Rat Creature's Journal

My stupid rats chewed on the cable on my wacom tablet, and it now won't work anymore. Unfortunately the cable is fixed to the tablet, so I can't just use a new USB cable, also with the many finicky small cables making up the cable I can't just fix it myself like I could with a power cord. I tried reconnecting the strands, but didn't manage to get it working again. :(

Why can't they make standard cable insulation bitter with some added chemical rather than letting it remain sweet as it is now? Surely it's not just pet rodents who love the taste of cable better than many actual food stuffs, that has to be a problem in buildings and such at least sometimes.

Argh. I guess my yuletart entry will have to be completely traditional media, because there's no way I can afford a new tablet right now, not even a cheap one like mine was, not least because of the same destructive rodents' vet bills. Gah, I haven't inked or colored on paper in ages.

In slightly better news, when the vet removed the remaining stitches from Krümel's eye on Monday he said it healed quite well. There's still a hematoma in his eye that'll have to heal, and he still has to take an antibiotic daily and eyedrops several times a day, but the chances are better now that he will be able to keep his eye. I have to come for another check in a week, or rather it ought to have been a week from Monday, but that's in the middle of Christmas, so I'm going to take him on the first day after, i.e. the 27th. Meanwhile Krümel seems mostly okay, though for some reason he keeps that eye squinted almost closed most of the time, but from what I can see of it, it doesn't look worse or infected, so I figure it's just because it's still healing or something, and hope for the best.

So my desktop computer, which is fairly new but not under its six month warranty anymore, has a problem. Sometimes it won't boot when I turn it on. It doesn't even show the BIOS screen nor the graphics card notice. The on/off switch diode lights up, and the case fan works, however I don't see the hard disk diode blinking.

So when it happened the first time out of the blue (there weren't any signs of incipient failure the last time I had turned it on) I thought the worst, tried the turning it off and on again once to no effect, and then pulled out my computer, intending to check all cables, then open it, see whether the processor fan starts, and whether maybe just some connection is loose or too much dust had accumulated or anything. So I pull it out, wriggle all the outside cables, try once again, and miraculously it starts before I even open it. And the computer worked fine, no errors, no freezing, or anything.

So I thought that maybe it was nothing after all, clearly going with my hopes for a best case scenario, because I really don't want to spend money repairing or replacing it fully or in parts. Also seeing how it is still fairly new I didn't anticipate any such extra computer costs, I'm still recovering from buying it this spring, no matter that it was a relatively cheap one as far as computers go, but it was still a big expense for me. (I did however backup the data I hadn't already.)

But then today it fails to start again. So again I try a couple of times, futilely hoping that it might resolve itself on its own like before, then pull it out, open it, and all cable connections I can see seem fine, so I try starting it while open, and again it suddenly works, and now seems to run okay. It did give me BIOS notice that I had pressed the cold reset button too often in sequence, so clearly something registered even as the computer didn't seem to do anything.

Does anyone have any idea what produces behavior like this?

So in an attempt to start relying less on LJ's ScrapBook gallery functions I just spent the last few hours uploading all my drawble artwork (over 60 images) to my webspace, created thumbnails (thankfully I found a shell command automating that step), coded them to display on my page for assorted sketches, complete with the annotations that used to be gallery labels showing as mouseover, i.e. for whom I did it and what the prompts were.

Then I changed at least the posts for the most recent drawbles to link to these images instead of the LJ hosted ones, that in *three* places, what with the crossposting. I do not look forward to do that for the rest of the drawbles, let alone all the entries showing rat pictures, and scans, and what not. Gah. It's not that I'd be that thrilled to pay them again as if nothing had happened, but I could have read another SGA Big Bang novel in this time, you know? And at least this part led to some vague improvement in that more of my art shows on my site, editing to relink most other other content won't do anything of the sort. *feels conflicted* Maybe I should consider letting posts just break...

Anyway, I feel like drawing monsters, which I haven't done in a while, so if anyone's interested and maybe wants a monster drawing, you could prompt me with a description or some features. I do somewhat cute monsters better than truly scary ones, but I can try to be scary.

I have a killer headache, my throat is scratchy, my nose stuffed, and I woke up from a nightmarish dream where I was chased through tower structures during some kind of flooding event, that was damaging them, so I had to scramble over waterlogged, bloated corpses (no idea why they were already bloated when the flooding was happening just then), nearly drowned in some pipe/tunnel thing next to one, and all of that somehow was happening as I was trying to get through an excruciating (and general anxiety inducing) family dinner thing at the place. There were other horrible things too. Thanks a lot subconscious!