Two Sorry Days

I want to say at the top that I don't expect or want any sympathy. That said...

I spent all of today doing the very thing that frustrates and angers me like no other: making a balky computer behave. Yesterday I upgraded my anti-virus software and discovered afterward that my photo uploading software no longer worked. No problem; I'll just reinstall it. Did that, then found that Photoshop wouldn't open, nor could I reinstall it--it froze up every time. This was getting serious. I could live without photo management, but I need Photoshop. Tried to fix that, and I think you see where this is going: by mid-morning I had completely screwed up everything, including the Office utilities (Word, Excel, etc.) upon which paying my mortgage most directly depends. Not only that, but I apparently crippled all the means available to me to repair the damage short of doing a complete reinstall of the operating system. Not my favorite option.

So, while my main computer passed the afternoon backing up all my files to an external hard drive--I hadn't destroyed any data yet but by that point I wouldn't have put it past me--I researched my problem online via laptop. Twenty minutes ago I implemented the most promising solution and ... it worked! Nothing was lost! All I had to do was reinstall Photoshop, which the stupid blinky box allowed me to do this time, and I was back in business.

Like I say, in a world where billions of people have no computers--or food, shelter, jobs, etc.--I'm not asking anyone to feel sorry for a guy with two computers and whose heaviest physical labor for the day involved moving back and forth between them. But I hate computers when they do this--HATE HATE HATE!--and have a lot of excess energy to spew your way. What a waste of a day.

Yesterday involved a gentler kind of frustration. I sat down to pencil and ink a couple of pages and found that I just wasn't drawing well. It was like slogging through concrete. Some days go like that. Sometimes I don't notice when a brush or nib goes bad and I think the problem is mine when it's really my tools'. I remember one stretch of four or five days when everything I drew was terrible, then realized I'd lost all my mojo the same day I switched to a different texture of paper.

That didn't seem to be the case yesterday. I hadn't actually inked anything in more than a week and might've been a little rusty. You just have to work through it, and I picked a couple of pages that I thought would be less artistically challenging than others. Nobody else would be able to see the difference. Happily, in my experience, when I look back later I can't really tell the difference between work done on a good or bad day, either.

Again, no sympathy needed. I'm just venting, and in fact it feels kinda good. Thanks, I feel better now.
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P.S.: Perfect. I was just about to hit the "Publish" button when our home's cable Internet went out. If anyone other than me ever reads this, I guess it eventually came back on.

Looks like I picked the wrong day to use technology.
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P.P.S.: Got the cable back after about three hours. I should just go to bed now.