feren

As a follow-up to my previous entry, I have to say I rather enjoyed my Christmas this year. lady_curmudgeon and I drove up to Antioch last night so that we could crash at roho and genet's place, which let us be able to see Curmudgeon's niece at 9 this morning without having to get up at 5 o'clock to make the eighty mile trek North. I must say that sometimes it's really quite convenient to have the keys to your best friend's house!

Curmudgeon and I did our gift opening yesterday morning, since neither of us really wanted to wait until we got home tonight. Curmudgeon gave me a number of very sweet, useful and sometimes funny gifts. They included holiday-themed boxers (Popeye with "Nice" on the front, Bluto with "Naughty" on the back), lighters, non-holiday boxers, a pair of flannel shirts, $50 towards some iTunes purchases and a new beard trimmer. Curmudgeon got gifts from me, the cats and Santa -- a new 20" wide-screen flat panel display for her computer (that may need to be exchanged already thanks to a stuck pixel), a book called "The Art of Justice," a brass cat figure that sits atop a flat-panel display, a Garmin Nuvi 350 GPS navigator (we took that with last night just for fun and it does a really incredible job in navigating... though I'm curious why it chose an entirely different route to get us home than the one it took us on to Antioch last night), a pair of decorated ceramic cats, some kitty-themed calendars and a Roomba 4210 Discovery.

Seeing Cassie open her presents was a lot of fun this morning. Curmudgeon's sister-in-law is even more hilarious when she opens packages -- I have some absolutely awesome shots of her gaping in shock and delight as she pulls the final shreds of wrapping from a box. Curmudgeon and I both got very cool gifts from her brother and his family (picture albums of Cassie, a gift certificate to Pier 1, a gift certificate to Menards and some custom-made cards from Cassie) as well as a delicious Christmas dinner of ham, chicken, beef, pasta and pie.

The only downside I can think of for today's events is that we were subjected to one of Cassie's gifts -- a brand-new DVD of High School Musical 2, which Cassie is absolutely smitten by and could watch Again and Again and Again. That film made my brain itch. I much preferred playing with one of Cassie's other presents, UNO Attack! Now that was a game that Curmudgeon, Cassie, Curmudgeon's brother, Curmudgeon's sister-in-law and I all seemed to have a lot of fun with. Oh yeah, I also left one of my new books at Roho and Genet's place. Trust me, though, that doesn't even compare to High School Musical 2.

When I got up this morning I made sure I checked in on lady_curmudgeon, who hasn't been feeling well for the last six days or so. She was feeling worse this morning and asked that I stay home to take care of her. I called in, spoke with my boss and got permission to skip work for the day. It was a good thing I did, because at 2:20 we packed ourselves into the car and drove over to the local immediate care facility. Curmudgeon was running a fever, her blood oxygen was low and her breathing was suffering -- I believe the max she managed on the peak flow meter was 225.

We got out of there at around 3:30, after a breathing treatment and some prescriptions were written. Curmudgeon's feeling better (her peak flow was back up in the mid 300s and blood oxygen was back up to 99) but we're going to have to keep an eye on things for the next few days to make sure the sinus infection doesn't set her back. I'm not yet sure what this means for our Thanksgiving plans, honestly. Traveling back to Kenosha to have dinner with her brother's family may be out of the question. We will have to see.

... and then I pick up the trailer from U-haul -- that is, I will pick it up if they haven't screwed me over by renting it to somebody else like they did the last time, when I danced this dance for duncandahusky. At eleven o'clock, our friends will show up (my friends H.K. & G.K. as well as roho and genet). Once everyone has gathered the moving of lady_curmudgeon from Kenosha to Z'ha'dum commences in earnest despite having been ongoing for the last four months...

The 'mudgeon and I worked through most of today, though there was some downtime after a late lunch. The Expedition was loaded up to the roof and we drove down to Z'ha'dum. Once it was unloaded we drove back to Kenosha. We're down to a few boxes, some furniture and miscellaneous items. Once everyone gets here I think this is going to go pretty quickly. I just hope that the heat stays within something approaching "tolerable" while we work.

A man with a plan, a mechanical band

Today was something of a challenge, as there was a lot of work to be done over at the estate to prep it for sale. And for somebody who hates heights as much as I do? The challenge was elevated ten fold. I probably spent more time on top of a (very tall, shaky) ladder today than I have spent on ladders my entire life until this point. But I can say with all confidence that lady_curmudgeon's brother will have no complaints at all. After over seven hours of work we had every screen scrubbed, every window has been washed inside and out and all the storm windows have had both sides cleaned as well.

After all the time I spent on the ladder I figured Hey, why stop a good thing? So back on the ladder I went to tackle the various house and garage gutters that were sprouting all sorts of greenery. I pulled three heavy garbage bags of rich, black compost out of those gutters. But hey, that chore is done so neither I nor anybody else will have to deal with it later.

I am a tired, sore boy. And tomorrow I commute back to the office for a week that'll be chock-full of stress and lots more work, all so I can give up my Saturday night by pulling an overnighter to upgrade our firewall cluster. Ah well, such is the life of the Chief Bitmover.

And gasoline filled super-soakers

A long day at the office yesterday netted mixed results but I think we made some progress on one or two important issues. I achieved escape velocity from the office sometime around 1920 hours and made my way up to Kenosha, arriving something like an hour later. Even when I-294 is under construction I can still travel a great distance in reasonable time on it -- so long as I wait until after rush hour has finished.

I was hungry and the hour was late, so I convinced lady_curmudgeon to accompany me on a quick run for some fast food. When we returned from Burger King I handed her the drive-thru bag and asked her to carry it since there was a "heavier bag I forgot in the back of the truck." When I came around the front of the Expedition and she saw the huge bag with "Happy Birthday" written on it she just stared and said "Oh, my."

Before we had our late dinners she unwrapped her gifts. I think I surprised her with the vast range of items I'd managed to fit in there. Everything from ceramic painted cats (Think of the Chicago Cows On Parade art exhibit and you have the sense of how these cats were painted) to a wireless desktop to an iTunes gift card she can use to buy some new music. Perhaps the biggest surprise to Curmudgeon was the bag of Russel Stover sugarless chocolate truffles that I had put in there. She was sure she'd hate them simply on the merits of their being sugarless. None the less, I convinced her to try one and she spent the next five minutes boggling at how delicious it was. Do I know my lady, or what?

In other news this weekend will be spent in the usual way I spend my weekends in Kenosha: helping the Curmudgeon pack for her upcoming move to Z'ha'dum and maybe having dinner or coffee with some local friends -- assuming we don't get roped into putting some final finishing touches on the estate so Curmudgeon's brother can get it on the market. Of course no weekend of productivity like this is complete without a twist. This week's twist is that the last round of antibiotics given to Curmudgeon's primadonna cat (Aptly named "Diva") seem to have had no effect on what has now been diagnosed as a kidney infection. So a new round of meds are being applied and I'm the lucky cat daddy who gets to put them down her throat for the entirety of the weekend (as an amusing sidenote, I think 'mudge is envious because when pill time arrives Diva fights me less and I usually get the pill down her throat the first time, whereas for Curmudgeon there's lots of squirming, biting and several tries are necessary before the meds go down the hatch).

Build the robots

Good wishes of birthday cheer go to my lady_curmudgeon, for today she celebrates a circuit of the sun on this little mudball we call home.

Happy birthday, sweets.

I guess I'm having a streak of luck from Friday the 13th, or something. Or at least that's what some would have you believe. Let's see... last night I tagged those traffic barriers with the Expedition, right? And just a moment ago I gave lady_curmudgeon muscle spasms on her bruised rib cage when she bent over the recliner to see a video that was playing on my laptop.

Delayed bad luck? I'm not allowed to touch anything for the rest of the day.

Nothing, except an unending hatred for cellulose insulation and the knowledge that my roof was built using trusses instead of stick framing. Oh, and that I need to go back up there next weekend with some duct tape and tape some venting hoses back together so they actually reach the vents instead of laying open on top of the insulation. And that the attic space above my den is not accessible from the attic space above the house proper, lending further to my belief that this was added on and not part of the original floorplan.

( At least I didn't fall through my ceiling. )
You can't always get what you want

I've driven past it perhaps dozens of times in the last five or six years, but I've never stopped there. That was taken care of last night, however, when lady_curmudgeon and I were just out for a drive in the area -- I can now officially (and with great pride) say that I have been to the Mars' Cheese Castle in Kenosha, WI.

I cite random circumstance and a deep-seated fear that I would die before I visited this local landmark as the reasons for attending.