I survived the family reunion and all I got was... this pretty awesome margarita, actually

So. After two months of high anxiety (and that last month a solid four weeks of full-throttle cleaning. Y'all, I didn't even know what a baseboard was), my stepfather's thirty-person family reunion dinner is a fait accompli. I mean, I guess--I can't really even verify that it happened, because Brett the Vet evacuated me about fifteen minutes before anyone got there, and by the time I got home four and a half hours later, there wasn't a soul in the house but my parents and the pets. And my mother cleans as she goes--that's just how she rolls--so the house was spotless. The only reason I'm even partly sure it happened at all is that our fridge was significantly less full.

(My mother went into a grand mal fit du shit right before I left, so... good call on my part. I think it had something to do with the fact that she hadn't eaten all day and the air conditioning was being pissy and it was 78 actual degrees downstairs. Yeah.)

So we went to the Iguana (excellent churros) and I had a large Texas margarita even though I probably shouldn't have due to the medication adjusting but dear GOD, did I need a drink, and then we went back to his place and watched the Coraline DVD. Also, there was wine. So I was feeling pret-ty goooood by the time I got home. I'm going to try to get brave enough to set up Camille today--I had gotten to a point where it was like, there is too much stress and anxiety and bad juju in this house with the reunion preparation, and if something goes wrong, no one is going to give the least shit about helping me with it, so... I will wait until we are over and done with this. And now we are. Wish me luck.

Compocalypse '09: Despair

So I finally work up the nerve to set up Camille.

Camille does not come with a user's manual.

I am serious, you guys. There's one of those quick-start foldouts and it's like, "1. Plug in the computer. 2. Flip the power switch on the back. 3. Press the power button on the front." The end. Like, it says this in 56 different languages on the back and the front, but... that's all it says. There are three discs, but I don't know what they are, and one seems to be a recovery disc and the other's "Nero 8" or something and I don't even know what the third one is. I turned on everything and it took me to a black screen with that real DOS-y looking print that said "Press DEL to setup," and it took me to some screen where--you know how you hit F10 to get to somewhere that you can put the computer into safe mode? (BIOS settings?) That scary place I never, ever go? Yeah. It looks like that. I don't know what to do with that.

So I'm currently on the ASUS troubleshooting page, but I'm not seeing a category for Here's How to Turn the Fucking Thing On Since We Neglected to Give You a User's Manual, Sorry About That. Next possible step: calling people.