I have to say that I'm kind of over the whole sailing ship thing now... and this looks like it's essentially more of the same. But I'll keep playing it anyway, it might improve once I get into the proper meat of the story.

Unfortunately Monday went downhill pretty damn quickly. There were a whole bunch of meetings I had to extricate myself from, which was much easier than I thought it was going to be, and I ended up with a perfectly valid excuse beyond "I really don't feel the need to be at these meetings". But when I got home on Monday night I turned on my laptop and that was when the real fun started. I don't know if I tried to get it to do something before it was ready or what the deal was, but it wouldn't load any of my desktop icons and kept flicking between the empty desktop and a blank grey screen. I tried rebooting, nothing... I tried unplugging my wireless mouse, mild improvement for a moment, then nothing... and Google was being no help with what was actually going wrong. Eventually I managed to find how to get to Safe Mode in Windows 8, but when I got into that menu I noticed a command for "Refresh your PC" which promised to revert my computer but keep all my files.

There really is no feeling of stomach sinking abject terror like the terror of technology that completely fails to work the way it's supposed to... I know it's one of the high level First World Problems... but it does generally make me want to throw up.

And that's how I spent the majority of Monday evening... I didn't eat anything because every time I thought about it I also wanted to throw up, and a large chunk of time was spent firstly waiting for my laptop to go through the refresh process and then secondly me trying to install all the programs the refresh process had removed. And then finding the settings for things like Firefox and Thunderbird in the backup data left behind by the refresh process so that I wasn't starting from a completely blank slate.

I still haven't reinstalled everything... like iTunes and Photoshop Elements for example... and I have a sense of complete and total dread every single time I boot up the laptop that it's going to fall over again. Doubly so because I have no fucking idea what actually happened to make it fall over in the first place. And for reasons that defy logic, there seem to be all these little things that my laptop was doing perfectly fine before that don't work the same way anymore. Weird and frustrating.

The tinfoil hat wearing portion of my brain is pretty damn sure that it all has way too much to do with the launch of Windows 10... It's a conspiracy I tells ya!

Anyway, on a normal week I would have spent the week pottering around getting the laptop back to normal... but not this week. Tuesday was Movie Night and then Thursday was Haircut Night.

My hair was seriously in need of a cut (and a colour) though... the grey is definitely starting to show on the sides, and I felt like I was just at that scruffy stage. But Tink sorted me out. We're still refining the overall cut for my current style, I think this one is more a developmental cut rather than a finished product... but overall it works okay. I did suggest to Tink that we take it from four weeks to three just because that last week my hair is generally a mess, so hopefully that will work better. Other than that we chatted about this, that and the other before I took myself home.

Oh and I managed to leave my umbrella on the bus on Thursday morning... I have no idea how, it was attached to the back of my bag (kind of) and I'd already dropped it and picked it back up again once, so I have no idea how I managed to drop it, not hear it fall or realise it was gone until it was too damn late. I wouldn't have minded if it hadn't been the decent mid-sized umbrella... partly because I have no idea where the hell I got that one from, and partly because all my other umbrellas are either much smaller and therefore infinitely useless or gigantic.

Fortunately I've been feeling better this week than I was last week, so at least I didn't have to contend with feeling sick on top of everything else.

I finished off the week with my monthly chiro visit and a nice dose of So You Think You Can Dance... and of course, next week is a whole new beast....

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