Mom Life in the PNW

Caught Me Some Clams for Clam Chowder!

I went clamming for the first time in my life down in Coos Bay, Oregon. The drive is a little far, but its a FREE place to stay and I am all about the frugal living if you haven’t gathered that by now. Once I started getting the hang of it, I enjoyed it… but apparently you’re not supposed to crack the shells, or at least try not to. Let’s say about 1/3 were cracked by me, at least the big ones were. The razor clams were a little bit more tricky to get to and get out since they can move and bury their selves deeper into the sand. Those tricky little bastards! So we didn’t get our limit on those ones, but I think we did well overall since we all got about 8 or 9 each.

The worst part about it, is their neck or breathing tube, whatever you want to call it (reminds me of a nasty looking elephant penis)… and cleaning them. Oh god the cleaning is so nasty. I just stood there for a good 20 minutes allowing the men to do 4 buckets full of clams, but they weren’t going to let me gawk for very much longer. I did not want to squeeze their poop sacs or cut them open and remove the tendons from the shell. I will tell you this, its a lot easier to get the meat out of these clams than it is crab. Not sure if i like the taste as much but we have about 3, 1lb bags I can use for clam chowder.

I love me some clam chowder, so I guess it was all worth it in the end.

Next time, I’ll catch em and the men can clean em.

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My husband all elbow deep

My Video Card Wants My Soul

I have been having the worst couple of weeks ever.

A couple months ago, I decided I needed to order a video card, more specifically the hot beast EVGA Nvidia GTX 480 since my 4850 was locking up on me during game play. I went with that one because it was the best bang for the buck; $210 to be exact. Normally I am cheap, but you cannot be cheap in the gaming world or it will greatly hinder your experience. I would have wanted to purchase a $50 dollar one if I didn’t know a thing about computers. I researched, ordered, and everything was running fine for those 2 months until last week. My computer was crashing, not to the blue screen of death, but to the black. I imagine that is somewhat worse, or maybe it’s the opposite? Either way, it pissed me off because it was doing it every time I would boot my PC up with it only running for 10 minutes. I was not doing anything to cause it to overheat, but I figured that was the issue as all the reviews say this thing is and will run HOT. Before I did anything with it, I decided I should probably do a clean install of Windows 7, because of the frequent crashes. You never know when you get a random virus or spyware on your system, which can corrupt it. Everything was working fine, then the following day; reboot.

SHIT!!

I looked in the event viewer under administration and found that I was having AMD Northbridge errors, which from my understanding points to the motherboard. Was this thing cooking my motherboard? I figured, maybe I needed to update my power supply wattage, so I ordered a new one. Installed it, booted it up and same thing. THE FUCK DOES THIS THING WANT, MY SOUL? My boyfriend then reseated what he could and that did not work. Then I told him to take it out and put the old video card back in, and wa-la it is now working. I have had one crash in the last 3 days, which comparatively, is heaven to the reboot hell I WAS going through.

I contacted EVGA tech support and they’re sending me another one, which I am hoping will not give me the same issues. But now, I am afraid I must spend more money to replace my motherboard that this fucker apparently sucked the life from. Might as well replace the CPU while I’m at it, but that cost money, which I don’t currently have because I have been having to buy computer shit, dresser shit, and every day shit. Thankfully my boyfriend just ordered a cpu and motherboard for his PC so that I can use what he currently has now until I can afford to replace it. I am probably looking at close to $400 bucks.

Ahh, the life of a PC gamer.

Then to top off my extremely shitty week, school started back up and I thought the 2 classes that I had left would not be overwhelming. WRONG! I have to type up 55 clinic notes a week. If I’m lucky I can get 11 done each day and not have to worry about it on the weekends. The fact that these doctors talk so insanely fast, have shitty tech recorders, or are foreigners makes me want to stab myself in the ears. It prolongs the process for me to get my homework/job done. Sometimes 11 clinic notes can take all damn day, especially if you’re new in the field like myself.

Yes, I am full of complaints today, but I think I have earned it.