yours truly, angry mob

Aargh. As if the Festive Season weren't bad enough, various things are conspiring to drive me to homicidal rage today. Time for a rant list. Ritual imprecations, and a piece of holly, upon the following:

1. This bloody Internet connection, which is suddenly, for no adequately defined reason, glacially slow. The wireless thingy insists it's running at between 90 and 100%, so why is it taking seven minutes for the "Post an Entry" page to load? I suspect I may have run incautiously into our bandwidth cap by watching an entire season of Avatar a couple of weekends ago, but surely they should either cut us off or start charging us rather than randomly slowing us down? No such outcome is reflected on the widget, anyway. Most annoying.
   
   
2. My new headset, the existence of which my computer STILL refuses to acknowledge regardless of which orifice I plug the wretched thing into. The headset itself isn't faulty, it works fine on the CD player. There don't appear to be any drivers for the thing, either. Of course, it's futile to be annoyed that I can't use Skype, because in fact the computer connection is too slow to use Skype at the moment, anyway. Aaaargh.
   
   
3. Celine (*&%#^$ Dion. The gym has its music turned up loud, which means warbly irritating female R&B vocals cut audibly through my own music - even the more cacophonous bits of Pixies, i.e. most of it - unless I turn it up loudly enough to hurt my ears. I hate, hate, hate having two pieces of music playing at the same time, so I ended up switching off my MP3 player and enduring. Celine Dion in any incarnation makes me want to run amok with an axe, but the song they were playing was the one from that Buffy episode with the demon roommate and her dreadful music taste, and hearing it always makes me vaguely suspect that my toenails are growing unnaturally.
   
   
4. Eczema in new and interesting places. My eyelids are drying out. Don't laugh, you have no idea how bloody irritating it is. Either they're dry, scratchy and lizard-like, or I've moisturised the hell out of them and the cream is melting and running into my eyes. Gah.
   
   
5. Parcelforce. I have no idea if they've been bothering Scroob lately, but their inclusion is ritually necessary.

Festive season, yeah right. Blood's a bright, cheerful red, isn't it?