Dear Diary #84: Ball Fell Out of Ballpoint Pen

Dear Diary,

Got desperate for Halls to alleviate some cold symptoms and I caved at a grocery store. It cost just under $2 for a single roll of Halls... I can usually get a bag of four rolls for $4 at pharmacies or big box stores, so that was a painful one to swallow. Even worse was the fact that I dropped one piece on the floor and had to chuck it.

Twas craving a salad with chicken and blew about $9 on one at a fast food joint. Couldn't believe how much I enjoyed it. Come to think of it, that's exactly what I've turned all of my sandwiches into given the way that I eat them -- with a fork and knife, cut off or taken apart because I don't eat with my hands anymore.

Still coughing but mostly only in one building where the air is dry as a desert. Outside and in other buildings, no problem. This one? Lung is about to come flying out.

That confused feeling when you lost the password to your other router/modem thing but you only logged into it once a year to reboot it or double check settings. As long as it keeps working, I don't really ever have reason to log into it again, and I can power cycle it without logging in. So, I could just leave it completely alone until it dies or malfunctions, at which point I would probably need to do some intensive work on it anyway. But then there's that bad feeling of being a problem that needs to be solved. Fighting to urge to do a factory reboot and setting things back up properly.

I am definitely a pen noob. Pen started acting weird, then I noticed that there was a little metal wire hanging off the end of the tip. Must have written over a small piece of metal wire and the ballpoint pen got jammed open, right? So, not having pliers, I went to get a pair of scissors to pull this little bit of metal out and fix my pen. I pulled, pulled, and pulled, some more, took a while to get the entire metal wire out of the pen... Ya, I think the ball fell out of my ballpoint pen and that wire was a spring that was attached to the ball. And that cartridge was still half full. Boo.

So, I think it's time that I finally retire my Converse Chuck Taylor shoes. Been wearing them for four years and I knew that there was a hole in my left shoe, but I wasn't aware how big or deep the hole was until I took the laces off to inspect it -- I was planning on duct taping it. The initial assumption was that the hole only penetrated the sole a little bit, just enough to let water leak in and soak into the rest of my shoe. Turned out that the hole was all the way through the outside and inside, I could put my finger through it. The thought of walking into a men's room and stepping into a pool of something really put an end to the idea of keeping them.

Later.