feren

I got email back from the Canon factory service center. They received the 40D yesterday and have done a preliminary evaluation. That being said, $202 is the current estimate to repair my broken dSLR.

They also sent along a little note that hey, if I Really Want I could upgrade to a refurbished 50D for $699.

Right now neither option is terribly appealing.

I guess I'll select the "cheaper" option of simply fixing the 40D.

So it's 0432 and I'm one of only two warm-blooded beings on the office floor right now. Actually, come to think of it, the other creature on the floor is a contractor. Even though he's working on my project I don't know if he counts as a warm-blooded creature for that very reason... but I digress. As I was saying, it's 0432 in the morning and I've been awake since my alarm went off forty-give minutes ago at 0345. I went to bed sometime around 2145 last night, so I have something akin to 6 hours of sleep. At least that's how the theory goes. I'm sure tarinfirepelt can relate to the sort of confusion I have about sleep schedules when things like this happen, even if he doesn't have a lot of sympathy for me.

But that's just the problem: I haven't had a sleep schedule so much as I've had a toss-turn-wake-wander-return-to-bed-lather-rinse-repeat schedule. So, I've been working to combine a bit of the advice of markvd and ottr, the main thrust of which is to change a few of my habits. Namely? Cutting out the soda and caffeine that's been the mainstay of my diet for the last year. Monster energy drink? Gone. Diet Pepsi? Gone. Coffee in the morning? Gone (or at best replaced with decaf).

This will be my second day without caffeine. Like a complete idiot I quit cold-turkey on Tuesday night, which made yesterday Day One. I believe that had some hand in the "wharrgarbl" aspect of my day (a 12 hour shift full of dogjawed mouthbreathing project managers and last minute requests and outages certainly didn't help any, either; nor does the state of the house and the impending arrival of my parents on their way back to Minnesota).

I really hope that in a week or so all the withdrawl symptoms cease and, more importantly, I'm able to start sleeping through the night again.

You better

I discovered late last night that I should have worn my favorite cap all day -- even if was so hot that I was sweating buckets while we were moving things from the flat to the trailer. Like an idiot I didn't wear the hat and the wrath of the sun has inevitably been dealt: I have, once again, burned my scalp. It's not quite the color of a cooked lobster but it is along those lines.

Sometimes being bald is a pain... literally.

For the rest of the week I'll be rubbing my head down with aloe vera spray and trying not to put my head under the water when I take a shower.

We've sealed and locked the doors

Blackteagan Sketch Commission blackteagan held a sale on sketch commissions this weekend. I was lucky enough to be able to get in the queue, which surprised me given how late I was in tossing my hat into the ring. When asked what I wanted for the sketch I told them, "I'd really like you to just have fun and surprise me." Surprise me they did with this wonderful piece! I'm very enthused about it and can't wait for it to arrive -- and I hope it arrives, since once again I'm having it sent to the PO Box. The same PO Box, you might recall, that the postal service seemed incapable of delivering to the last time I had a commission mailed to me. Hopefully this time... will be different. The thumbnail will take you to a larger version.

In other news this has been a pretty productive weekend. I already alluded to the surprise that genet and roho had in store for me on Saturday evening. Today I helped lady_curmudgeon and her brother finish cleaning out their parents estate. The property goes on the market Monday and her brother wanted to make sure the house was in its best shape for when the realtors and potential buyers walk through. I know this is all very hard for Curmudgeon.

After sweating and laboring at the estate I came back to the World's Smallest Flat to sweat and labor some more. I took down the kitchen table, the kitchen chairs, boxes of books (OMG no more books honey, seriously!) , boxes of other fragile things, a bag of clothes and some other odds and ends. I had no idea that my girlfriend owned a didgeridoo. I got everything that we'd wrapped and packed downstairs and into the Expy, which is pretty much full. I'd like to finish this weekend by wrapping and packing a load of dishes from her kitchen but I'm not sure I'm up to the task. I've downed one Diet Pepsi in under a minute to try and lower my core temperature and I'll probably slam another before I actually post this to LJ.

Still, we're looking pretty good and the end is well within sight.

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

My route up to lady_curmudgeon's place involves a good portion of I-294. For those who don't live in the Chicago area and thus have no reason to know about this road, I-294 is a major loop for I-94. It is also currently undergoing major reconstruction in a number of places.

( This is gonna hurt the Expy more than it hurts me. )
In the end I'm okay and the truck is more than okay to drive. It just needs some work done to it. Seeing as how I have nobody to blame but myself for this situation I can't be too angry about it. My only goal at this point is to get it fixed as quickly as possible.

[Edit at 1149 4/14: I have to wonder how much of this damage could have been minimized if I'd just given myself this really nice grill and brush guard for Christmas last year, eh?]

Life is a highway

Thanks to the wonderment that is Google Apps for Your Domain (Yes, the beta is still taking sign-ups) I have been able to cobble together a pseudo-answer for the problem I faced after Friday's failure of panther and my subsequent announcement that I am shutting down and leaving the hosting business. So, for the moment, I have the ability to keep receiving email via my personal e-mail address and put up an explanation on the front page. All thanks to a side project run by a search engine. Sadly, the webserver component for Google Apps doesn't support virtual hosts that might point at my explanation page via their own URL, so it's not a complete solution. But it's still better than where I was two hours ago.

Google, your powers are truly mighty. I just wish I didn't have to turn to them because of a situation like this.

sometimes

When leaving roho and genet's place yesterday I managed to give my ankle a pretty sound beating, the result of which seems to be a mild sprain. It was remarkably easy... I was walking along their front sidewalk, which leads from the porch to the driveway. I absentmindedly stepped off the edge of the sidewalk with my left foot, thinking there was solid ground where I was putting my foot down at. Unfortunately for me there wasn't any solid ground there -- just a big hole that grass had grown up in. So, down came my foot with the very inner edge of my boot sole on the sidewalk's lip and the rest (unbeknownst to me) hanging off into space. The rest of my weight came down, my foot snapped down and into the hole and **WRENCH-O**. Why hello, searing pain! It's been a while since you and I talked!

Of course lady_curmudgeon, Roho and Genet were pretty concerned. I am told that at the time it looked like I was going to go completely ass-over-teakettle, but somehow I pulled off a miraculous recovery. It took me a minute or two of balancing on my right foot before I was able to stand again. I gave assurances that it was just a light twist and that I'd be able to walk it off in no time. Clearly I underestimated things. By the time we got home last night the entire left ankle was aching and when I took my boot off I could feel how swollen and sore everything was. In retrospect I am stupid-lucky that I was wearing my much-beloved Stanley boots, because they are workbooks with lace-up tops that are very good at supporting your ankle. I think that had I been wearing regular tennis shoes I would have fractured the ankle instead of just giving it a really good spraining. Joy.

So anyway, this morning I got out of bed... put some weight on my left foot... and nearly demonstrated my impression of a tumbling clown of some sort. A naked one, who without his glasses is blind as a bat. A naked, blind, cursing-like-a-sailor tumbling clown. I downed some aspirin and told Curmudgeon that we needed to go get an ankle brace from the local Walgreens, because there was no way I was going out and doing anything today with just my boot's uppers to support me. Luckily the Walgreens was having a 50% off sale on Ace bandages, so I got a one-size-fits-all ankle brace for $5.49 instead of the $12 and change they wanted for it normally. I strapped that on and, when augmenting it with my boot, was almost able to hobble around at a pretty decent clip. With the brace and boot on I have the full range of motion my ankle is supposed to have, I just can't put weight on it at certain angles without feeling a very sharp pain through the base of my joint.

I'm here to tell you folks: There is no single better way to make yourself feel like a complete failure as a human being. When you sprain your ankle you end up walking like you've got something seriously wrong with your foot, but you've got not splint, no cast, no cane or crutch. People look at you funny because you end up doing this weird sorta hop-shuffle-drag thing for no discernable reason, and occasionally you hiss in a bit of breath if you end up twinging something just the wrong way. And all because you didn't look where you were putting your foot... I mean, how much more demeaning can it get? You got hurt while you were walking... something even a three year old can master! Durr. Still, as humiliating as that is I still got a better deal than tarinfirepelt, who ended up getting scorched by some hot asphault. That's way, way worse. And since I had spent part of the afternoon lighting denatured alcohol on fire with Roho in a vain attempt to make his pressurized kerosene lamps go, I definately got off light with a sprained ankle.

You haven't seen the worst of it yet

So now I get to add that to the list of things that (desperately) need my attention to be given to them.

I run a hosting service why? Oh yeah, I do it because of my love of technology.... except when it fails and roaches a drive in a machine that's half a continent away from me.

I should just convert my office at home into a proto-datacenter and be done with it.

Tonight, while I was taking the trash and the recyclables out the curb (sometime around 9:16 PM or so), I saw the first firefly of the season. I had just gotten a bag full of garbage and used cat litter out to the end of the driveway when I happened to look up. My timing couldn't have been better, because just as I did a firefly buzzed by and winked his light. I was so startled I dropped the bag and stood up to squint, because I didn't really recognize what I had seen. He flashed again once more and then disappeared into the night.

I stood out in front of the house for something like ten minutes after that, just waiting to see if I'd see any more of those ghostly green lights. I didn't, but that's okay. While I was out here I had time to enjoy the weather...tonight it's teetering upon the edge as it can't quite make up its mind between being "spring-cool" or "summer-warm and a little bit humid." The weather, along with the sighting of that lone firefly, caused a few memories to tickle the back of my brain. One of the strongest ones was from about 20 years ago, when I spent a few weeks in Long Island, where one of my uncles lives. I was at my uncle's house, and spent an entire evening running around his yard and catching fireflies in a jar. Another memory was of a much more recent time: when I was living in Wheeling with roho and genet, I spent quite a few of my nights (when the weather would permit it) standing outside and just staring at the stars and the moon. Back then I was thinking about somebody. Now, when I do the same thing in the back yard of my own home, I think about those memories. Maybe that's weird, maybe it's some sort of "meta-zen" when I think about memories of thinking of people (I think maybe I think too much).

On the topic of Ra: He seems to be doing well. In the time that has elapsed since my last update about him there have been no accidents that I've been able to discover. The daily tending of his litter box shows he's still passing urine, though it's hard to tell if he's passing as much as he should since I cannot accurately gauge his water intake. The other problem is that I'm not able to get a good sense of if there's still blood in his waste -- his litter just clumps around it and leaves no hints. I may put down a plastic cat pan liner and sprinke No-Sorb atop it to see if I can get a sample. Since he's finished the first week of antibiotics I want to make sure I'm not seeing any extra colors that shouldn't be there.

Here's to keeping fingers crossed.