Archive for the Category ◊ LAN ◊

Author: VSC
• Monday, January 21st, 2008

Lisa suggested I should put a blog entry with each item I listed in my last post as a title and a couple of snarky comments for each. This seems like a good idea, except for the part where I came down diseased. Now I remember why I quit spending as much time in the hot tub at the Cat Ranch. Every time I go into their hot tub, I get sick the next day. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with their hot tub. I’m pretty sure it’s because I stay in it far too long. (Think 2+ hours.)

Anyway, I’ve spent my day having 15 minute moments where the cold medication briefly fixes everything and I feel fine. In those moments I have delusions of getting my ass back to the LAN party which is where I’m supposed to be. And then the ability to breathe fades, and I spend the next 3 hours & 45 minutes laying around moaning, moping, and mentally cursing the manufacturers of the assorted cold remedies I’ve been taking. Each time I end up switching to a different drug in the hopes that one of them might work, but the reality is they all work about equally well.

There was a point to all this…

Oh. Right. Blog entries.

So anyway, cold medication doesn’t really do as much as you might think to increase general snarkiness. At least not in any creative, amusing way. So hopefully I’ll get back to those later.

And I should go to bed. But I don’t want to. Every nap today involved dreams about my car brakes locking up and the car skidding, or them just not working well enough. Either way I keep hitting the car or cars in front of me. They’re never bad accidents, but the dreams are just stressful. Stupid sick dreams.

Category: dreams, health, LAN  | Leave a Comment
Author: VSC
• Saturday, January 19th, 2008

So once again, LAN season has rolled around. Everyone is play Team Fortress 2, but I’m tired and not focusing, so instead I checked my backlog of blogs. Ici is still updating damn near daily, which reminds me that my own blog could use some love. But I never quite know what to say.

Which is silly. There’s shitloads of things going on in my life right now.

The brief run down would be:

  • LAN party weekend!
  • I’ve lost 100 lbs now.
  • Work is moving Feb 15th.
  • My girlfriend and I are looking to move to Oakland.
  • I’ve taken up embroidery.
  • I did genetic typing on my aunts and they have some uber-rare allele that seems to be Portuguese in origin.
  • I have turned into a Coach whore, and bought another used, leather Coach bag as a reward for 100 lbs.
  • I spent all day photo copying the labels from the Happy Mutant Handbook onto sticker paper, and labeled random items in the sample prep lab accordingly. (my favourite would be where I labeled a box of 100 vials of blood with a sticker that said “contents may have expired during shipping”.)
  • The cops raided a house at the end of the street, guns drawn and everything. Ah, life in Pittsburg!

So that’s what going on in my life.

Oh, and who knew embroidery could be subversive? I’ll get ambitious and post pics later.

Author: VSC
• Friday, May 25th, 2007

Directions to Lord Corrigan’s house:

First take the basket to hell, take the bowels exit and turn left for 3 clicks.

Wave to Satan and be damn sure to pay the toll, he gets pissy about that.

Then take the elevator down 10 levels and ask for “Lord Corrigan” from the first orc you see.

They are pretty good about escorting visitors in.

Author: VSC
• Thursday, May 24th, 2007

I feel like I should post something because things have happened since my last post, and that feels like a shitty place to leave off. But I don’t really feel like posting either.

The day after talking to the clinic, I was able to get some recommendations for doctors to try, and on the 30th I have a consultation visit with one of them to see what he has to say and how I feel about him. This is a good thing.

I need to call at least one other doctor and make an appointment I suppose, but I can’t quite bring myself to care.

I don’t seem to care about much these days. In fact, I think I’m sort of depressed.

Unusual because there’s a LAN party tomorrow.

Maybe that’ll help bring me out of this.

Mood: blah Music: the ticking of the clock. Only one hour of work left.

Author: VSC
• Saturday, February 24th, 2007
This thought disturbs me, and I’m afraid to say it.

But I need to.

I think I might be too old for LAN parties.

*shudder*

*cough*

*hack*

_pain!_

Yup, I’m sick again. There’s a shock. Something about not taking my zinc I suspect…

Third LAN party in a row I’ve gotten sick after. The LAN party ended on Monday. On Tuesday I woke up with weird gurgling crap in my lungs. By Thursday I was starting my days by throwing up the slime I’d swallowed the night before. Friday afternoon was spent having a fever for a good 8 or 9 hours.

And now I’m up, trying to allow my girlfriend, who has to get up for a meeting tomorrow morning, to get some sleep. At first she was being very sweet, understanding, and supportive. By the time I got up, she was trying not to whine everytime I coughed. And really, there’s three other rooms I can easily be as miserable in without disturbing her.

What I should have done was gone over to Mom’s house, and if I hadn’t have been so sick, I’d be there now.

my mother called me this afternoon. It took me a while to get the message… I was home, sleeping, and heard the phone ring, but it had melded into my fever dreams. When I was finally able to comprehend that the beeping MEANT something, I checked my messages to find out that my mother was having severe dizzy spells, to the point of being unable to move or see, at work, and that she needed help to get home.

When I called her back, she was still at work, and had spoken to the Kaiser advice nurse, who was %99 sure it wasn’t a stroke because she didn’t have all the symptoms, and that her co worker had gone to get a dramamine like substance for her.

These are, if you’ll recall, the same people who misdiagnosed, and prevented my father from getting proper treatment.

She wanted me to come follow her while she drove home to make sure she got there.

I got my girlfriend to drive me so I could drive her home.

Ironically, Kaiser appears to have gotten the diagnosis of an inner ear viral infection correct, and once on the Dramamine, my mother was probably far more fit to drive than I was.

She’s not supposed to be staying alone though, as when it hits, she’s totally immobalized by the dizziness. Apparently dehydration is a big issue with this particular infection because all the dizziness makes you prone to puking, and being too nauseous to eat.

And I thought my sick had a good gross factor on it.

Mood : uncomfortable Music : none Tv : none

Category: family, health, LAN  | Leave a Comment
Author: VSC
• Sunday, February 18th, 2007
I’m not actually hungover… At least not from the stand point of having had too much to drink. I had one shot that I choked down, followed by Corrigan offering me a sip of his drink, which contained gin. Now I used to have a healthy appreciation for gin until the last LAN party at the Cat Ranch, where the last thing I had to drink before passing out in the hall was at least 2 shots of gin. As I recall I pretty much finished the bottle, and the bottle pretty much finished me.

So one whiff of the gin last night made my stomach give a mighty heave, and I went running out the front door, to wait and see if I chucked.

Fortunately, I held everything down, and that was the end of my alcohol concumption for the night. It also cut way down on carcinogen intake.

So the only reason I can figure I feel like this is the fact that my sleep/awake schedule has been completely reversed over two days. Honestly, it hurts to be alive right now.

On the plus side though, my hair is blue, my PSP is blue, I finally found a game at the LAN party that I don’t totally suck at, (not that that was the key to LAN party happiness, but it’s novel to not come in last for once, especially in a deathmatch) and there’s still two days of LAN bliss left.

On the minus side, the left half of my head would probably feel better if someone blew it off with a shot gun. I mean, the process would hurt, but once half your brain has been removed, you’d be dead, and I imagine it’s hard to feel pain when you’re dead.

Oh yeah, last night was punctuated about these weird dreams about my boss informing me that we were going to have to move to the corporate headquarters after all, and that I was not allowed to have blue hair there. I pointed out that this was hardly fair, I asked to make sure there was no reason there would be a problem with my hair being this color.

Long story short (too late!), the entire dream was about my boss and I basically being annoyed with one another. Mostly I was annoyed at him because he was annoyed with me, and being a bit totalitarian about decisions that he’d normally at least let me have some input on.

When I woke up, it took a while to realize that it’d been a dream, as parts of it were based in reality. I had asked my boss if there was any reason it would be a problem if I dyed my hair blue. (One of my co-workers felt obligated to dye over her cotton candy pink before a conference. I just wanted to make sure nothing was coming up where I needed to be presentable.) The lab that I ended up moving to in the dream was based on the real local headquarters that the lab will eventually be moving over to. The things we discussed involved real projects that I’m working on. The weird part was the degree of unhappiness and irritation between us. Usually we get along quite well. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this dream.

So maybe I’ll just take some tylenol and go back to bed for a while.

Mood : in pain. It overshadows most everything else. Music : dear god, nothing loud Tv : Again, silence please…

Category: dreams, health, LAN, work  | Leave a Comment