Happy Year of the Dog!

It's the Chinese New Year, and this year is the Year of the Dog.
 

The Year of the Dog is actually my year, which is a bit ironic, as I really don't like dogs much at all.  Mostly I don't like dog owners, particularly those who feel that their pets should be treated like children and brought into all kinds of stores and restaurants.  But I don't really like the dogs themselves either.

Growing up we went to Chinese restaurants a lot, so studied the Chinese zodiac on the placemats.  I remember that I thought it would be funny if my brother was Year of the Pig, though he is actually Year of the Rat (not much better, though rats are certainly more respected in China than they are in the States).

I'm kind of hoping that this is a good year for me.  After all, I have a play in the Fringe (and I'm closing in on the last of the edits).  And it seems I am making some progress on pushing forward an interesting project at work.  However, the day itself was not particularly auspicious.  On the way home, I was dealing with too many things like a wayward garbage can, and I dropped my copy of The Old Wives' Tale in the snow.  I'm still pissed about that, though the truth is that, while I am enjoying it quite a bit, I am not particularly likely to reread it.  Thus, I can part with this copy and just download a version from Project Gutenberg.

Then it turned out that my daughter's laptop wouldn't charge.  It took a lot of fiddling around with it (and switching chargers), but it ended up charging after all.  So it won't have to be replaced for a while, though my son's laptop does seem to be on its last legs.  (For that matter, the main desktop computer I use seems completely out of memory all the time, and I probably will have replace it, since it certainly isn't cost effective to try to upgrade it.)

Then someone had unplugged my wall charger, and the laptop completely ran down while I was off doing something else.  This is always annoying, since it usually means having to restore a whole bunch of files when you reopen them.  However, I didn't lose any work due to it shutting down.

Finally, I had really planned on running off to the gym, but I simply ate too much, and it took too long to digest, so I gave that up.  I'll probably go tomorrow.  On the whole, not a great evening, given that my routines were all thrown off, but I suppose it could have been worse.