Twenty (8/9)

Another day so busy. I think they want me to run all over the place tomorrow. I will sign on early in the morning, and go from there. I do need to be home in the afternoon so I can meet with my neurologist.

Yesterday’s shot wasn’t terrible. I guess that I was going to sleep just as I really started feeling lousy. Wasn’t great when I woke up, but I did pretty much sleep through the night.

Work today, on the other hand, was exhausting again. Fingers crossed that I can get things finished so I can take a couple of days off to start next week.

But this whole thing has had me feeling a little proud of myself. I kept my word to the guy who hired me, despite odd recruiter calls for a good long time.

I really suck at patting myself on the back. Another of the many things where I’m not great.

Whatever.

I’m not embarrassed by anything I’ve done.

Free-write tomorrow for the two-thirds mark.

Nineteen (8/8)

Another incredibly busy day that’s really prevented me from thinking about or doing anything other than work.

Another day. More forms. More actual trips I really have to take by the end of the week.

I was actually really nervous about taking my injection tonight.

I told my neurologist about it, and have a virtual appointment with her on Thursday.

Another in-personal appointment for something else tomorrow.

Ugh.

But I feel like I’m scrambling, and really getting things done with work.

Let’s see what happens.

Villagers awake to find that a strange well has appeared in the center of town.

I really don’t know what a well here in Alexandria would produce. Lots of dirty DC and MDDR ground water seeping in?

Got through the nighttime shift. OMFG.

Maybe I’ll get some more substantive writing this weekend.

Seventeen (8/6)

I checked some of my writing on this day from years ago….

Writing about the operation for CCSVI.

I stumbled across The Bear. I really wasn’t that intrigued until I heard Peter Superman recommend it. His previous of The Silo was very well-received at home. Just sitting watching TV with my wife is enjoyable.

Thank you to Tracker for the prompts. They’re coming in handy.

Your worst haircut.

Oh, I don’t really know. A significant part of my head hair is gone courtesy my genetics.

I’ve taken to pretty much doing a clipper cut, and that gets progressively shorter.

But I figured by this far into my forties, a significant portion of it would be gray. I also presumed I’d be able to grow a full beard by now.

So much for either of those.

Otherwise, I think I’ve really been taking it easy this weekend.

Long week ahead.

Sixteen (8/5)

So much sleep. Finally.

I had led that with a four-letter initialism that contained a profanity I’m trying to cut out. *deleted*

No, I’m not offended by the naughty language.

But keeping a clean vocabulary helps with other things.

Don’t bite my nails. Don say #$@ethan

Both require similar levels of discipline.

~Make up a good excuse for missing a deadline at work.

As I’m writing on a Saturday afternoon after doing several hours of work to try to complete stuff that I’d promised months ago, but wasn’t able to finish due to other obligations…..

I am so exhausted. After odd sleep last night, I ended up finally falling back to sleep, and ended up asleep until like 1100.

This week portends to be similarly-busy. I’m hoping that the Tuesday injection doesn’t mess me up as bad as the one this week did.

Time to do fantasy league setup….pfft

Fifteen (8/4)

Yeah, I’m so busy I really am not having time to devote to this, but I am dedicated.

Just the act of plunking away helps recenter me, maybe?

Watching news about the severe weather. Looks like the Beltway Swamp is pretty calm.

I need to get with the guy, who I think I was supposed to replace, tries to fit in with his new role working with my company. Sounds like he’s kind of acclimating to the climate, but, I think it’s a bit of a culture shock.

I’m here to help, even though I’m so busy, and I really wasn’t happy with some of the things they’d been doing.

The company is the spin-off of a company I have experience with. When a proposal I helped write in about 201s beat their former company, protested the award. The company I was helpihg had a policy of not participating in protest recompense. The old company ended up prevailing in the protest….by just cutting salaries by 25% across-the-board and rebidding.

This would have been early in the days of converting almost everybody to a subcontractor.

Double-whammy from both the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (colloquially known as “Obamacare”), and general cuts to industry spending.

Your employer has to offer every employee an opportunity to buy very expensive care.

So you don’t have many full-time employees; nearly everybody is a subcontractor.

Not only do subcontractors end up paying the full premium, a lot of the anciallary benefits you’d expect as a full-time employee go away.

Say goodbye to that cafeteria legal plan.

He’s working with one of the little companies that formed after all of that….and is probably happy considering the raw deal he’s been getting for the last few years.

What else?

Prompt: A sudden sinkhole swallows one corner of a house, exposing a secret room where a crime might have been committed.

Given that I live in Alexandria, it’d likely be something from the Civil War, or the glory days of Byrd Organization Virginia.

But I’m pretty sure there’s nothing that’d be revealed. The building we’re in is largely improved land for the railroad tracks across the back of the complex that have been there since probably about 1840.


I missed the Hall of Fame game last night. Too busy. And I don’t really care about the teams who played. Not that you’d see much with the truncated regular season.

Think we’ll do draft Sunday before Labor Day.

.

Speaking of that, sorta back to needing to burn leave. Friday before scheduled for off. My birthday, too.

Still looking at a long time in the fall.

I had to resurrect my Ticketmaster account to see if I could get Tay-tay tix for my wife. Yes, this is the sort of thing that happens when you’re married to a Millenial girl…..but we can fly to NOLA. It’d pretty much be our anniversary week, anyway.

I really need to find more prompts, still.

So. Busy.

Fourteen (8/3)

I am so incredibly busy that I can’t see straight.

Thankfully, I feel a ton better today than I did yesterday.

So many forms to fill out because I’m being asked to fill in on positions for people who’ve yet to be hired.

I have been looking back over old entries, however.

Something I put up on OD from some other site people tried to which others tried to migrate in 2002:

Read a promotional book sent to the station last night while I waited on Debian to finish downloading (building a small server to act as an Appletalk to windoze gateway)….

The Internet connection at the stations wasn’t great, but it was certainly better than the dial-up I had at home. Assuming everything worked, I could download the installation ISO in the first part of my shift, and burn it to a CD-R before the end of my shift.

I did this stuff at work because the Intertubes connection was quick for the time, and the CD-Rs were kinda-sorta free out of the production studios at the station.

If memory serves, the stations had something like an 80KBps fractional T-1 connection.

Certainly better than my 3.3Kbps home connection.

*checks old ISP address*

Hmmm… can’t reach this page

They were absolutely awesome from their founding in like 1996.

*looks up the WHOIS data*

Ties to some other one-off Intertubes provider. Opening that provider’s page shows some generic portal stuff.

Being a nerd is disappointing.

So, too, was diving back through old email to find my Ticketmaster login to try to buy Taylor Swift tickets for my wife.

Uses the email address I stopped using in, uhhh, probably 2004.

No, I’m not that interested. But she is, and it’d be an excuse to go to New Orleans. Concert(s) are a couple of weeks after our anniversary; why not?

Thirteen (8/2)

Yesterday’s bit was more than a bit off, largely because I was more than a bit off. Since I had to stop taking Tysabri due to the JCV antibody test, I started taking one of the meds containing this.

It’s a bit different than the other injectables I’ve been on before. Deep muscle, so different operation than the sub-q things I’d had in the past. But there’s this nifty auto-injector. Find your spot, take out the slack in the tip, press more, it’ll click, then wait for the indicator thing to show it’s finished, and a second click.

The sub-q meds I’d take right after I got out of the shower in the morning. The nurse I’d spoken to said that I probably shouldn’t do that with this drug…I need to do it with a muscle that’s been excited a white, and will remain that way for a few hours.

So. I’ll do it when I’m grabbing my lunch. Whatever.

I can take Tylenol if I’m feeling icky. Okay.

I took the shot just before 1300. By the time I finished my early work at 1500, I was feeling pretty yucky.

So. Tylenol. And a few hours of normalcy.

Until just after dinner.

Holy hell.

I don’t think I’ve felt that bad since I was hospitalized with a bad infection.

Somehow, I did manage to do work, but I really wasn’t with it.

I feel drunk but I’m sober.

Chills, but no fever.

If that’s going to be how I feel when I take that, gonna have to modify schedule(s).

Maybe I’ll feel better enough tomorrow to really write something. So incredibly busy with work, too.

Eleven (7/31)

Freewrite

Obviously, a lot of what I’ve been doing this month has been freewriting.

It’s fine. Sticking to a schedule is a big part of why I do this. What am I supposed to be doing? Oh yeah. That. But first I should write to keep the streak going.

Do this. Don’t do that.

It kind of fits with a lot of where I am on things like the benefits of religion, even if you’re not a believer. (And I am, but I’m really bad about taking my own advice…..I kinda am a shut-in courtesy my health…)

But I really have a reflexive negative reaction to public policy based on faith.

Kind of there with people who view the weather as an existential crisis.

That graphic won’t get a lot of play from politicians.

Credit to Human Progress on that.

Things are getting better. But that doesn’t do a lot to keep the small number of us watching nightly and cable news afraid.

I’m so sick of it all.

Maybe my perspective is influenced by the MS diagnosis? I reached the conclusion long ago that, yeah, I have MS. It’s probably not going to kill me; I’m probably gonna die of cardiovascular disease or cancer. Just like everybody else.


I suppose, however, that sort of thinking speaks to some of my attitude about so many things.

I’m past the halfway point in life, so…whatever.

Ten (7/30)

From Tracker on OD…

A long time ago, in the days before mobile phones, we 

Had a hell of a time getting from Point A to Point B.

Yes, this is top of mind after the rideshare driver had trouble picking me up from where I’d gotten an MRI at 0800 this morning.

Getting there was pretty straightforward. Getting out, on the other hand, was a pain.

But, as I pointed out in a discussion yesterday, things keep getting better.

The mobile phones were with the transportation, but the entire process of what I did would have been a several-hour process in the hospital even five years ago. Today, I was finished, home-and-back, in about two hours. When I find an envelope suitable, the CD with the results will be sent to my doctor os she can look at them tomorrow.

I should get some coffee, and something to nibble on.

Nine (7/29)

Sampling again from several years ago.

Write about a really expensive restaurant bill you’ve had. Where was it? How many people were in the party? What was really good? What was not-so-good? Do you at all regret it?

It’s been a whilte since I had anything really expensive. One of the things I’ve noticed is the the really expensive places, following the “Inflation Reduction Act,” which is really just the Green Alchemy push rebranded, haven’t seen as steep price increases as the “lower-tier” restaurants.

Two burgers, a regular fry, and a shake cost us nearly $60 the other night delivered form one of the food delivery places.

That might have cost us half that two years ago. But that restaurant might be linked to COVID. 5G. Open your eyes!

We’ve really not been up to go out in a long time. But, fi I was to head out to a restaurant in DC, maybe I should eschew my usual haunts for a different place…one that, no kidding, was listed as a selling point for hte neighborhood when I was looking at Real Estate in the city.

But today is going to be pretty low-key. We watched something my wife had DVR’d. She’s off to pick up Polly Prissypants from the groomer. (If our children would be South Park characters, it makes sense that our “dog” would be something related, too…but it is a very fitting nickname for a dog who was clearly named “princess” before she was first abandoned)


News. This.

You’re talking to a buy who’s had screens burned from more than a few IRSSI sessions in GNU Screentmux.

(I do miss Screen, but there was some vuln in the version that was shipping that some skript kiddie was using that would cause sessions to quit working. Tmux is easily installable with many distros, and is IA-blessed for work, so switch.)

MRI in the morning to see how much damage PML caused with the JCV infection.

The Totes-didn’t-used-to-do-evilGoogle Reviews on the place where I’m going aren’t confidence-inspiring.

It’s a tube. Pay your copay, get put inside a tube, and you try to stay still. I often fall asleep. Whatever. Get out, get dressed, go home.