Rambling, steroid induced update... I got in to see my neurologist last Friday and he agreed to let me pass on the $3000 MRI and instead of intravenous steroids (5 days of a catheter and lots of possible side effects, yuck!) he gave me an enormous 10 day run of oral steroids to take. 2 days each of 20 mg pills starting at six a day and tapering down to one. Scared the crap out of me, usually steroids and I don't get along, but so far just some minor heart palpitations, too much sweating, some itching and my food tasting funny. And, of course, the bizarre spurt of fake energy and overactive brain waves. I figured "no sleep this week" because so far I've been taking 40 mg at bedtime, but I've been taking my Ambien and Klonapin all together and so far not too bad.

I figured perhaps at least I'd get some things done this week with the extra nervous energy, going to work on my new Ebay store, Enigma Arts, where I'm transferring all my postcard auctions to try and keep my listings on MorticiasMorgue a bit less jumbled. I've got the artwork almost finished, I can't do anything halfway, then I just need to transfer a bunch of my PC's over there. I still need to get GothicKitty up, I've been having too much fun playing with Phoebe and snapping endless photos so far, though. She's getting so big, in a few weeks she'll be a year old!

For some reason, even before the steroid regimen began, I decided one night that I just needed to completely upgrade my Mac to OSX. After downloading yet another program that told me "use the OSX version, it's better, OS9 is dead" I just got really pissed and decided to try it. It had been so long since I installed OSX originally that I had to pretty much reinstall it to get it to start up correctly. A lot of the programs I already had (Photoshop, GoLive, Toast, Suitcase...) were already OSX compatible, so it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I'm still using my old ClarisWorks, I need to get AppleWorks, I've got MS Word but it annoys the crap out of me for some reason. The thing that disturbed me the most about OSX when I first tried to play with it was the lack of the Apple Menu, and all of my beautiful hierarchal menus, desktop folders, labels, scrapbook and little things like that, but I'm getting somewhat used to it. After like 13 years of using the same basic system, it's rather disorienting. I like to put my files in my own folders, dammit, so they make sense to me, and I'm the only one who uses the computer... I switched over to a much more high tech version of Scrapbook, though, which I already had for OS9 called iData Pro. The company that was distributing it wen out of business, but the program creator is keeping it going and giving away free trials on his website, so check it out now, awesome program!

It's nice to have a version of AfterDark back, though I miss Boris ;-) I'm beginning to make peace with the Dock, though it still gets in my way. The font anti-aliasing is rather annoying too, I'm having enough trouble reading right now without making my fonts fuzzier and slightly smaller . On the good side, my auction listing program isn't corrupting my finder every time I use it, though I'm having some printer problems even though I updated the driver for my Epson. It's like it gets tired after awhile and gives me an error, which I'm having to work around by stopping the print queue, hitting retry, and then starting it again (to print one page).

The system does seem to be more stable, though, less crashes. It also restarts a hell of a lot faster than OS9 did. When I added an external hard drive to the old system it doubled my startup time, but OSX just bounces right back. It's a bit quirky, sometimes clicking on the weird little transparent menus doesn't work (I have to click on the desktop then back again). I like the updated iTunes and the new version of Fetch is fancy.

Oh well, more later, I need to try and wind down a bit before bed, still have two more steroids to take. I just went in and created the new Ebay store so I guess I'd better go make my About Me page and add my pretty little graphic to the store listing. Those little 310x90 logos are so easy to make, I don't know why more people don't at least make the effort. I get lots of compliments on my Morticia's Morgue store logo, I think it makes you look more professional (and more memorable to people).