Friends

Today i feel reasonably well: I got up, showered, and dressed; played with Rick; accepted and put away a medium-to-large grocery delivery (thank the good Lord for online grocery shopping!); drank 1.5 quarts of gatorade (gotta keep drinking!); read a little bit; laid down but didn't sleep; and tidied up some financial stuff (I was behind on some reconciling). I think we may go out for dinner. It will be my first time driving since Tuesday night, and I'd like to see how a short trip goes before tomorrow morning.

My Plan A for tomorrow (subject to revision as necessary) is to take John and Rick to school and see my doctor tomorrow, as instructed by the ER staff. I'd like to see if I can get some work done - maybe half the day. I'll take it easy and listen to my body, though. My stamina is still not what it should be and my voice is still distinctly frog-like but I am pretty sure I'm past the contagious stage. I've missed roughly 56 of the last 78 work hours (that's about 72%, folks!). I glanced at emails once or twice, and called in a couple of times, but I've got work to do!

It feels good to be among the living again!

I wonder if I'm dealing with a low-level version of PPD? I had it seriously bad with both Ike and the girls (lots of thoughts of suicide and hurting infants), but I seem to have a case of the blahs I can't shake. I'm not feeling physically well, and just not happy...

Sometimes I just don't know how to say, "No."

About a month ago, the ladies that were suddenly taking over the church's Home Tour asked me to Decorate a 3' tall Christmas Tree for their silent auction. The money from the Tour and all the proceeds go to about a dozen different local charities. The OUR Center being a big benefactor, but there are also women's groups, children's support, and a bunch of other missions that we help out with.

Jet was on another origami kick, and he unwittingly dragged me along with him, and I decided to do the whole tree in origami ornaments, and do a knitted scarf in red as the skirting underneath. I think the tree's due tomorrow, and I'm still knitting, but the other bits can be seen in a little flickr album here. A few highlights were the umpteen piece dodecahedron, a couple of traditional Japanese chrysanthemum constructs with various types of stoppers, and some frogs and fishes for luck along with a few dozen traditional cranes in various types of paper.

Part of the insanity is that this morning John found out that our wireless hub had broken down completely. It was dead. We have a "only replace dead things" sort of policy right now for most of our big expenditures, and we only upgrade when we replace. The price on the N protocol wireless is now very, very good, so he simply replaced the hub. The upstairs computer is hardwired to our Internet connection. My replacement machine has the new protocol built in, and we only had to buy a plug in dongle for the laptop, so we're all good now, and the upload and download speeds are now phenomenal. I'm... amazed.

Washing towels, making soup... going through the monumental fiddly hassle of adjusting my PayPal account to receive payments FROM THE NEW SECTION OF THE WEBSITE THAT IS OPENING SOON!!! Cold sunlight, hot tea, warm cats.

And, I realize belatedly, it's my eleventh wedding anniversary. Happy Anniversary, George.

The Further Adventures Of... should be up and running soon, thanks to the efforts of my wonderful sitemistress. "Firemaggot," the Antryg and Joanna story (is 15,000 words a novelette?), is my opener, backed with the two short Ben January stories "Libre" and "There Shall Your Heart Be Also," and with "Quest For Glory," which is short and silly and fun. I wrote a little intro (for the benefit of those who HAVEN'T been following all this here on the blog)... and we'll see.

In addition to a button to buy stories (at $5 a pop), there will also be a Donate button... all contributions will be accepted with sobs of grateful ecstacy.

Hiking with Larry Niven on my one-day vacation from teaching - VERY nice to get out, though I find I'm not nearly as sure-footed as once I was, and have to watch my step where the trail gets steep. Still, the overcast day was balmy and it was marvelous to be out on the hills. And the day following that, a gathering of the college History Department in the local pub, always instructive and enjoyable, though MAN any alcoholic establishment gets noisy once work lets out! Maybe it's the effect of everyone drinking Actual Beer and me drinking Orc-Ale or Thunderbrew or whatever it is they serve in all the taverns of Ironforge... virtual beer that's about as real as the icon one clicks to get the little blue bubbles around one's virtual head.

By the way, if anyone is interested in such things I AM on Twitter now... I suppose I should get it connected to this blog (is that possible? It is on my niece's).

Last night, just after I posted last (about 9:45 p.m.), I started to experience distressed breathing. We called Dad and Stepmom and they came over; Stepmom stayed with Rick while Dad took John and me to the emergency room. After chest x-rays, blood work and a three hour wait, they put me in a room and gave me IV fluids and some pain medication for the body aches. The x-rays and blood work came back just fine, but the doctor sounded pretty sure that I have H1N1. I was also, apparently, pretty darn dehydrated. They put 2 liters of fluids into me and my blood pressure was still a lot lower than normal - 106 over 60.

After they pumped me up like a Foster Farms chicken wanna-be, they let me go (around 4:00 a.m.). It's amazing how much better I feel today! Today I feel like a normal person who has a cold instead of like something disgusting scraped from the bottom of someone's shoe. I looked it up, and the typical person has about 5 liters of blood... now of course, 'fluid' and 'blood' are not the same things, but still - I figure that my fluids were down by a third or so. Not good. Fluids, apparently, are important.

Now I think I may take a shower and get dressed. I think that would feel very good.

Rick, by the way, has no idea that anything out of the ordinary happened last night, and I'd like to keep it that way.

john went back to work today - his sweet mother took him. rick and i stayed home again. i talked rick into a nap this morning but he woke up in tears because his ear hurt. my dad and stepmom were going to be coming by later with a care package (essential groceries and medicines) so i called them and they said of course they'd be able to take him to the doctor - i am still much too sick to drive. we discovered that my poor child has two ear infections. poor kid!

he came home and we gave him his antibiotic. within 15 minutes he was nodding off on the couch so john wrestled him into his sleeper and we put him to bed at 6:30. hopefully he sleeps well tonight - last night was difficult, to put it mildly. rick sucks his thumb at night and when his nose is congested he can't suck his thumb. he came into our room around 2 very upset about the injustice of the situation. i gave him some medicine and put him in bed with us. he was still coughing and coughed some stuff up onto his beloved dondee. dondee, of course, went immediately into the washing machine and rick was bereft of both his thumb and his blanket. poor kiddo! he did eventually go to sleep but it was much harder for his parents to go back to sleep - something about having a kid throw up 3 inches from your ear will do that. john ended up sleeping in rick's bed but said he just had gotten to sleep and was dreaming about how comfortable he was when the alarm went off.

while rick was at the doctor's office i got very cold and went to bed with a heating pad. even with lots of blankets it took me an hour and a half to get warm. later in the evening i got too hot and had to strip down almost to my undies. weird.

thank goodness for family! i don't know how we would have gotten through today without them. i honestly don't think i could have driven rick to the doctor today. and then there's the thought of me possibly taking h1n1 into a busy pediatrician's office - i would have been lynched!

speaking of being sick - i am out of energy and must go to bed.

Fort Hood shooting suspect is paralyzed

If I ran the world, this guy would get the Marsellus Wallace Special, but I don't, and that's a good thing. At least he can sit quietly during the interminable court proceedings.

Yesterday I left the clinic after the emergency phone call but before the emergency patient actually arrived. I heard later what happened. A dog had eaten chocolate, and it had happened recently enough that it was worthwhile to make him throw up. He brought up thirty-three Kit Kat wrappers.

Apparently he wasn't the only chocolate poisoning case that day, either. One vet said later that she spent most of her afternoon making dogs barf.

I suspect Halloween is not high on the list of favorite holidays among veterinarians. Valentine's Day and Easter might not be up too high on the list either.

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

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Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

I don't wish to make sweeping statements, such as England is entirely comprised of pinheads, but stories such as this don't reflect upon the region in a good light:

Ex-soldier turns abandoned gun in to police, immediately arrested and convicted of possession

The level of officious twittery necessary to come to this point staggers the imagination.

[Yes, I know we're much worse here in the U.S., but we're making fun of Britain for the moment. There's plenty of time to lambaste Florida later.]

for stark_black in thanks for her service....

( Read more... )

Last summer, I got a new phone from Verizon and it died in the first two weeks. The support folks were pretty nice about getting me a new phone and getting me what I needed to ship the broken phone back to them. So I did that, and the lady at the shipping office said, "Make SURE you keep the UPS shipping slip to make sure you have a record of sending it to them."

I'm now thanking and blessing her for saying that. I filed it away in our celphone records folder, thinking I'd never see it again.

( Yes, I did see the #$@*&! thing again. )

To all the veterans of all the services and all the wars...

Thank you for what you've done and for what you've sacrificed.

Random factoids

A bottle of liquid bromine weighs a lot. And don't clean that glassware with acetone.

When I eat paneer tikka, I have the full attention of both cats until the last bit is gone.

The sliding whiteboards in chem and bio lab are heavy. I have a big dark puffy bruise on my left hand from trying to stop one as it was sliding.

Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are a poor substitute for a breakfast containing protein.

One reason I'm so bad at studying is that I'm constantly exhausted. (I'm sleeping poorly because I'm so stressed... about studying! I may take NyQuil for a while even though I am not sick. It seems to work better than sleeping pills.)

Foster Kitty

This afternoon, I picked up Foster Kitty and put her on the bathroom counter where there was some extra food. She ignored the food. She hissed and growled, pacing back and forth on the counter, until she got back down to the floor, and then she was perfectly lovey again! She was also eager to eat that same food when I fed it to her in her bowl on the floor. I think she's terrified of any new situation no matter how minor the change. Poor girl!

I am slightly more pulled together

My e-mail rule and my One To-Do List are working well so far. No sudden discoveries of unanswered mail that had been forgotten. Rob even added an item to my list, with a deadline :-), and I did it. However, studying isn't going as well as I'd like, yet. I'm up to date on making flash cards (I'm doing it DURING lecture now, as we learn the new material! yay) but I need to do better at reviewing those cards and working practice problems.

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

Man, am I sick today. Last week I had no energy but seemed to be all better by Sunday - I went to work on Monday and felt fine. Starting yesterday, though, I have been experiencing a typical cold with congestion and coughing - one that has hit me particularly hard. I got up for an hour and a half this morning and went back to bed for almost 3 hours. I took my temperature and it's 100.6 (though I had just been sleeping and was too hot when I woke up). Achy, too, though that could be because I've been sitting or sleeping so much.

I'm beginning to wonder if I have acquired H1N1 (I had a seasonal flu shot this year). I've never really been good at distinguishing between colds and flu, and usually rely on body aches as the defiining characteristic. I looked up symptoms of H1N1 and they seem to be identical to those for seasonal flu. Whatever I've got, it's run me over a few times now.

There's a theory working around the net that the Big Ass Particle Accelerator in Europe, the LHC, will never succeed in running because it would destroy the Earth/Universe, so the Universe, the Time Patrol, Dr. Who, or $(your favorite Star Trek captain) is sabotaging it to save us all.

It's getting harder to discount this theory with the news that it was taken out most recently by a bird with a baguette.

Oh, and apropos of nothing, here's Princess Leia and Princess Leia sunbathing in the The Gold Bikini (for the other two people on the planet who may not yet have seen it).

... and finally writing a little again, but mostly just staying alive, lately. It's been kind of cool.

Yesterday the chiropractor tried to straighten me out after all the coughing. My massage therapist was just shocked at how knotted up I was last Tuesday, so she recommended me getting worked on, as he could help with the immune system as well as the muscles that were just messed up by lying, sitting, and coughing all week. The funny thing was that for the middle of my back he got me all positioned like a pretzel and then bounced on me, and nothing moved. He said that my muscles had locked up so tight from the coughing he couldn't do anything there. So we worked on both ends, neck and hips, and got some movement there. I'm going back next week.

( Cut for a bunch of pictures and text. )

When I picked Rick up from preschool yesterday, he had a dry cough, a slightly runny nose, and not much energy. By bedtime, he also had a fever of 101.8. I gave him some Motrin and put him to bed. This morning, he is still coughing and his nose is still running. The fever is gone and he is full of energy. Grandparents were unavailable, and John didn't have enough notice to prepare lesson plans for a substitute, so I am staying with him today.

This morning I woke up with a sore throat and painful cough; John is low on energy and has a dry cough. He went to school (see previous note about lesson plan) but is thinking about having another caller fill in for him tonight. He and Rick have the day off tomorrow for Veteran's Day, so hopefully I will feel well enough to go to work and accomplish more things.

I feel like my life is falling apart. I'm late paying my bills, the cats' litterboxes are best not described, I'm behind on preparation for my next square dance booking, and I got an 86 on my o-chem test. There's no future in sight for my foster cat, I keep discovering e-mails I haven't answered, and I have put off contacting both UCDavis and Santa Clara U for as long as I dare. It is time to pull myself together.

( pulling myself together )

Hopefully this will do it.