Nom de Plume

What?

WHAT?

I can’t hear you!

No, I’m not deaf.

Well, not YET.

I can’t hear over the freaking PLANES.

I loathe, despise, and abominate Seafair. You wouldn’t believe the noise of the planes. It seriously hurts your ears, it’s that loud.

The sad thing is, Seafair hasn’t even started yet. This is what we have in store:

Friday
11:00 a.m. KeyBank Air Show presented by Boeing

1:00 p.m. American Family Insurance presents the Patriots Jet Demonstration Team

1:20 p.m. Fat Albert C-130 Demo

1:30 p.m. U.S. Navy Blue Angels Practice

2:40 p.m. KeyBank Air Show presented by Boeing

Saturday

12:35 p.m. KeyBank Air Show presented by Boeing

1:00 p.m. American Family Insurance presents the Patriots Jet Demonstration Team

1:20 p.m. Fat Albert C-130 Demo

1:30 p.m. U.S. Navy Blue Angels Demonstration

3:25 p.m. KeyBank Air Show presented by Boeing

Sunday

10:00 a.m. KeyBank Air Show presented by Boeing

11:20 a.m. KeyBank Air Show presented by Boeing

1:00 p.m. American Family Insurance presents the Patriots Jet Demonstration Team

1:20 p.m. Fat Albert C-130 Demo

1:30 p.m. U.S. Navy Blue Angels Demonstration

2:55 p.m. KeyBank Air Show presented by Boeing

AHHHH.

My bleeding ears aside, isn’t this a tad excessive? Oh, no, not at all. Let’s burn through all those fossil fuels. So much for Seattle trying to be a green city.

I despise Seafair. It’s fine if you can get away from it, but when you live in south Seattle, you can’t. The traffic. The crowds. And those infernal air shows. Which are loud, and distracting, and set all the dogs in the neighborhood off in a frenzy of barking.

Looks like my mother might be appearing on This American Life to talk about Iraq.

I soak up sun. Even wearing a hat, SPF 30, and sunglasses, I still tan. So the white patches are becoming more and more obvious to me.

I suppose examining every pore doesn’t help either.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought some foundation (Zia cosmetics–who can resist?), and thought to myself, “WHY haven’t I been wearing this stuff all along??” Seriously, it was perfect. Only it was light coverage and didn’t really do much for the patches. I had read online that MAC has some good coverage foundation. So today, I hoofed it down to the mall and hit the cosmetics counter. The girl caked me up.

She was pretty caked herself–but it looked as though underneath the three inches of putty, blush, and chartreuse eyeshadow she was a pretty girl. Which leads me to the following observation: Even though I threw down 140 bucks, I’m thinking that maybe Dermablend is the way to go after all. I’m caked, and you can still see white patches if you look up close. Say hellooooooo kabuki doll.

Don’t even ASK how I came across this little gem.

On the bin of peanuts:

Warning: This product is processed on machines that also process peanuts.

I believe they term our neighborhood “transitional.” I found out what happened last night. From the Seattle P.I.:

Someone shot at an unmarked police vehicle late Thursday in south Seattle and officers were searching for a suspect, Seattle police reported.

The shooting was reported about 10:15 p.m. on Rainier Avenue South at South Fisher Place. No officers or the vehicle were hit, police Sgt. Deanna Nollette said.

Police had a K-9 unit at the scene. Officers were looking for a suspect with a pitbull puppy, she said.

Tonight Harry and I went for our tromple in Madison Park, and when we came back started noticing all the police cars with blazing lights. I’ve never seen so many in one place. The entire Safeway block is surrounded; there are at least 30 police cars along with a helicopter circling overhead. And of course, there’s NO NEWS OF WHAT’S GOING ON.

I’ve been using QuickBooks Professional 2004 for the past couple of years, mainly because my mother gave me her copy after she decided that she hated it. I don’t particularly love it, but it’s been functional–which is why I haven’t switched despite having a copy of SBA 2006. I figured that once I switched to Vista, I’d change over to a product that can create invoices in Word rather than the cumbersome PDF.

And lo and behold! Microsoft made the lite version of SBA’s successor free! It was all I needed. Woohoo. So I installed it on the new machine and copied over the QB file to import data.

Didn’t work. Apparently, you need an instance of the program itself to transfer. The data files aren’t enough.

Okay. So I went ahead and installed Office Accounting Express on my old PC. Did all the file transfers, works like a charm. YAY. Transferred the company file over to the new machine.

Didn’t work.

Okay, so found message board with support guy saying that the best way is to create a backup, then reinstall the backup on the new machine. YAY. I’m almost there. I followed instructions. It was all working. And then, it …

Didn’t work.

Okay, so NOW the problem is that the SQL database doesn’t exist. Well, that’s what I’m assuming. What the message SAYS is that my SQL server, which was installed as part of the damn program, is not set to allow remote configurations. I suppose that’s all essentially the same thing: it doesn’t exist because it can’t be configured remotely.

Please, somebody, just hand me a gun. Vista 64-bit is going to be Vista, in 64 bits. Then, so am I.

Update: five minutes later.

Oh Jesus. Okay, so I decided to change permissions in SQL Server Express. Found a handy dandy little technet article, followed the instructions … and then found out that I needed to install SP2. Do I have the strength for this?

Update: the next day/

I’m glad I didn’t start installing stuff. I posted a message on the help forum and someone kindly told me to restore it to a different name. It works now.