I wish I could figure out

why my laptop can do a Google search, but refuses to connect to any actual websites? My firewall just got updated; maybe that's it. But it's damn annoying.

I'm still hurting, but taking ibuprofen and sitting rather than walking have kept it bearable--I actually got a lot done today, and I made headway on the referrals. I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow morning at 11 am; it was the quickest they could work me in. I hope I just strained something and it'll work itself out soon.

I've been listening to the Linkin Park station on Pandora. There's nothing like alternative metal/nu metal to totally stoke the fire when you're annoyed already. I think I need to switch the station over to Loreena McKennitt or Ella Fitzgerald.

I wish I could stay up some more, but I am hurting, and I took some medicine for it, and while it hasn't kicked in yet in terms of the pain, I'm feeling sleepy. I have to get up early tomorrow, so I think I'll go take my contacts out and go to bed. At least I did get to see 'Heroes Reborn' tonight. They've done an excellent job with it. Tomorrow, as Scarlett said, is another day.

I may have fixed the issue

I went into AVG's firewall section and chose to restore defaults. Chrome seems to be loading faster, and hopefully will continue to load. I'll let you know if that was the fix. Another issue, which wasn't a factor with mine, is that sometimes the LAN settings ask for a proxy server rather than automatically detect, and unchecking the proxy and checking the automatic detection can help. But like I said, that wasn't my issue. I'm thinking it was the firewall. We'll see.

I should be asleep

and in fact I'm heading to bed now. But I had some trouble with a firewall upgrade and didn't have time to sort it out over the last couple of days, so I've been offline. Tonight I took a shot at it and yay! I got it working again. I think the program thought I was running Vista, because the first download didn't ask which operating system it should work with, and once I finally got everything uninstalled and downloaded an updated file, it did. I'd like Vista, but I'm on XP for now. Anyway, sorry for not posting. I hope to catch up over the next few days.