Bubba Siege

I don't have much of a front porch, it's merely a set of brick stairs with a railing precariously attached and a pair of shrubberies providing enough privacy to make it a passable perch for the pleasant perusing of periodicals and publications.

Until recently. Over the last week or so the shrubberies surrounding ny building have been vanishing, one-by-one.



My outdoors cat used to love the shelter provided by the shrubs that aren't pictured here:
I have a bad feeling about this. I fear my landlord is planning some major renovation to the exterior of the building and that my apartment will be under Bubba Siege at some point in the very near future.

If you are a renter, you might already know what a Bubba Siege is. It's what happens when loud, vulgar and often drunken contractors set up a semi-permanent camp outside your apartment window while they go about painting/renovating/repairing the building in the noisiest manner possible. They never seem to go away and yet they never seem to make any progress towards their goal

Professional Bubbas are amazing. They can do in weeks what it would take a layperson hours or even days to accomplish, and they can do it at a decibel level rivaling that of a live rock band...if your town has a "classic rock" station ( i.e., one that still has Boston and Foreigner in daily rotation), the Bubbas will have it tuned in and cranked up. Remember Styx? You do now.

To make it worse, it looks like I'll be unemployed during the upcoming Bubba Siege- a Siege is not so bad when one has a day job, as there is no way in hell you can get a Bubba to begin work before 9 or continue after 5, so they have usually departed by the time one returns home, but a Siege will make one's home uninhabitable at peak hours. If one has no money, the library and the public parks will become indispensable resources , as well as providing valuable training grounds in case one is forced into homelessness.

Job in doubt? Spend money!

My new PC is not here yet, but I have already upgraded my monitor, having found a 20" LCD widescreen for $99...sweet!

It turns out that my old PC's CD drive was causing my woes.Windows wasn't recognizing it- I went into BIOS and disabled the CD and set the PC to boot off the hard drive first ( no A: drive in machine) and it worked fine- I temporarily installed a borrowed CD drive, defaulted BIOS back to boot off the loaner and it worked with no fuss, so voila , problem identified. But not fixed.

It's a drag , because I will have to find another way to move 25+ gigs of audio files from Old PC to New PC...a data-stick thingie comes to mind...it also shouldn't be hard to find/borrow an old IDE drive for free, so no way in hell am I buying a 50-buck drive for a PC that's two days away from being mothballed. There are a lot of ways to transfer files these days...might be able to FTP 'em...who knows?
Eh, cross that bridge later, right?



What game am I playing? Hint: You can get killed by pots and pans. My old PC can barely run it, but the new one should rock...I hope I can survive the virtual kitchen!