Aaargh and Double Aaargh

Sooooo. Veeeeeeerrrrrrry. SLOOOOOOOOOW.

I'm pretty sure there's an amendment to our Constitution that states something about American citizens possessing the right to quick Internet service. Enough with the health care reform already; how about some relief for those of us who are forced to rely on technology installed sometime during the Medieval era?

I've complained at length about not having any cable TV where we live, and while I really don't care about our inability to watch MTV or ESPN, I do care very much that my computer is moving liking a turtle. I'm about ready to dig into the ground and place cable myself if it'll help me post to Blogger in less than 45 minutes.

Not only is our absence of cable slowing me down, but I believe that our photo storage may be taking up too much space on the hard drive. I use iPhoto, and I've noticed recently that it's holding 26,502 pictures. Is that a lot?

I'm going through our 26,000 pictures, deleting the blurry and transferring those that I don't think I'll need any time soon to CDs. Maybe freeing up a few hundred gigabytes will help speed things up around here. I'm learning quite a bit about my husband in this process of sifting through our massive assortment of pictures. Basically I'm realizing I've married a crackpot.

The guy's got photo collections of the cosmos, which are pretty cool, but the ice sculptures? And all the LOL catz? Okay, those are funny, but we don't need to keep them on our computer when they've got their own website. Hubby's got a folder of pictures of food that he's taken with his cell phone: plates of blueberries, Mexican lunch platters, piles of doughnuts that co-workers have brought to the office, and our dinner from the fancy restaurant we patronized on our anniversary. We've got literally hundreds of pictures of the Orient that his mom has taken on her 3 or 4 trips over to China. Don't ask me why they're on our computer.

I found a bunch of scenic photos labeled "New York in the Fall." Not that we've ever been to New York, in the fall or any other time of year.

I came across a group of wooden boats carved to look like cars. Slug bug.

Speaking of cars, my husband has a fascination with trucks that have fallen through the ice. Up in Fairbanks, there's a lake that people use as a road during the winter, when it's frozen solid and as smooth and wide as the Autobahn. Every year, drivers push their luck by continuing to use the shortcut across the lake after the weather has warmed; one or two end up breaking through.

This is one of many toilet pictures that my perfectly normal spouse has collected. Although the male model in that photo is no relation, he rather resembles my brother-in-law. I showed it to my sister-in-law and casually mentioned that I didn't think it was very classy of Bill to let himself to be photographed like that. She believed me and started to read him the riot act, before our laughter alerted her to the joke. Good times.

Then there are all the photographs of toys that don't sell very well in the U.S.

I am deeply disturbed by the knot pictures. I know they are photoshopped, but still.

While we're on the subject of "deeply disturbed," I absolutely HATE the many, many alien pictures my husband has collected. I particularly loathe the family shots—a loving couple posing for their engagement photo, a mother holding her baby, a family sitting for their portrait—where one of the subjects is an alien, posing just as naturally as can be, like there's nothing strange about it. My husband thinks it's hilarious to slip a few into the screensaver folder that runs our own family pictures across the computer monitor when no one's using it. I'll be walking through the family room and glance over to see something like this:

That alien baby is almost as traumatizing as my slow computer.

Dinner last night: orange chicken, chow mein noodles