Ugh…

Today sucked.

I wasn’t feeling too well this morning, so I didn’t write at my usual time, between breakfast and work. Then between grocery shopping, phone calls (incessant, long, meandering ones from family members about freaking television, of all things), dinner, and a few other things, it was 9 o’clock by the time I was sitting down to write.

And then my computer steadfastly refused to play sound. (This had actually started late last night, but I had written it off as one of those weird computer things that just goes away when you turn it off and on again.)

The weird thing is, it doesn’t 100% refuse. It just won’t play any useful sound.

I tried the various settings in the Control Panel, and from there, the sound worked just fine. But you know how when you adjust the sound by clicking on the icon in the Task Bar (Windows 7 here), it plays a slight sound to let you hear the level, and a colored bar rises up to the slider as it does so? Well, nothing happens now. And my music player, obviously, can’t make a sound.

But when I turned on one of the few games on the system, one from GOG.com, run via DOSBox, that plays sound just fine. Obviously, it’s a Windows problem, but beyond that…

Worst of all, this is my good laptop, my writing laptop.

In other words, it’s 10+ years old, and has never touched the Internet in its life, and never will. Which obviously makes me very hesitant to take it in to a service place!

*moan*

Anyway, what with being unable to listen to my carefully curated vaguely appropriate musical selections from the literally thousands of .mp3s on my hard drive, and with not starting until so late, I needless to say got almost no writing done today. My total for the day was a measly 366 words, giving me a total of 31,957, which should not jive with yesterday’s numbers, because yesterday I accidentally counted 54 words of notes I had jotted down in the file to remind myself where the chapter was going.

So, yeah, today sucked.