So what do you do when decongestants keep you up at night? If you're me you get out your long neglected CNC project and start epoxying shit together. So in essence right now I'm watching epoxy dry and trying to sit still so I don't accidentally bump something while it's drying. Sure sleep would be awesome, but who needs it when you can smell epoxy drying (note to future self, do this shit outside! Assuming you have enough braincells left to understand this when it's all said and done.) The package said it would be 5 minutes, and it's tacky dry, but I want another coat so I'm posting on the internets, hurr durr. Seriously kids sudafed is a dangerous drug it leads to science!
Holy crap no wonder they make amphetamines with these, so I'm a fairly regular caffeine junky and average 4 sodas a day (listen it's down from 8 and a monster energy drink alright) so I'm less immune than I used to be, but still know that I could drink a case of soda and not get the shakes. Enter allergy season from hell this last week and my steady dose of allergy meds wasn't cutting it. I needed to stop the steady drip of my nose so I got some Pseudoephedrine.... I'm sitting here at my computer feeling wide awake but listless and my legs have been bouncing the whole morning. I'm buzzing, and I know it. I finally crashed out last night after 2am, and got up without much trouble around 6, and feel clear headed despite not nearly enough sleep. That's the pseudoephedrine talking, and it kind of freaks me out.
So as I mentioned previously I've got no time, that would include time to go to the gym. I've hoping to reverse that so I lined up some sessions with a personal trainer. I've worked with him before and he's pretty good at breaking me so I knew generally speaking what I was getting into. The gym that he works out of is about 30 minutes walking from my work, and I had an appointment for Monday at 3pm. I figured if I brought a bike in I could cut the time to get to there down considerably (like 7 minutes instead of 30). That would give me time to change, get there and work out them get back change and go back to work in theory. It was going to blow about an hour and a half, but I figured that wasn't too shabby. Cue the Monday morning and like a jack-ass I didn't do any prep for my little workout, and had to scramble to get my bike out of the garage (no small task) and get all the gear for working out and locking up my bike downtown. It was a cluster, but I managed to get on the road to work only adding about 20 minutes to the day.
I had an early(ish) lunch, but didn't have anything to eat just prior to leaving for my workout. In the process of getting my bike out, I noticed the rear tire was low so I had dug out the compressor and filled it up (long ridiculous story but my bike pump was destroyed on accident the last ride I went on), the front tire was firm, but I din't really check it (mistake and a half). I get changed, and get on the bike to ride out but the only water bottle I have on hand is the worst bottle ever (terrible prep for this I know) but it's all that I have on hand so I load that up and get to riding to my workout. Right away I realize the error of my ways for not checking the front tire, when I brake and my weight transfers forward the tire flattens out enough that it's kind of scary to maneuver (ie brake and turn at the same time). Scarier still is down one hill I'm matching traffic so 25-ish mph with a tire that is not safe. Either way, whatever I get to the gym in about 7 minutes and kick myself for not having a protein bar or some fruit to eat before I work out. But that's the sate of things so I roll with it and get into my workout. 40 minutes in the enormity of this mistake becomes abundantly clear, and I have to stop because I'm getting light headed and shaky. Not the good work out shaky, rather the I'm going to throw up and then pass out shaky. So I head to the gyms juice bar and get a smoothie to get some sugar into my body before I bonk, but it's nearly 20 minutes before I'm not shaking any more.
Now the fun part, the trip to the gym was largely down hill (gentle down hills, but still), crummy front tire and a body that is asking me for mercy; up the hill you bastard. It wasn't pretty. It took about 25 minutes to make it back to work, and another 10 to get changed.
When I got back to my desk I was a hot mess. Maybe not hot, but sweaty and gross; so mostly just a mess.
Anyhow if you made it this far and didn't TL;DR me, I'll reward you with adorable Otters
Alright, so the cat has a home lined up so we can see if it really is all retaliation for the child or if the cat has behavioral problems. It all started pretty recently, and so I think the cat is just acting out because it is jealous of the attention my wife and I give our son. She was pretty spoiled prior to his birth, as she could sit on my wife's lap and get pet most every night. Since our son, it's pretty rare that we are sitting down long enough for her to come over to get that attention, coupled with if she get's anywhere near my son he will grab her and pull out hair. We've been trying to teach him to play nice, but children have no concept of that what they are doing is violent and painful.
Anyhow, my wife was teary but ultimately understood that we needed to get the cat out of the house for the sake of our sanity as well as the cats.
I knew that children would be an investment in time and money, but the time factor is starting to surprise me. Some of this is self-imposed, we choose to make his food and we choose to use cloth diapers. Those time sinks are on us for sure, and we choose to breastfeed so that is also mostly on my wife (she is aiming for 1 year). The thing you don't expect is once they are mobile you basically heard a child, that is all you do. His crawling is getting pretty effective now, so he closes distance quite quickly, this is sad times for my cats and they have been forced to higher ground for temporary respite from doom (aka grabby hands). In retaliation one of the cats has taken to peeing on stuff.
That's not acceptable. There's some serious long hard thinking going on in my house, if we don't find somewhere for her to go today. Don't get me wrong, I strongly hope to have a place for her, but peeing on stuff is not going to be tolerated.
Any how you get the picture; and Saveur we get it. It's hot as fuck on the east coast, shut up already. It's the middle of Juneuary here in the PNW, and I'm pretty sure we haven't gotten over 80 yet this "alleged" summer. I bet you will never guess what was bought yesterday in my house? Ice cream bars and then we went out for Froyo, so yeah posting about heat apocalypse soothers for your East coast brethren is probably awesome for page views but you're making me fat(er) over here.
Okay, so whoever was supposed to be in charge of telling me there was new episodes of Futurama is totally fired. Episode 2 is already out, and I just found out about it. Hang in there Fry I'll get there as soon as this thing finishes buffering!
Seriously, title says it all. 7 years in this house, every summer ants. I've caulked and sprayed, in expanding insulation (that they apparently think tastes like candy) and poured an industrial sized thing of poison in the crack between my garage slab and the slate entryway. I don't understand how they keep getting into my house and pissing little chunks of sand into my entryway.
So a little false advertising in the title, there are no tits in this video. It does have the word rape in the song title if that makes up for anything though. I also learned a very valuable lesson on the dangers of noting how delusional commenters on A Beer for the Shower are. Yikes! Hi Meadnmythinkingcap. The whole sordid affair played out in the comments on her blog, my blog, and A Beer for the Shower's blog. I'm sure it isn't over yet, but it's and amusing read for those that like the stir the shit.
On to my true purpose here, Dry River Yacht Club - The Rape of Persephone. Thanks ElecricMustache.
Google friend connect people, if you are still using this just FYI they killed it. It's broken and soon to die you should take the following action if you want to not be pestered by the ghosts of blogs past and unsubscribe from every one of those damn blogs via your handy dandy friend connect widget and follow the good ones with your RSS reader (bloglines, google reader, pulse ect...)
If you see I'm not on your friend connect it's because I've spend the afternoon doing what I recommend above myself and those of you that I enjoy reading I've manually found your atom or rss feedto my google reader. It's been an interesting ride, and some of you may have not understood why so many people seemed to be following you around via friend connect. Here's the deal, there was a bunch of people gaming google's ad platform via the stupid friend connect and more than once I had to hide my adsense badges to keep them from messing me up. In short that crew of nerds destabilized the adsense universe ever so slightly and lots of people that used the services in a legitimate manner where at risk of getting swept up in that business.
Anyhow I hope I entertain a few of you from time to time, but I know that is a lot to ask for most of you attention deficit kids on the internet and instead offer, that I'm going to keep blogging and hope you stick around. If not, whatever I was blogging in the dark for a few years I don't need a community to get satisfaction out of this platform.
Ugh, and I've been in a user conference for the Enterprise management software we use at work all week. This might seem like it would be a good way to spend your time, but that would assume that the software was in any way interesting. It is not.
It is giant and all inclusive with modules for accounting, space management, work order tracking conflict management for resources and a hundreds of other things you don't care about.. Probably the best feature of this event is they are feeding me breakfast and lunch as well as snacks. Otherwise I've been using my phone turned tablet (it's a long story but I ended up with a phone that was run over and broken that I nursed back to life and use as a wifi tablet) reading blogs and other general joy.
How about you? What have you been up to this week?
I'm a sudoku player and was finding that my ability was stretched too thin on the Thursday and Friday puzzles so I sought out something to help me learn the strategies a little bit online. Enter Sudoku wiki.
You have to pay close attention to what it changes, but the strategies of Naked pairs/Triplets and pointing pairs seems to have the most mileage for solving puzzles that you fell the need to guess. Prior to finding this tool I would review my work against the answers in the next days paper and found that the correct number for a space was often one I wasn't considering for that space, (ie it was a number that could have been in 4 or 5 spaces so I didn't write it down). In a sense I was finding that I was building myself a box that prevented me from ever getting the correct answer. If you have any interest, but struggle with the harder puzzles this is a pretty good (though spartan) tool for learning some different strategies.
It's a strange place to be at right now, the internet is the most fascinating thing I can think of, filled with so many opportunities to do just about anything and tons of people that are trying new things and willing to help you on your way to try new things. Everyday I'm bombarded with crazy new and creative ideas from all over the world uncovered and reblog/repinned/reshared ad nauseum until they reach far and wide. Everyone is plugged in to greater or lesser degrees, but like the speaker in my last post I'm starting to think I'm too immersed.
I play Modern Warfare 3 on xbox, and go out of my way to mute all the jack asses in every room, I don't want to talk to them I just want to compete with them. I require no human interaction with them I just want to out play them, or when I play with people that are better than me learn how to get better.
I feel like that's a metaphor for something. What I don't know, but I interact with very few people in a real and meaningful way. I had the first conversation that wasn't about something that needed to be done with my wife last night that I can remember having in a week. That's some weird head space to be in. I don't have a plan, I don't even know if a plan is needed; but something needs to change. I leave that happy thought with a song that fits my mood for the moment.
Gizmodo posted an article a little while back on being deaf. Now the article is written by someone that was born deaf, and is in that 20 something age that is very angst filled anyway, but was pretty insightful none the less for me in my personal life. My father is going deaf, rapidly. It's not just a matter of certain tones going away, it's a matter of he's already lost over 80% of his hearing.
This is changing my family dynamic and reading the account of this young man's loneliness in a world that engages largely with our voices was very eye opening. When there is a gathering of more than a few people, it is not uncommon for my father to not be able to keep track of what is being said. His most common response is to retreat to his smart phone, that provides him with some entertainment. It is also getting harder for him to hear on the phone, so he has taken to texting rather than getting frustrated with not knowing what you said.
The article is a little long, but interesting to see a different perspective on life and gave me clues on how to help my father interact with his world.
Apparently we had a Tsunami indoors over the weekend so our main fax, print, copier that was conveniently located directly below an air handler is unplugged and pulled away from the source of offending water. It's broken, and the main printer for about 1/2 of the office. Sweet.
Next up, one of our partners servers is offline. Sweet, they don't have on site tech support so it's on me to figure this shit out. Trouble is someone stacked another server right on top of the server that won't turn on. I don't know what the other server does, so I don't want to turn it off until I speak to someone, but it's preventing me from turning on their file server, database server, dhcp server,..... you get the picture. Couple all that shit with I have a 9am conference call, and forgot my tie at home....
It's 10:32am and I need a drink. The hits keep coming today, and for fun I get my Mother this week. That ought to be about as much fun as I know how to have.
Anybody participating in the current Microsoft bribe you to use our search engine scheme? I was doing the club bing, that was all word games and you use the search engine to solve the puzzles until it closed down recently. For me it was a pretty decent deal, in a few years I managed to get 2 xbox 360's (well I earned one and they cannot keep track of anything so the sent a second one) and a kitchen aid mixer and some other miscellaneous garbage. I'd say that puts the net at around $800 or so dollars in money I didn't have to spend. They capped you at 500 tickets a day, but if you where efficient you could do that in about an hour.
The current scam is faster to complete (especially if you just keep using search autocomplete) and caps you at 10 points for searches and they have some daily offers of 3-50 points you can complete. You're out maybe 5-10 minutes a day, and can earn points to redeem towards xbox live subscriptions, or xbox live points. I think they have some other crap in there, but it's of no real value to me.
Pretty sad, I think. Here at Microsoft we are not above bribing you to use our products....
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