Okay, this is awesome.

Read this. (stick with it, it seems like almost total gibberish in the beginning, but it’s not. Think Snow Crash meets Microserfs.)

Then download and play this. (I promise it won’t break your computer.)

My morning has gone from “oh god, why am I up?” to “paranoid, hacking my hardware, fuck the man, I wanna game!”

In a good way.

Really.

“Their only shared interest was making meaningless phone calls to fool NSA data miners.”

BEST. LINE. EVER.

While sitting in a marathon doctor’s appointment last night, my cell phone starts ringing repeatedly. (Fortunately it was on vibrate, that makes it easier to ignore.) The last caller finally leaves a message. After my appointment, I check my messages only to discover the frantic phone calls are from my new landlord, with one follow up by her friend who lives up here (my bay area contact for this place) and met us for the signing of the lease and the walk through. The latter is the one who actually left a message.

Apparently, they were having problems with the $2250 in cashier’s checks they’d received from me. I’m pretty sure my blood pressure spiked when I heard that one. I mean, cashier’s checks withdraw the money from your account when they’re printed, not when they’re cashed. If something had gone wrong with them, it’s not like I had another $2250 just laying around to give them, and even if I did, what about the prior $2250? In an absolute panic, I called my Bay Area contact back.

The problem? My new landlord is a dumb ass. I called before I had those checks cut to find out what name she wanted them made out to. She had them made out to her, instead of her daughter. (Apparently the account opened to receive these checks is in her daughter’s name.) So the Bay Area contact couldn’t deposit them in the bank up here because they didn’t match the name on the account.

And this is *my* problem?

Eventually someone finally talked my landlord into understanding that redoing those checks would be a massive pain in the ass, and that the contact should just mail the checks to her. Even more fortunately, the fast talker wasn’t me. I’m pretty sure my version would have involved profanity, especially after the incident with the water. (Another long story I’ll bore you with later.)

It’s a good thing I love this house. The management is not an adequate reason to move there, that’s for damn sure.

I have successfully irritated my girlfriend. Go me!

I didn’t actually mean to irritate her, I just happened to remember that I needed to get a check from her after she went to bed last night. So I had to ask for it this morning. Which irritated her. She doesn’t like having random alterations to her morning routine.

Which, oddly enough, I can actually appreciate.

But I’m supposed to pony up $2,250 in cashiers checks tomorrow (to get the keys to the new house… *Squeeeeeeeeeeeeee!*) , and I figured she’d be really pissed if that fell through because I hadn’t been able to come up with the money because I was $20 short.

Plus, I told her I needed this on Tuesday. And it was a check for her half the bills. So I’m not feeling like I was really over-stepping any boundaries here, I just need to make sure that everything works so we actually have a house to move into next week.

She’ll thank me just as soon as the irritation passes, really.

I’m supposed to be doing something today, but I have no ambition. My boss doesn’t seem to either. (At least we’re well matched.) I gave up my rights to use most of my major bits of equipment today (I misread an email and thought I’d be spending a whole day in planning meetings again), so I guess I’ll work on getting caught up on my lab notebook. Sitting at my desk and doing massive amounts of cutting and pasting sounds more like kindergarten than work, and that seems rather appealing.

Funny. Last night my girlfriend said she was feeling antsy, waiting to hear if we get to move into the house we want to rent. At the time I had patience. Now I find her restlessness has transfered to me: I’ve no interest in work, or the work move, and just want to know if we got the place as well.

Addendum: My interest in the work move just got piqued. Best opening line for an email about a meeting I didn’t give a fuck about EVER:

It seems that I have overstepped my bounds in organizing this meeting.

You couldn’t keep me away from the follow up meeting to this email if my life depended on it. Will it be long? Yes. Will it probably be boring? Yes. Will there be people behaving badly at times and territorial pissing matches? Fuck yes. Will there be open Wi-Fi while it occurs? Yes.

Portable Internet Device: $200
Open Wi-Fi: Free
Spending an afternoon being paid to alternate between discretely surfing the web and watching people behaving badly: Priceless

I finally found a combination of cold drugs that actually work. It involves alternating between Alka Seltzer Cold & Sinus and TheraFlu Severe Cold, and “assisting” each dosage of each with a half dosage of Sudafed Non-drying Sinus. It’s sort of the Tim Allen theory of cold management: it just needs more medication. I guess I shouldn’t be encouraging that sort of thing, but fuck it, it works. Specifically, I think it’ll work well enough that I can actually attend work tomorrow.

In other news, I’ve discovered I’ve gotten kind of wiggy about processed food. This may be a good thing, assuming it lasts for any length of time. I love shows like Unwrapped because I usually find manufacturing processes facinating. It’s not just limited to food items either. I just like knowing how things are made. But lately I’ve found manufactured foods sort of disturbing. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I live on manufactured shakes. Nothing I eat these days resembles anything found in nature.

I miss food that doesn’t taste like artficial flavors. And when I watch shows about processed foods, I feel this self-righteous voice in my head chastizing people for eating this chemical-based crap instead of fresh vegetation. Which is funny, as I recall I used to be quite the processed food offender. Hell, if you look at the crap I drink, I still am. I don’t drink caffiene nor sugar, which means that everything I drink other than water is loaded with chemicals.

This fact now disturbs me.

I also find myself upset and self-righteous about a storage place ad I keep seeing. The ad suggests that people can store the useless junk occupying their over-full garages in storage places so they have room to put their new junk which the next Best Buy ad will try to convince them they need to be happy. All I could think was “perhaps if you just bought less stuff?” This is also terribly absurd as I am a huge abuser of retail therapy.

I feel overly consumeristic. I feel like there’s too much to atone for. I feel like I should be able to hold on to these feelings more of the time, letting them guide me in my actions. And I feel as though these thoughts border on the edge of spirituality.

I guess it’s a good thing I’m Wiccan

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.

So today I walked into work, refilled my water bottle, sat down at my desk, read the second email in my in box, ran out of my office and spent the entire rest of the day in moving planning meetings.

I’ll be spending tomorrow in much the same way.

On the plus side, turns out my $25 bag o’ joy from Buffalo Exchange is an honest-to-god $400 Coach briefcase from the 90s.

Who knew?

So Ici has been blogging daily since the new year started. I know that doesn’t sound like much (since it’s what, the 4th?), but that would be more posts than I’ve done in the last 6 months.

So I decided I should post something. And once again I have absolutely nothing to say.

Let me think.

I’ve lost 89.2 pounds. And I should want to talk about that. But I don’t find I have a lot to say. I’ve switched from eating to shopping, which I really can’t afford. I have actually discovered I like clothes shopping, but there’s no point in buying a lot of clothes because I’ll just get too small for them. I do like the change though.

Work is getting really stressful because we’re getting ready to move next month. But there’s not really that much to say about that either.

Life is good, my relationship is good, the electric bill because of all the reptiles is obscene, and I spent too much on Christmas, but it was a lot of fun.

Christmas was rather amusing… My dad’s family was wonderful. My mom’s family was a train wreck. Even though there was no actual family gathering planned for that half the family, names were drawn. Apparently I was the only person who actually figured out how to get the presents to the people my girlfriend and I were chosen to give gifts to. My mother and her sister have decided that my cousins no longer get to be in the gift exchange because they didn’t get gifts from them this year. Please note: they have screwed other people in the gift exchange before, this was just the first time it was the two of them.

My girlfriend got screwed too when my uncle got her a gift, but then told her it would cost her $50 to have it. Then when he tried to install it, he broke one of the plastic pieces on her car. In the end the installation didn’t work out, so he never really gave her anything. (I told him what to get her: a bloody Starbuck’s gift card. Those make her obscenely happy.)

But really, other than the fact that my uncle is a tacky little fucker, none of this is that big a deal; most of this just shows the bad blood that happens to be running through the family right now. Funny. All the deaths in my dad’s side of the family brought everyone closer together. Grandma’s health issues seem to be slowly tearing the family apart.

I should care, I really should, but I don’t. Whenever I get sucked into doing anything with that side of the family I usually regret it, and this slow degradation means I never have to see them all in mass. Frankly, it just seems like a bonus.

New Years was special: my girlfriend got the flu on New Year’s Eve, The main sewer line backed up on New Years Day, and last night’s storm blew a chunk of the fence down in the back yard. But A is better now, and we don’t have to pay for the fence or having Roto Rooter come fix the sewer line.

And may I just say, I was pleased with my Roto Rooter experience. They said someone would be here in an hour, the guy was here in 20 minutes. He had the house back up and running in 30 minutes. It was very nice.

I don’t really have any New Year’s resolutions. I do have 2 goals though:

1. No unplanned hospital stays.
2. Fewer trips to the emergency room.

Granted they’re not exactly things I can control, so perhaps it’s more of a wish list. But a girl can dream.

Happy New Year, y’all!

I guess that question would make more sense if I actually updated about the shit that has gone down since September.

Last we spoke I’d declared war on August and was desperately grateful it was over…

Oh. My. God.

I just realized all I posted was a few lines about the fast.

Nothing about all the shit that’s gone down since I turned 32.

Oops.

The ironic part is it’s spiraled so far out of control that most of it feels like ancient history. Honestly, I think Furina visited about three years ago, not less than two months ago.

So… Since the beginning of August of this year I’ve been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, been put on a fast (lost 44 lbs in 6 weeks which is *insane*), seem to have ditched the diabetes via the fast, got rid of the sleep apnea by losing 44 lbs, had a 6 week period, had a DNC and endometrial ablation as treatment for the 6 week period, and got a shit load of blood clots as a result of the out patient surgery, resulting in multiple bilateral pulmonary embolisms.

Say that 5 times fast.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, pulmonary embolism means a blood clot trapped somewhere around a lung. They usually don’t form there, but migrate there. Their presence slows the flow of blood going past the lungs so even though your lungs work fine, you run out of breath because you can’t get enough oxygenated blood out of the lung area to the rest of your body. Bilateral means both sides, in this case both lungs. Multiple is self evident. So basically I have (or at this point, perhaps, had) multiple blood clots interrupting the blood flow around both lungs. This is not the same as cutting off the blood flow. That’s when you die. (See exhibit A: my father.)

Apparently your body can, over time, break the clots down. But to prevent the little pieces of clot that break off from forming new clots, they put you on blood thinners. As of Monday my blood was 4 times thinner than normal. (That’s overkill. It’s supposed to be between 2-3 times thinner. They’ve scaled back my blood thinner.) I get my blood tested about twice a week while they try to get this where it’s supposed to be.

I haven’t been to work in weeks. It’s been so long that I’m actually starting to miss it. I’m supposed to be applying for SDI, but it’s sort of a paper work nightmare, so I have to have yet another doctor fill out yet another form. In the meanwhile, I have given up every fucking vice I have ever had except for gaming. Between the fast (which I am still on, they even let me continue it while I was in the hospital) and the blood thinners, I am no longer allowed to: eat food, drink alcohol, drink caffeine, smoke, or go in hot tubs. Now would seem like the time to discover recreational drugs, but those are verboten as well. That’s where the question of “Where the fuck do you go from here?” comes into play. Vices are more than just a habit or an addiction; they serve a purpose. My addictions function as stress relief. Besides the fact that I have no idea what to do with myself, there’s the issue of I have no idea how to relax without these things.

When I explained this to a coworker who called to see how I was doing, she remarked “I’m glad your getting healthy.” If I could have reached through the phone to smack her, I would have.

But the statement has sort of stuck with me.

If I am getting healthy, even if it’s somewhat involuntary, I suppose it’s time to learn healthy relaxation techniques. (And talk about involuntary. I’ve reached my goal for the bariatric surgery, but I can’t have surgery for 6 months because of the clots. So my doctor wants me to stay on the fast for 6 more months. 6 more months!)

I guess there’s not much more to say. I mean, there’s tons more, but it kind of doesn’t matter at this point. Hell, at this point, I’m not sure what does still matter. And I guess that’s the really big issue. This is supposed to be life altering. And it is. But I don’t quite know how much my life has been altered. So I feel a little lost.

Life is insane, it must be coming up on Samhain.