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September 22 1998, Tuesday

things that have infuriated me of late

Microsoft's built-in fax software. I want this software giant to know the pain and agony they've put me through yesterday and today with their miserable non-intuitive wizard-based faxing "solution." When I fax four .bmp files, I expect to fax four sheets of paper. Not seven, not eight, not an undetermined number endlessly Sorcerer's Apprentice stylee, not without the ability to ABORT DAMNIT (and no, I have absolutely no desire to see my aborted faxing attempts coming back from the dead on a regular basis either). And how about a preview function, just like, say, Microsoft Word?

The fact that AOL now spams me with an advertisement every time I logout. It was bad enough when they did it only some of the time.

The fact that when I logout of AOL, their software maintains a connection on the line for a disturbingly long time thereafter. (Don't bother telling me AOL sucks completely and that I'm a fool to be using it at all; it was handy when I was traveling.)


K

im and I were terribly hung over this morning. There seems to be a general consensus among those willing to prescibe a cure that the best medicine for this sort of condition is marijuana, and since medical marijuana is legal in this state, we may not have even been committing a crime when we smoked it on several occasions today.

A nervously pleasant real estate agent took us on a tour of a little cottage in someone's backyard in Kensington, and everything was going well until Kim asked if there was anyone else applying for the place. "There was another girl, but it turned out she had a dog, and it didn't work out. Since you'd be sharing the yard, there can't be any dogs." Evidently there's a whole subculture of people out there trying to sneak their dogs into the mostly dogfree rental units of San Diego. Kim had been thinking she could definitely get Sophie into this place. It certainly looked like a possibility: the landlord is the absentee kind and it's a small, detached cottage. But now we could see it was an impossibility. We smiled and told the real estate agent thank you. There wasn't any point now in even filling out the application. Having a dog enormously increases the complexity of finding a place.

L

ater we drove down to Ocean Beach and checked out another possible residence, a spacious one bedroom bungalow in a courtyard of similar places. It was nice for the price and we decided to go for it. We set up camp in Java Joe's, a big, dark, dank, dingy coffee house in downtown Ocean Beach, drinking caffinated beverages and filling out the applications with a borrowed pen. Kim attached a long message to our applications explaining that she does have a small dog, but that Sophie is well behaved, housebroken and quiet . I was more concerned that my present lack of job was going to nix our prospects.

Java Joe's would be ever so much nicer if they'd lose the brown carpet that contributes so much unnecessary funk. Today was a laid-back kind of afternoon, and there were only a couple other customers besides us. Somebody spaced his or her counter shift and the counter girl was getting increasingly pissed off at her captivity there, firing off phone call after phone call to possible relief. We realized we ganked her pen after we left, and not wanting bad karma attached to our rental application, we went through the trouble of returning it.

After we turned in our applications, we went briefly to the beach to watch the sunset and the timeless inexhaustibility of the waves.

B

ack in Normal Heights, we had word on the answering machine that the prospective property manager was okay with Sophie, but we'd have to pay an additional $400 security deposit. That sounded outrageous to me, but Kim (who has had bad experiences finding dog-friendly places in San Francisco) was delighted. We chowed down on another quality dinner of Roberto's tacos.

one year ago
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