Day off from camp today. As I sit here recovering from our VERY long day of cruising the Taste of Chicago and eating lots of exotic and tasty foods. I got tempted to do some more upgrades. I usually ignore all my computer/tech stuff in the summer, but this long weekend has me motivated, I guess.
Droid is now running a 2.2 build. It’s fast and I put Flash on there. Best part is being able to watch videos inline in Google Reader. All my music is showing up twice, but hopefully I’ll find a fix for that. I’m not really using the droid for music playing until they implement gapless playback or a soundcheck-like volume normalizing feature and/or the ability to shuffle by album.
WordPress is now at 3.0. Haven’t noticed any differences (unless crossposting doesn’t work when I publish this), except a couple memory errors in my dashboard… I didn’t really need to read the wordpress development news.
And now, to take advantage of the rest of my day off… I think we’ll be playing Lego Harry Potter.
bad news: I didn’t qualify for the clinical research study that would’ve paid me to take the drugs that I’m already taking
good news: I didn’t qualify because I’m too healthy; A1C of 6.1, down ~50 lbs from a year ago, might even be able to reduce the meds that I’m taking, if I get more exercise and turn some fat into muscle.
bad news: A1C tests usually mean blood samples taken with a needle and a big bruising scar that lasts for days.
good news: today’s A1C came from the same finger prick they used to test my current blood sugar and was ready in 6 minutes.
bad news: I had to fast for this appontment today and hadn’t eaten since 8.30 last night.
good news: panera bread on the way to the red line (with free wifi)
bad news: I’m not done with the stats for work, yet
good news: I’m downtown for the study appointment, so I can swing by the office and get the stuff I’m missing, hopefully.
bad news: between major seasons, so not much work besides finishing the stats.
good news: picked up a few days at a couple other teams courses and met people and have heard from even more courses who want me to work for them.
bad news: it was raining this morning and I had at least one 10 minute walk on the schedule.
good news: the sun is out.
After digging food out of my wisdom tooth with a toothpick after every meal for the past few months… the cavity became too bad and I was experiencing ridiculously unbearable pain every few days. I lined up an appointment at a Dentistry school, since the rumor was that they did good work and did it cheap. They checked me in, took an x-ray, told me that the tooth was definitely the culprit and told me they could pull it right there and then. It was a couple students who did the actual work, and they did hit my gums with their tools a couple times, but it wasn’t an overly painful experience and I didn’t have any ridiculous swelling or signs of infection. They prescribed me an antibiotic, and I took my final dose of that today. I still have a whole that little bits of food occasionally get stuck in, but I’ve gotten really good at using the mirror on my visor in my car and a toothpick to get it out.
In other news, I got on the list at a couple more teams courses and hopefully I’ll be picking up more work. Already lined up a few days in between the usual season and summer camp. Hooray!
The long breaks between seasons make me nervous; When the new season begins, my confidence in my ability to do my job is completely deflated. Right now, we’re a few weeks into the season, and I not only KNOW that I am damn good at my job, but I’ve been doing it long enough that I should be teaching other people how to do it or running my own program or both. It reminds me of the time right after my Dad died, when I was nervous every day I had to go to work that I would just break down and not be able to focus enough to get through the day. I managed to get through every day, back then, and the only thing that I couldn’t keep up with was playing in bands. I’m not sure, now, if I just needed the time I was devoting to music to relax and decompress or if playing was actually more mentally demanding than working. Maybe it was both. I miss playing music, I want to play again… but when I feel so insecure at the beginning of each season of work, I wonder if I really have the focus to pull both off again. It’s just like all those classes, when I was in school. I feel like I can do one very well, but if I try to do all of it, I’ll end up doing them all half-assed… is this just pre-season jitters? Will I suddenly remember how good I am at being in a band a couple weeks in? Will my work or my music suffer from trying to do both at the same time? Sometimes I feel like taking some shitty office job that I don’t care about and wouldn’t have to try hard at, just so I can focus on the rest of my life. The money would certainly be more stable… but would I go crazy if I didn’t enjoy and believe in my job? I certainly felt crazy when I worked at TelecomNOW; I had to give up caffeine just to stay grounded. And I took on the Wormtown.org project while I was working there. Not only did it help me keep my sanity, by being something I believed was worth doing, but it kept me connected to the music scene, so that when The Overtones stopped playing, it wasn’t hard for me to find another band to play with. I don’t feel confident enough to try for any drastic changes… find or start an organization I believe in that I could work for full-time, all year or make a living with music by building up my chops and getting back to the point where I could sight-read and do studio work… I’d be happy, but they seem unrealistic or unattainable. I definitely feel pressure to do more, though. That is my point, I either need to do more of the work that I’m doing, that I love, or I need to do more of something else… music or something. I don’t think I’d ever feel this insecurity or lack of confidence if I didn’t have these huge breaks.
So, my big excitement, so far, this year, was the day my facebook got hacked. I don’t know how, and since they didn’t change my password and lock me out, there’s no place to report it to facebook staff, and apparently no action that they’re going to take to try and figure out who this person was who started chatting up all my friends about being mugged while in London and needing money for a hotel bill. So I changed my ancient password… on facebook and several other web-based email accounts and social sites… and I guess I’ll just hope that it doesn’t happen again. I’m sure facebook could at least get an IP address that was signed in when all the messages were sent, but they seem uninterested. The fun part was that I was notified by facebook messages on my phone. I logged in from my phone to check it out… and I managed to change my password and temporarily deactivate my account… all from my phone. I never would’ve been able to do that, before. I love my phone. Also, I set up latitude… you’ll notice a little map with my face on it, in the right column of fashiondisaster.org … no more wondering if I was really mugged while on vacation in London. Did I mention that I love my phone?
Winter. This is my real downtime. The holidays are over and work doesn’t start up again for a few weeks, unless we hire new people and have to train them. I usually entertain myself with a video game addiction at this point in the year, and this year is no exception. Sarah and Frank and I are all addicted to video games. Sarah is still spending most of her time on the Uncharted 2 multiplayer, and I’m almost finished with the The Saboteur. I could go back to Ghostbusters, if I finish it, I guess… Ghostbusters is fun, with all the cast voices in there, but The Saboteur is a way better game. I also have Brutal Legend to finish… and probably some others that I’m forgetting about.
My new favorite naming convention for businesses/shopping plazas is the combination of the street names it resides at. We drove by “Scharrington Dental” tonight, which is near the corner of Schaumburg and Barrington roads. I go by several on my way to the teams course in Northbrook: Waukdee plaza, at the corner of Waukegan and Dundee; Dunsten plaza, at Dundee and Pfingsten, Dunhurst shopping center, at Dundee and Elmhurst. Is this a Chicagoland thing? I don’t remember such lazy and non-creative (lazative?) naming conventions anywhere else that I’ve lived. It makes me chuckle.
BTW our holiday schedules have changed a bit: here at home, Doug is spending some time in the hospital dealing with an infection. This may delay our Christmas dinner and gift-opening to another day… maybe even next year. Out east, we’ve shifted family days around a little and I think Tuesday afternoon/night and all day Wednesday are still free, if you’re looking to hang out with us, while we’re out there.
Shoveling hasn’t been too bad, so far, this year… a couple light ones and a couple heavy ones. I don’t have a feeling this year about whether this is going to be a “heavy” winter, like last year was. I really hope we can avoid the storms on the day we’re flying out this year, though. That was a little too stressful, last year. Good job, those of you who claimed days… 12/28 (evening) through 12/30 is still available, for those of you who haven’t (or just want to leave it up to chance). We’ll be tempted to make a trek down to NYC to see the Tim Burton exhibit and maybe catch up with whoever else lives down there and might want to tag along… unless those days get claimed by people in the MA area.
I managed to get through the balances on most of the gift cards that were haunting my wallet… in a related note, some of you are getting christmas presents from me for the first time in years… or ever, maybe. I managed to avoid most of my impulses to buy things for ourselves that we really don’t need.
I’m getting very comfortable with my new phone; I’m happy with my choice… no regrets. I have a new number that sort of forwards to my old number, by the way… so, if you’re on Verizon, it’s cheaper just to call my old number, but if you’re not, lemme know and I’ll get you my new number.
I finished Mini-Ninjas, though I might just play it again on Hard. I am looking for a new game to become hopelessly addicted to during my break from work. If you have suggestions or games that you like to play online that we can play together, hit me up.
I’m bad at using gift cards. I’ve dig through my wallet several times in the past year and piled all my gift cards up and went to each website, one by one, to find the value of each card. The I try to use the cards… food-specific cards are the easiest to use. Store cards (especially Target, for some reason) stay in my wallet for years. And those visa gift cards are really the worst; I use them until there’s a dollar or two left on them, and then forget how much is on there, and never use them for the small purchases that might not put them over their limit. By the time I remember to try and split a purchase into whatever is left on the card and the rest of the balance on some normal card, the card is more than a year old and some maintenance fee has wiped out the remaining balance. The exception, of course, was the stockpile of Apple gift cards that Sarah (and her mom) gave me over the past few years. I had no problem spending them, all at once, on the macbook that I happen to be writing this post from, right now.
I’m genuinely worried about the two $100 gift cards that I put into my wallet this week. One is an American Express card that I only paid $50 for at their Daily Wish site, and the other is a rebate from Verizon. Regardless of my extensive and ridiculous wishlist
, I like getting gift cards. They make things easy, theoretically, but I’m still bad at using them.
In other news, we got that tree up, and got lights and ornaments on it. Peanut helped untangle the lights.
Am I a Black Friday shopper? No, not really. I admit that I’ve spent half my day, and half of yesterday, at the computer, tracking good deals on my favorite shopping sites… and I do have five orders pending with Amazon, right now, and a couple with some other random places and I did get in one line this morning, but it was inside a store, and I only stayed in it for about 10 minutes, at which time I saw the item I was interested in, sell out. I laughed at the seven geeks in line outside Half-Price Books, and chuckled when I saw the limousine at the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru… There are definitely parts of the craziness that I enjoy, but I’m not a big shopper. I did exchange my Droid for a new one, because of some weird whistling noise it was making. The set up process was surprisingly easy. I really do like Android. I also went out and cut down a christmas tree, and now it’s time to clean up the tree stand and put that thing up.
The Droid has been pretty awesome, so far. The phone works. I just got my Google Voice invite, so we’ll see how that affects things. It should, at least, open up some cool voicemail options. The web works. The apps work… though, the web apps still seem redundant, with such a good browser onboard. With the push gmail, I get notified on my phone before I even see it on the web; It’s creepy. The navigation does the job. It does need some more options and features built into it… ability to customize routes or at least request shortest vs fastest or non-highway routes would be nice. The audio part is surprisingly functional. I miss the Sound Check and the ability to shuffle by album that I have on the iPod and I don’t know if it has the battery life to use it the way I did on the trains all summer and since it also has to stay on all day as a phone.
This is the month where work usually wraps up… and that leads to the month when we wrap presents… and it will all blur into a month I will call Wraptember.
Those of you who plan on seeing Sarah and I when we’re back east, claim your days now.
