Well, either that or jump out of a window. My official retirement statement came back from last year. Despite my not-insignificant contributions, I managed to lose five times what I contributed. My losses this past year are almost exactly the same as what my yearly salary comes to. Now I'm sure a lot more people have lost a lot more money than I have, but it's still a lot to me.
I have reached that magic age where the fillings I got when I was younger are now starting to be a problem. About six or seven months ago I had one fall apart. This time they caught one before it broke and fell out, but they had to drill out the old filling and prep the tooth for a new one. This tooth may eventually have to be crowned, but it's fixed for now.
Unfortunately, I have to go back again next week because I have another one on the other side of my mouth. With my resistance to Novocaine and other numbing drugs, trips to the dentist have always been unpleasant. My dentist said I'm the most difficult patient in his entire practice as far as numbing goes. Um, yay for me?
I tweeted the whole experience, or as much of it as I could anyway. It's hard to type with four hands in your mouth. I expect to be numb for several hours now. In fact, the receptionist said "I hope you ate lunch before you came in!"
I didn't think that would be a very good idea. I think it's bad etiquette to eat just before a dentist appointment. Or if it isn't, it should be. Well, skipping a meal never killed me before, so I think I'll be okay.
Today we had a virus in the office that was pretending to be a DHCP server and replacing client computer DNS servers with its own evil, smelly ones. It was quick to spot when I was told our internal wiki stopped working. The wiki used some special DNS tricks to make it work inside the office, but only if you were using the main office's DNS servers, so when the virus started hijacking peoples' connections, it was noticed quickly.
It was much harder to track down, though. I really like wireshark (Sniffing the glue that holds the Internet together, hehe), and it is invaluable when trying to find something like this. It took some time to track down, but we eventually found the problem and laid the smack down on the employee that goofed up.
I have been down with what must likely be the worst cold I've ever had. It's been an absolutely miserable experience since Wednesday. I drove to the store yesterday to pick up some juice and a few other things and the short trip almost killed me my chest hurt so much. The coughing has been excruciating, my chest and back are sore to the touch from it.
Thankfully Lorien didn't get it as bad as I did—perhaps her just having a cold recently protected her somewhat, I don't know, but she's had a much better time of it than I have.
This morning I got a call about my car: the power steering pump came in, but when they pulled the old one they found that my water pump was bad, too. So now I'm replacing the power steering pump, thermostat, water pump, and the timing belt. At this point I'm wondering if anything else can go wrong. On a side note, I received my car title in the mail today.
Yesterday I mentioned how my barely-paid-off car lost power steering. It turns out things are just a little bit worse.
Not only is the power steering pump bad, I have a thermostat that croaked, too. So much for celebrating having paid off my car…
I just received confirmation from my bank that my car loan has been paid off and I'll be receiving the ownership papers in a week or so.
Also, on my way home, I lost power steering. Why is it that just when you pay something off it starts falling apart??
I hate to be the one to complain about bad neighbors, but two doors down from my cul de sac my neighbors have left a car on the road for months. With all the snowfall, it's completely buried. Normally it's not a problem, but we've had so much snow that the plow isn't coming through our turnabout because it might hit the car. I just called the police department to complain about it. The garbage trucks aren't coming through, and even the mail is not being delivered. Enough is enough, time to let the Police deal with it.
I think I'm just going to install a revolving door on my office to accommodate all the traffic it's been getting today. And stuff all my work—nothing's getting done when this many people keep coming to me. Seriously, it's every three to five minutes I'm getting interrupted, sometimes way less.
Lorien left for Houston this morning. She'll be down there until Monday night. She was going to hit some RenFair down there, but apparently that's canceled now. I was hoping she'd get to go (so was she—it was one of the main reasons she wanted to go in the first place), I wanted her to get me a picture of a wench on a cell phone to go with my ninja on a cell phone and pirate on a cell phone pictures.
Anachronism. Ha!
My jaw has been numb since 9am. Yesterday I had my semi-annual dental checkup and cleaning. I had lost the top of a filling last week or so, and it had to be repaired. I have a new dentist, since my old one retired. I'm now older than my dentist.
That aside, my new dentist is a nice guy. He uses a new anesthetic to which I found I'm as equally resistant as the old stuff. Unfortunately, the way to find that out is to get a shot of it, then have the dentist start drilling. He instantly hit a live nerve. So he gave me a second shot and a few minutes for that to take effect. Then hit the nerve again. I got a full third injection after that and about ten minutes later was completely numb. I am just now starting to get some feeling back on the right side of my face.
The sad part is he had to drill for literally five seconds, just enough to clean up the edge of where the partial filling fell out. The whole thing cost me $20 after my insurance cut in. It really was almost no work! Such a high price to pay in numbness though.
I missed out on a nice free lunch too because I didn't want to bite my tongue off or take a chunk out of my cheek.
Two days ago, I wouldn't have believed I could have a more difficult day at work. Somehow I managed to experience one…the very next day! I had a terrible day right after a really bad day, which doesn't make me very happy.
We had a bunch of people over last night, too. When I got home, I stomped around for a while, then went to my bedroom, turned off the light, and just laid there in the gloomy silence. I felt a lot better after about an hour or so.
When people started arriving, I no longer felt like caving their heads in with the nearest blunt instrument.
Today was terribly busy. It all started when I was asked to test internal network mail relaying as soon as I walked in the door. I accidentally overwrote the file I was "borrowing" the code from, using Notepad.
In case you didn't know, there is no way to recover a file if you'ved edited it and saved it in Notepad. It only has one level of undo, and it's certainly not the one you need. Take it from my mistake, use a real editor even for a small job, and make sure your files are backed up.
From there, the day got worse, with steady a traffic of problems into my office. Everybody thinks they're the only ones with problems and I should be able to take care of it right away. Some I can, when they're easy, and I don't mind it. But some people come to me even when they know I have nothing to do with whatever their problem is and still expect me to figure it out for them.
The file I overwrote this morning wasn't a total loss—I was able to rewrite it much better, and the bulk of the difficult part was a SQL query that I had stored so I access it as a View, so I just had to rewrite some logic.
The worst part about the day was I was so busy I never even had time to stop for lunch. I hate days like this.
I got suckered in to coming to downtown Coeur d'Alene today to fix my in-laws' wireless router. As you can see, there's nothing wrong with it, as I'm connected to it right now. Today is Car d'Lane, the big classic car show. Therefore, there isn't a parking spot to be had anywhere downtown—including my in-laws' business lot for "guests only." I wish.
The temperature finally crested 70°F today, it seems like forever since we've had a warm day like this. Except for one odd heat wave real early this year, it's been quite cool. We've had rain for the last two weeks almost. I even had to turn the furnace back on!
This morning a neighbor's dog woke me up with its incessant barking at about 7:30am. Now, I'm usually up by this time, but it is a Saturday, and it would have been nice to sleep in. But since I was up, I decided I should go out and mow the lawn. I spent the earliest part (I didn't start until about 8:45) by the fence nearest that neighbor, just in case they were able to sleep in with their damn dog barking every two seconds for the entire morning.
It took about two hours to mow everything, and now I feel like I'm going to die from all the pollen I've been exposed to. It's been the curse of my life to have bad hay fever.
But at least the lawn's done. Until next week, anyway.