The Sound of Silence

"Hello darkness my old friend...

I've come to talk with you again..."

I wish I could play that song on my blog, but alas, those day have come to an end.  I've read over and over how people hate it when your blog starts with the auto-play on music.  I once had another blogger visit A Day in the Wife and proceed to send me an e-mail outlining everything that was wrong with my blog:

• hate the music, and so do your followers
• don't like word verification on comments
• too hard to find my e-mail address
• I was too "small time"

...and then she ended it by saying, "You're killing me, Smalls".  All I did to open myself up to this was leave a comment on her blog that one of her posts was funny.  Her blog has over 600 followers, so I think she thought she was doing me a big favor, but I thought to myself, "That's IT, I am auto-playing music FOREVER!"  Because you know why I write this blog?  It's not to win an award.  It's not to get more followers than anyone else.  It's not to impress people (CLEARLY!!!)  It's because I like to write, and I think everyday life is funny.  And nothing I say is terribly original to me, it's only sometimes funny because this is stuff that happens to everyone in some way, shape or form.  I also happen to like my followers.  You're funny people.

But do you notice how this Smalls Talk happened about four months ago, and it's still on my mind?  At least I'm not bitter, right!?

Anyhoo...the other day, Stacey Ballis posted something on Twitter that was funny, and since I am now stalking her, I was going to respond with a Vanilla Ice comment.  Since I like to be accurate when I quote Vanilla Ice, I went to playlist.com and searched for the song "Ice Ice Baby".   When I hit Play, my computer went "All right, Stop!" and promptly downloaded a virus and literally stopped.  This is the fourth time I've picked up a virus on my laptop, which only started happening when I started getting music for the blog from playlist, and so, I bid playlist.com a fair adieu.  It's sad, really, because I love music and it's been such a fun tongue-in-cheek thing to put a matching song with a blog post, but Saturday was the day the music died.  My laptop is still not working, so I have to use Current Husband's computer at night.

The other person affected by my dying laptop is Youngest Daughter.  She is a big gaming junkie, and loves to play Club Penguin, Nick Jr., Disney, Webkinz, and Class Brain, all of whom can be suspected of sending viruses, or at least loads of spyware, to my computer.  Every day, YD asks if she can play my computer, and every day I have to tell her no.  She gets very sad and then walks away to read Captain Underpants books, which I suppose is the lesser of two evils.

Last night, YD and I made a Sam's Club run.  School has started, so I needed bread, lunchmeat, chips, fruit, carrots, juice boxes, cereal, waffles, after school snacks, and caffeine in various forms.  We spent about $250, a full cart night, and on the way home we were listening to the radio when the ad came on for Double My Speed Dot Com.  The people were giving their testimonials about how they went to Double My Speed Dot Com and their computers are now miraculously like new - the cynic in me says that all of their passwords and account numbers have been downloaded as well.  Pretty soon, a small voice pipes up from the carseat in the back:

"Oh great, NOW you tell us, after we've wasted all of this money on food!"

There she is, the Child of 2010, who would rather play Club Penguin than eat.  Super.  I've made my child into an Internet junkie.  "And the people bowed and prayed...to the neon God they made...."  Do you think I'll get Mother of the Year?  There it is again...The Sound of Silence.

Happy Hump Day!  (Ooh, I want to play "Humpty Dance" now...do the Humpty Hump...)