While I have an internet connection and a prayer, I thought I’d rant for a little while and further document my crazy. I’ve been feeling very unproductive on here for the past couple days, opening tabs and then sort of leaving them there to read for days on end while I hum and haw and walk from one task to the next, pull my hair out, whimper a little and then lose my internet connection … again.

The annoying thing is, from my husband’s end (i.e. our server and where my internet connection is coming from) there’s basically no problem. My mac just seems to have lost it’s noggin and can’t deal. And I’ll try a million things and then try them all again with no luck. Then I’ll walk away and clean something in the apartment thinking, “Clearly the internet gods think I’ve been online too long,” and then I’ll come back and the problem will either temporarily be gone or it won’t be with little explanation. Basically – nothing I am doing is helping anything and sometimes I strike gold and have a connection long enough to do some stuff, and sometimes I don’t.

MEANWHILE, like that isn’t fun enough, there’s this unwelcome house guest roaming around, nibbling on the food in my pantry and pooping a lot. I like to call him, “that damned mouse.” The mouse who seems to be some kind of mouse trap escaping savant. The little sticky traps that our maintenance guy has brought have proved basically useless because without so much as a peep it just climbs onto the trap eats for awhile and then un-sticks itself and leaves.

The Tomcat trap we bought last weekend and put peanut butter on thinking, “He can’t just pick that up and leave,” well apparently he can or else he is able to magically sit on the thing and lick the peanut butter off and then leave without triggering the “kill me now” button. Amazingly if I so much as look at the trap wrong it goes off, so if it were a “startle Jen” trap then I’d say it works rather well. But the mouse? Not caught yet.

I think tonight Dan’s planning to pick up a real mousetrap (you know the old school get ready for blood and guts kind) and we’re crossing our fingers that the old standard holds out. I’m mentally paying my respects and also hoping it works since clearly this mouse might be smarter than we are. Hopefully it’s not planning to go out tonight and buy Human Traps or else we’re done for.

Anyway the hubby is coming home for lunch and installing Ubuntu on my Mac and I might just be converting. I tried it out on the disc today and mostly liked it except it kept booting me offline, too, but I’m hoping it’s just because I was running on the CD and not a real version? At this point I’m just going to try whatever and hope for the best and at least I’ll have OS X and Ubuntu to switch between and feel like I’m doing something useful when my connection drops out.

I should probably publish this now before I lose my connection and probably also this post…

* update *

So we installed Ubuntu and all would be great except that my internet driver thing on the Mac doesn’t appear to be supported. There are a handful of drivers out there apparently with this problem and lucky ducky me, I’ve got one. I suspect Mac very much so intended it this way. But Dan still thinks he might be able to Linux/MacGyver me a solution tonight because he has mad skills. In the meantime, I’m praying my connection holds out today on ye old Mac OS X. It figures now that we’re trying to install Linux on it, the Mac is behaving. I’m pretty sure it knows what we’re trying to do and it’s all, “Look the Linux thingy is way more complicated than you thought it would be and now I’m behaving. You should probably just forget this whole thing, Jen,” but you know if I did, my internet connection would be gone again in like the blink of an eye. ::sigh::