Going to the gym? Once you put your stuff in your locker, you still need someplace to put your key. Around your neck? Dorky. And I hope you don’t mind carrying your water bottle and iPod and book. Don’t want to or don’t have enough hands? You need a fanny pack. Dorky! Fanny packs are too dorky? Carry your nice purse. Ultra dorky! And dumb.

Going jogging? Maybe you don’t mind carrying your water, but what about your keys and ID? You could put them in a regular bag, but it would bounce and flap. Dorky. You’re back to a fanny pack, dork.

So it appears that, without pockets in exercise clothes, we still look like dorks, but the manufacturers have the added bonus of getting to sell us overpriced fanny/waist/hip packs and/or those iPod carriers that strap to your arm. Have we really netted less dorkiness?

An hour and a half later, while we were at the part of From Russia with Love where James Bond finally fights the SPECTRE agent who has been following him the whole movie, a bat flew out of the kitchen and started zipping around the apartment. It’s interesting to see a Halloween decoration flying around your Christmas tree.

Thud said, “What is that?!”

I said, “It’s a bat.”

He said, “How do we get rid of it?” By this time we were standing up but constantly having to duck the bat.

“Well…” I said and opened the front door. Our apartment isn’t that big, and Cory’s bedroom was closed. On its next circuit, the bat found the door and left. And then I said, “Hey! Now the exterminator won’t have to put down rat poison!”

And that’s the story of the bat in our apartment. I did hear maintenance inspecting the attic this morning, although I don’t know if they found anything else, but hopefully that will be the end of it.

So we did our thing and found some rocks, and several of them had clearly and obviously already been cut down to make gems, and then the leftovers re-seeded into the buckets. Ok, look. I know gem places seed the buckets to be sure that every one contains at least a couple of things worth cutting, so that they can make more money selling lapidary work. But WTFLOL? Can’t you at least let me pretend that the stuff in my bucket hasn’t been picked through? Come on!

We won’t be visiting that one again – maybe we’ll have better luck elsewhere.

Cory started talking a few weeks ago, that is, using a few words in context on his own. Reading Mercedes Lackey novels aloud is at least a couple of years off. (Although he would if he could, for the annoyance value.)

We consider his first word to be “cup.” He said it while looking around for his sippy cup, and went straight to it and took a drink when he spotted it. But he mostly says “Cory” (“Cowwy”) now. It’s not vanity so much as it is the only way he can express a variety of different meanings, such as “that object should be given to Cory,” “time to play with Cory,” and “Cory is on his way over to climb on you and drool on your shirt.”

His main hobbies include turning the ottoman on its side so that he can play in the space between the cushion and the base, taking the cushions off the couch, and throwing the occasional tantrum to see if it will get him anywhere this time.

Be sure to read the Lysol one.

But then there are the e-mails. When you, almost inevitably, get outbid you get the e-mail from eBay shrieking that YOU HAVE BEEN OUTBID and BID AGAIN NOW!! DON’T LET IT GET AWAY!! AUGHHHHH YOU FOOL!!! And as if that weren’t enough, when the auction finally comes to an end, you get another soul-sucking “tsk tsk” e-mail from eBay to remind you that you lost.

So usually I just look for Buy-it-nows. What’s funny is that eBay then sends you the e-mail congratulating you for winning. Oh yes, I am quite the winner and that made my day. Don’t I feel like a worthy person. What a joke.

I hate eBay.

And you know what she then told me? It wasn’t actually up until February. February!

The first step was kind of funny. Thud and I both saw it, and there was this realization that hey, that was his first step! And you sort of feel like there should have been bells ringing and lights flashing and confetti, but it’s over in an instant, none of that stuff happens, and Cory just goes back to drinking his juice.

With all of the excitement of walking, he has also been more short-tempered and ornery. And, unfortunately for me, has decided almost overnight that he should be eating more grown-up food. It’s not that I don’t want him to, of course, but it’s gotten much more difficult to figure out what to give him. He doesn’t like everything we eat, and it’s not always practical anyway. Suggestions? So far I have had no luck with the foods designed for toddlers, things with larger fruit chunks or mini ravioli for example.

Last night he ate almost an entire wedge of spicy black bean quesadilla, although it took him an hour.

Without going into too much laborious detail, I was trying to install a new piece of software and change the location of its user files. It kept failing to move the user files, and eventually while I was watching the directory they were going to, I found out the software was confused and was trying to move all of my user files, not just those specific to itself. No wonder it couldn’t move them.

At some point in all of this, apparently Windows XP became suspicious that I was trying to tamper with it or make an illegal copy or something – I still don’t know what – and refused to do anything else until I “activated” Windows.

The PC I am using – which I have had for a few years by the way – I bought direct from Dell and it has the Windows certification key stuck right to the case. So I entered it, and… Windows didn’t take it. We checked and re-checked it. But XP insisted that I either buy a new license, or call customer service. WTF?

Fearing that we had a 40-minute support call on our hands, Thud came home from work a little early so that he could watch Cory while I was on the phone. I made the call from my cell phone (because incidentally, this is where we discovered that the Vonage phone was nonfunctional again), but in fact I never spoke to a person. I spent several minutes talking to voice-recognition software and assuring it that I was not trying to install Windows on a another machine. That computer decided to re-activate this computer, gave me a long code to enter, and that was it.

Well, almost. iTunes then decided that it was a different computer, so I had to “activate” it there too to listen to my purchased music again. Plus, I still had the problem with my user files, and having totally freaked out Windows once while trying to fix it I determined that the only way to correct that was to back up all my stuff and create a new user account in XP to start over. I’ve been setting my workspace back up ever since. Also, deleting my old profile inexplicably broke my sound card driver, so I had to reinstall it.

Everything seems to be working now, until the next thing I find that doesn’t.

Please feel free to comment that I should go buy a Mac if you can donate the funds for it. Keep in mind that it has to be fairly high-end to handle gaming. Otherwise I am afraid I will have to stick with this PC for a few more years and you will just get a boot to the head. Sorry.