Man weekends go by so fast!

Friday night, Diana and I had dinner at her parents house. It was good fun to see them and just hang out.

Saturday morning, Diana and I went to find a geocache that had eluded us when we went with Baditude and H-bomb. It's a 4-part one, where each part leads to the next. We verified part 1, and finally found part 2. We searched for part 3, but never found it. We did bring a backup cache location nearby which was easy to find, but not all was lost. It turned into a 3 mile hike in the hot sun, and I was pretty beat afterwards. That afternoon my dad and I went to Radio Shack and picked up the pieces we needed for our fish project. We have all but one piece, and are basically ready to get started. It's very exciting. That night, Diana picked me up, and we went to see the San DIego Riptide, our arena football team, play it's home opener. I'd never seen arena football before, and it was a lot of fun. Diana's not that big of a football fan, but it would be a great thing to do with the boys. I'm definitely going back for long-sleeve shirt night.

Today has been pretty lazy. Diana worked in the morning, and I did some chores around here and played some Nethack and GTA3. It's really hot, and I'm still getting over my cold, so I've been pretty lethargic (yesterday probably took a lot out of me). When she got home, and joined forces and cleaned the house.

I'm not ready to go back to work! Busy weekends go by too fast.

HaloScan sucks ass.

I've switched to a new comment system! Give it a try and lemme know how it works.

It's going to be a beautiful weekend. Diana's been working hard, and I've been so sick that we're ready to spend some time outside in the sun. I'd like to try to get that geocache that we missed last time. We're having dinner with her parents tonight, and there might be some Scabble involved, so that should be fun. And we need to do our taxes. :P

I'm feeling much better today. I'm so happy to be back in the game. It was a really disconcerting feeling to feel so out of it. And now that I'm back in the game, it's the weekend! Woo hoo!

Back to work for me!

I think I'm over the hump, and on the road to recovery. I just have to evactuate my sinuses every three minutes. And if only my right ear would clear, all would be right with the world.

I got my eBay Billy Bass. I cracked the puppy open, and the internals do NOT match the schematics that I downloaded. So now I'm not quite sure what to do. I think we had a good shot at putting everything all together if all the plans matched exactly to what we had, but I'm not as convinced about our ability to understand everything enough to sort of go it on our own. Nothing to lose, I guess, except some time and money. :) I emailed the guy who made the original plans, but haven't heard back yet.

So, other than that, not much to report. I haven't done much over the past couple days except hang out and watch TV. I actually watched a Celebrity Profile that chronicaled the thrilling career of Hollywood powerhouse Scott Baio. And Maury Povich interviewed 14 year old girls who wanted to get preggers and have babies. A couple hours actually spending time with real live babies cured that right quick. Good old Maury. Is he married to Connie Chung? It strikes me as weird that she's a respected news reporter, and his show is so trashy.

And I actually played some GTA3 yesterday, which was fun. I haven't played computer games in a long time.

Bah.

I woke up this morning and had a temperature of 102. I took some ibuprofen and by midmorning it was back to normal. I laid in bed and sweated it out a little, though. I'm feeling a bit better this afternoon, which is good. I'm tired of being sick, though.

Better, yet worse.

I'm feeling a bit better today, mentally. It was pretty frusterating to me that I wasn't feeling really altogether there, but didn't really know why. I think I now know why. I've caught The Cold that everyone and their mothers have had. My coworkers had it. Iwan had it at Mammoth, and now I've got it. I went to bed last night a little sneezy and sniffly, and woke up with a full fledged gnarly sore throat and stuffed up. So I'm going to chalk up the last week or so of feeling weird to this thing brewing in my system somewhere, and now it's burst forth. So in spite of feeling worse, I do feel a bit better. Everyone's told me that this thing lasts for 2 weeks or so, so I have that to look forward to.

A group of us went out for diner last night, and then watched Baditudes WCD football season. I think I referred to it before, but Eryn has set up a full season of football for a team he created with all of us as players. He then sets the computer to control both sides, and we just sit back at watch the computer play itself. Sounds lame, but it's really a lot of fun.

Discostup stayed over at our house last night. Our first official houseguest! It was neat to have our guestroom used.

So, here I am, back at work. Go Adman!

Oh! Baditude jumped on the bandwagon (I'm no longer the last one one) and started a blog. You can find it off his website. Nice work, buddy!

Well, I don't know what's been wrong with me.

Last week, I started feeling pretty crumby, sort of all of a sudden. I just sort of woke up feeling really tired and naseous (dry heaved a little bit). I called in sick and went back to bed, and slept for like another 3 hours. For the next couple days, I just felt really lousy without many real physical symptoms. But mentally, I wasn't really able to concentrate, and I just felt totally disconnected and out of it. As I've said before, I felt like I had sort of "perception blind spots" in that my brain wasn't really processing everything that I was seeing. That's how it felt, at least. I tried coming to work, but wasn't really able to do much or think clearly. And this was sort of scary to me, so I get anxious and stress myself out which doesn't help much.

I was able to go to Mammoth this weekend, and that generally went ok. In spite of still feeling a little out of it, I was able to hang out and have fun and snowboard and so forth. A big group of us went, and we all got along really well and had a lot of fun together. My friend Mike was there and is in town tonight, and it's good to see him. As he's busy being a new doctor, I'm guessing it's probably pretty nice for him to get away from that rat race too.

I went to the doctors this morning and after doing a quick neurological test and checking my eyes and ears, they did a blood test and urine test. Everything came back "all ok". I felt a little stupid for not really having any concrete symptoms and apoligized to the doctor, and he said not to worry about it, and I was clearly there for some reason. I was discharged with a sheet that I had "undiagnosed weakness". Sweet. By the time I got to my car, I was pretty hungry, so cracked into the lunch that my lovely wife made for me.

At this point, it occurred to me that I was probably just dehydrated and/or low-blood-sugar-ish (although if this was on the blood test, they didn't say anything to me). In fact, I think I've felt this way before, and I think that was the advice my dad gave me at that point. You'd think I would have thought of this earlier, and I'm sure Diana probably said something along those lines, but for whatever reason, there I was.

So I'm making a big effort this afternoon to basically constantly drink water. And I'm feeling actually pretty OK. Before I started feeling bad, I don't feel like my eating habits were any different than usual (I wasn't on a deserted island or anything), but I've been able to sit at my desk and actually get work done, which is more than I can say for the last couple days.

Norm said it best, that I've had a little run of stupid little semi-sicknesses that have just sort of kept me under 100%. So here's looking forward to a run of 100% health!

I just finished my third 16 oz. bottle of water in 2 hours. It occurs to me this may be as much water as I used to drink in a day. Maybe that should tell me something. And I put in my lubricating eyedrops. Huzzah!

I had a pretty good weekend! Friday night, Diana and I lazed around and watched a movie (The Bone Collector) which wasn't very good. But it was nice to stay in while the rains started. Saturday we hung around during the day, and went to see the San Diego Sockers that night with some friends from my work. That was a lot of fun. It's funny how different a crowd shows up for Sockers games than Gulls games. Lots of kids and families there, and good clean fun all the way around (except our boys lost, but oh well).

Sunday, Diana and I conquered the last remaining water-flow problem via a couple of trips to Home Depot. We got all the tubes and connectors we needed, and redirected the downspout flow from the courtyard all the way along the front walk and out onto the walkway at the top of the front yard. We were quite pleased with ourselves, and actually DARED it to rain. But it probably won't rain again for another year. Oh well. It's a little ugly, but it's a perma-temporary solution until we do something more interested with the courtyard.

Little Buhr is in town, and we met up with a group of people out at dinner, which was a lot of fun. Good to see LB again. And with him in town, interest has been sparked in playing some poker, which will happen tonight! Woo hoo!

Friday already?

This week has just been crusing right along. Not a whole lot of news to report.

Last night I went to Eryn's house to watch the latest game in our WCD football season. For those not in the know, Eryn created a team using a bunch of his friends as models for the players (including renaming the players to our names, etc) and just let the computer play out a full season, controlling every team. So we literally just set the computer to play the next game in the season, and watch the AI play itself. In spite of how dumb that sounds, it really is sort of exciting. EA did such a good job making it actually LOOK like a live football game that it's not that hard to get into the swing of things and cheer for big plays and so forth. Anyways, we kept notes to be reported back to our Yahoo group.

I rushed home for Survivor, which was interesting as usual. Also on that night was MTV's "True Life: I'm a Gamer" which we watched. It was pretty interesting. Those guys gaming habits (8-12 hours a day) made me feel a lot better about my own gaming addiction.

Not a whole lot of plans for the weekend, except rain is expected. I know for a fact that the damn rain gutter is sloping the wrong way, so I'll probably go out and try to fix that tonight. Tommorow night a small group of work-peeps are going to see the Sockers play, which will be fun. That's about it!

My hypochondria has passed. I'm fine now.

"I'm afraid I might be a hypochrondiac." <---- That's comedy.

Diana and I watched "Office Space" on TV last night. That is a GREAT movie. I also read an hours worth of Shogun. Good stuff.

I've been using my Visine every day, when I first wake up and before I go to bed and a couple times in between, and have had no eye problems. So, so far so good!

So my friends girlfriend has been having neurological problems for a couple years, and was just diagnosed as having Lyme's disease. A friend at work was having a wierd visual problem that she thought was related to her recent Lasik eye surgery, but it turns out that she had pressure on her optic nerve due to intracranial pressure. She had an MRI done that afternoon which ruled out things like tumors and bleeding, which is good. She now has to have a spinal tap to measure the fluid pressure in her central nervous system or something.

I'm so scared of getting some serious disease or something that just sort of all of a sudden comes up. Maybe that's how all diseases are, I guess. But I've heard stories of people who just sort of one day start not feeling well, and it turns out they have cancer of the (whatever) and have 6 months to live. That idea is so scary to me. I'm turning into a total hypochondriac.

Well, maybe not unreasonably so, but it's still something I think about every so often.

This weekend went by quickly. Diana and I put up some curtains. They look better on the floor than on the wall, I think, but they might just need to be gotten used to. I worked more on the rain gutter, and got it much more stable. The problem is that the roof is sloped one way, and I want the water to flow the other way. So even though I sloped it slightly downhill, because the roof is sloped even more the other way, the water partially flows the wrong way and collects at the non-drain end. It's frusterating.

Diana and I worked on a "skin" for my Grand Theft Auto III character, which was a lot of fun. The game makers provide a file that is used to paint the model in the game. There are samples provided, and we took some digital pictures of me in my comfy clothes, and with a little effort, we were able to make some not-too-bad skins. It's so funny now that in the game I'm wearing scrubs pants and my mexican pancho sweatshirt thing. We tried to do my Spongebob shirt, but the graphics on the front doesn't fit very well.

My dad and I also worked on the fish project. It turns out we had the Christmas edition of the Billy Bass, which didn't fit into the schematic that we had for the normal Billy Bass, so it was a lot of tracing and learning, which was fun. We decided that we actually need a Billy Bass proper, but once we get one, we should have a good head start on exactly what we need to do.

WOW!

Norm had some extra tickets to go see STOMP at the Civic Theater, and was kind enough to invite me and Diana. What an AWESOME show that was. It was just incredible. I had a smile on my face the whole time. The most amazing part was the pure skill and creativity they had creating music with totally rudmentary objects. Anyways, too much to even begin to type out, but I'm really glad we were given the opportunity to go. Thanks Norm and Teri!

Dry eyes.

Two nights ago, I was in the jacuzzi for a littel pre-bedtime soak. Not unusual. When getting out of the jacuzzi, I rubbed my eyes a little bit and found that my left eye was slightly swollen at the inner corner of my eye. Within a few minutes, the upper, inner corner of my left eye was really swelled up so that it covered the lid. I took some anti-allergy stuff, which didn't help any. When I woke up the next morning, my whole eye was swollen, almost completely shut.

I called in sick, and made a doctors appointment for that afternoon. It's the third time I've seen him for eye problems, either with redness, itchiness, or swelling. He's not really sure what's going on. He thought it was either the start of a bacterial infection, or an allergic reaction to something, and, not knowing, gave me meds for both. Great.

I talked to my brother and dad a little bit. They don't have much of a better idea, but agreed with what I've been thinking for a little while, that I have chronicly dry eyes. I did some reading about chronic eye dryness (are your eyes drying up just reading this?), and at least a few web pages said that computer users can be particularly susceptible since we don't blink as much. I can TOTALLY see myself doing this.

So, I'm going to self-diagnose, er... myself.

I'm going to say that I don't blink enough (I just read computer users may blink 7 times a minutes, compared to 22 times per minute average), and can become tear-deficient. This can cause dry spots on my eyes, or a buildup of junk in my eyes, which can block ducts and generally cause irritation and inflammation.

So, to fight that, I'm going to take more computer breaks, and try to concentrate on blinking more (probably impossible). Further, I'm going to have a healthy supply of artificial tears onhand, both at work and at home, to be used multiple times a day, particularly before bed and in the morning. And the next time I have a significant problem (swelling, etc), I'm going to insist on seeing an eye-doc.

There. Let's try that for a couple weeks and see how things go, right?

Now, I guess I continue with the regimen of antibiotic eyedrops and anti-histimines as perscribed? I don't see why I should except that I was instructed to do so.

Weekends are never long enough.

Saturday was a baby shower for the wife of a co-worker of mine. The ladies got together and did baby stuff (which Diana seemed to have fun observing more than actually taking part in), and the gents played golf. Iwan was able to join us, which made things a lot more fun, as I didn't really know anyone else except my co-worker. I would have loved to break 100, but I got a 103. Oh well.

Saturday night was Gabe's birthday. A select group went to Bucca de Beppo for dinner. I've only been there twice, and thought the food was generally mediocre, but the atmosphere certainly makes up for it. It's a lively place, and we had a good time. Afterwards, we went to some little bar. Diana and Sara and Eryn and I left around midnight, which was a little early for some people at the party, but not a bad time to make an exit. Gabe seemed really touched we were all able to make it, which was nice.

Sunday was a little more relaxing. Diana tutored in the morning, and I slept LATE, which was nice. We then went to the Home and Garden show at the fairgrounds, which was sort of overwhelming. I'm not sure how much we learned about what we want to do with our yard, but it was neat to see the exhibits. We came home in the afternoon pretty pooped, and just sort of lazed for the rest of the evening, which was nice. I got the spa clean and sparkling again. It turns out some measurements are in half-teaspoons, and some are in teaspoons, and some are in ounces (6 teaspoons to an ounce, I think Mom said). I have half-teaspoon sitting out by the jacuzzi. And I think I haven't been putting in enough stuff sometimes, thinking that I was putting in *teaspoons* when it actually was *half teaspoons*. Especially when I'm supposed to put in an ounce of something, that's 12 halves, and I think I've been putting in 6 halves. Anyways, it's all good now.

A skiing trip to Mammoth is being planned, which should be fun. Diana and I were really on the fence about it, because we're not that big into skiing or snowboarding (her less than me), and it's a long drive just to hang out with friends that we see all the time around here. But on the other hand, it WILL be fun to go on vacation with all those peeps, and Mick is going, who I never get to see, so that made the decision easier. I'm not looking forward to the long drive, though.

So... that's about it for now. Oh! I bought Grand Theft Auto III. Now to see what all the fuss is about.