I’m defective

It’s a beautiful warm wonderful spring day.  And I’m afraid to go outside or open the window.  The tree pollen count is high and I’m as congested as can be.  My nose, my sinuses, my ears, my throat…can I get replacement, non-defective parts for every part of me above the shoulders?  I’ve taken a steamy bath, I’ve tried a neti pot (which wasn’t so bad, but didn’t help), and I’m already taking my medicine.  I’m trying Tylenol Cold on top of that.

I had plans today.  I was going to run, walk the dogs, take them to the dog park…not happening.  John is cleaning out the garage.  I’m working on being a little less miserable.

Baby fish mouth

I need to get over this major congestion/sore throat thing.  I don’t feel sick, I just need a new head.  Around 2am, I moved into the guest room so I could do all my tossing and turning and snoring and sniffling without keeping John awake all night.  To his credit, he did volunteer to be the one who slept in the other room, but I when I need to sleep propped up (like I do right now), I sleep better there (or on the couch), where I can pile all the pillows in the house into the corner of the bed and sit up comfortably all night.  Stupid allergies.

John is late getting home today.  He’s supposed to be working on a project for class, but he hasn’t been able to get some program to run, so he planned to meet with the guy who wrote the program after work today at 5:30.  Then the guy rescheduled to 6:30.  And John has no idea how long this meeting will take.

Okay, he just called (7:20), and he still has no idea how long this will take.  We decided that if he’s not on the road by 8, he should get himself a sandwich (they’re at Panera), and I’ll figure out dinner on my own.

What AM I doing?  I just spent 20 minutes condensing compiling combining meshing (what the hell is the word I’m looking for?) CONSOLIDATING (there it is!) my work bookmarks and home bookmarks, and I’m not done ’cause now I’m organizing them.  Yes.  I separate my books into fiction and nonfiction and then alphabetize them, and then for extra fun, I organize my browser bookmarks by type of site (work, blog, reference, shopping, etc) and alphabet.  I bet no one’s having more fun on a Friday night than me.  🙂  And if I needed a clearer indication that there is something wrong with me, it’s that I’m not starving right now.  I’m barely hungry.  I had a bowl of frosted flakes with a banana sliced up in it for breakfast around 8 this morning and one of those Smart Ones frozen pasta meals for lunch about 1pm.  That’s it.  Wait, I had half a bagel around 3.  But still.  I’m usually hungrier than this.  Of course, the more I think about it, the hungrier I’m getting.

I just heard from John (8:20), and he’s finally on his way home.  So dinner can wait for him.  Pizza it is.

Allergies suck. And blow.

Who likes to get to work early and then work late?  I do!  (Brown noser.)  And my throat hurts.  I’m pretty certain I can blame this on allergies and the change in the weather.  But it SUCKS.  So much.  And even when the ibuprofen is working and my throat only hurts a tiny bit, it hurts a lot when I sneeze.

Enough of that.  I spent about half of today reminding myself that it wasn’t Friday.  I thought yesterday was Thursday, too.  But tomorrow really IS Friday, and that’s nothing but good.  John is running the error checking/scanning thing I couldn’t find the other day on my poor broken laptop, but it looks like it froze in the middle of it.  So much for that.

(My throat hurts when I yawn.  What’s up with that?)

I have nothing internet-y to share with you today.  I’m sorry.  What with getting to work early and then staying late (and actually working the whole time) and then making dinner and spending some quality TV time with John, I haven’t had time to play on the good old interwebs today.  My plan for the next 12 hours is to take my medicine, go to bed with water and ibuprofen nearby, prop myself up on several pillows, and hopefully wake up tomorrow morning with a relatively clear head and non-scratchy throat so I can run.  It’s been several days.  Oh, the humidifier.  Can’t forget to set up the humidifier.

Good news!  Tomorrow’s pollen forecast is low.  Hope it stays that way.  I don’t want to have another of those springs.

Go be your own country already!

As if we needed another reason not to move to Texas.  Go read Jess’s take on it.  It’s good.

In other news, I had the BEST sandwich for lunch today.  Turkey on honey wheat bread with sprouts and avocado slices.  SO good.  And it came with baby carrots and ranch dressing (GOOD ranch dressing) and a cookie.  If you have an Apple Spice Junction near you, I recommend it.  At least that sandwich.  And the ranch dressing was green!  I’ll admit it made me a little nervous at first, but it tasted great, and it’s been six hours since I ate it and I feel fine.  Maybe turning a dairy product green for a holiday isn’t such a good idea.  Not without a note or something.  You know, like “Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  Your ranch dressing is green on purpose!”

Computer hell

Okay, that’s an exaggeration.  It’s not THAT bad.  I have several computer options besides my own laptop.  Could be worse.  Anyway, as I think I mentioned yesterday, my computer crashed on me twice last night.  It did it again this morning, and then one more time when I booted using Ubuntu to see if it was a Windows problem.  Clearly not.  And Ubuntu gave me a message that said my hard drive is failing and it has bad sectors.  That’s what I remember, anyway.  I can’t say for sure because it crashed.

I tried to run a scandisk thing John told me about, but I couldn’t find it, so I called Dell Technical Support.  It took me a while to get through to a person, but once I did, she was very nice.  She told me that I’d already done most of the troubleshooting she was going to suggest (I told John.  He said, “You’re welcome.”), so the next thing to do is run Dell’s built-in diagnostic tool.  She told me how to do that, told me that it might take a while, and suggested I call back once it’s done and I can see what errors are found.  If no errors appear, I need to look at the operating system again.

I hung up the phone and ran the test.  I got an error almost immediately about not being able to detect the microphone board, but I’m pretty sure that’s not my problem.  The next error came under the “Hard Drives” heading.  It said,

Msg: Error Code 2000-0146

Msg: Unit 1: DST Log contains previous error(s).

My first thought was “HOLY SHIT!  Daylight Saving Time is screwing with my hard drive!”  And just this afternoon I was gushing about how much I love Daylight Saving Time and all that lovely warm sunlight in the early evenings.  Traitor.

I called Dell Technical Support back and read the message to a new very nice woman.  She told me I need to replace my hard drive.  Yeah, I get that, but what does it mean? I repeated my Daylight Saving Time theory to her.  She laughed.  Then she apologized for laughing.  (I forgave her.  I laughed, too.)  And then she told me that it means one of the disks on the drive is damaged.  It either can’t read or can’t write.  (Poor illiterate disk.)

Since then, I’ve googled the error message and found out that while I can probably manage to use this hard drive for a little while (I can try to make it stop using the bad sectors), it’s on its way to total failure, so I might as well replace it.  It’s not that expensive.  And DST stands for Drive Shelf Test.  Whatever that is.

So I need a new hard drive.  In the meantime, I have options.  But I’ll miss my pretty pink laptop.

ETA: This mustard is awesome!

Now with more inanity!

Some days I wish something interesting would happen to me so I could write about it.  Most of the time I’m just as glad nothing did.  I don’t need excitement.   I just need to know I can come home every day.  (That sounds so sad.  I need a lot of other things, too, but we’re not talking about that right now.  Read into that what you will.)

Jess (pyromaniac in disguise) wrote some good stuff today.  (“Wrote some good stuff.”  I have a way with words.)

If you know your classic paintings, you may enjoy this video.  You’ll probably enjoy it even if you don’t know that many, if I may use myself as an example.  I found it courtesy of this post from The Bloggess.  There’s a lot of other good stuff in that post, too.

I’m happy to provide links to interesting things, but I can’t let that be all I do.  That would be boring for me.  Of course, right now I am boring to me.  Mm.  Boring is no good.  Smoothies are good.  (As are non sequiturs.)

Thank the whatever from high atop the thing for autosave!  My computer crashed (for the second time tonight) and I was convinced I’d lost this post.  But no, WordPress has an autosave function, and I don’t have to start over.  Which is good, since I don’t have the energy to redo even this less-than-stellar entry.

And with that, I think I’ll hurry up and post this before I crash again.  But what caused the crash(es)?  Hard drive?  Windows installation?  Wish I knew.  Too bad I’m not married to a computer fixer-upper/programmer/family tech-support guru.  Which reminds me…this is very funny.  ‘Cause it’s true.

I knew the way you know about a good melon

The produce guy at Wegman’s praised my apple-choosing skills today.  Good to know I have a fallback if my current job doesn’t work out.  I’m not sure where, other than the produce section of a grocery store,  I can market this new-found skill o’ mine.  I also noticed that finally, as of yesterday, there is NO MORE SNOW in the front yard.  It’s mid-March – if it snows again (this season), I’m moving south.

I finished Run today.  Loved it.  I think I’m going to head for something lighter next, like maybe the next book in The Dresden Files series.  Mindy is using my book list (see Books and Movies in the sidebar) for inspiration so she can take a break from her school reading.  That makes me very happy.

Daylight Saving Time started today, but it’ll probably be Tuesday before I’m used to it.  It’s almost nine, and I should be thinking about getting ready for bed (I plan to get up early and run, if it’s not raining), but it doesn’t feel nearly that late and I’m not remotely tired.  Those tiny insignificant issues aside, I’m thrilled about the time change.  I need more hours of daylight.

Wet dogs

It’s been raining off and on all day (mostly on), so during a break this afternoon, I let the dogs out to play.  They were amusing themselves, sniffing around, eating dirt, and I went back to my book.  A little later I realized I was hearing rain hit the windows pretty hard and I remembered the dogs were still outside.  I rushed over to the sliding glass doors and found two soggy dogs huddled up against the door, trying to get under the overhang.  Adorable.  They’re in now, mostly dry, and being a little clingy.

I’ve already shelved my new books (I had to move about a shelf’s worth of books all over the house, one shelf at a time), and now I’m relaxing.  I think John just gave up on his projects for the day, so we’re going to cuddle up and watch TV.  And skip dinner.  We had a big lunch with Jess and Chuck after the book sale.

I forgot about this part of spring

The rain is messing with my running plans.  It was raining hard this morning when the alarm went off, so we slept in the extra hour and I went straight to work.  When I got home from work (less than an hour ago), it was raining enough to keep me in.  It’s supposed to rain into the evening, slack off for a little (when it’s too dark and too late to run), and then pick up big time over night and all day tomorrow.  So even if I wanted to get up super extra early (we’re already getting up extra early to meet Jess and Chuck at a book sale in Maryland) to run tomorrow morning before we leave, I couldn’t ’cause it’s supposed to be pouring cats and dogs.  I like rain and everything, but I was on a roll!

</whining>

It’s Friday, it’s the weekend, I get to buy books tomorrow (Hi, I’m Zannah.  I read.), and I get to hang out with people I like.  And I can sleep in on Sunday.

[Pause while I peruse my bookmarks.]

I really and truly just gasped.  Out loud, by myself.  I think I found the house I’m supposed to live in.  At the very least, I need lots of money and an interior decorator who can read my mind and find these pictures years from now when I can afford to redo our entire house.

Go here and read this.  (You don’t have to.  Next time I’ll ask politely.  But it’s a nicely written post about being alone during a power outage.)

I’m done for now.  I have very important things to do, like going through my books and writing down titles I’m missing and authors I love so I can look for their books.  I think we’ve already discussed my need for lists.  I can browse through a book sale forever, but if I don’t bring a list, I might browse right past something I’ve been looking for because I didn’t recognize the author.

Today, I am a noodle

Wow.  Check this out.  It’s a (short) public service ad from Sussex Safer Roads about wearing your seatbelt.  The music, the slow-motion…I got a little teary.

And if you weren’t moved by the seatbelt ad, be inspired by 40 inspirational speeches from movies cut into one 2-minute speech.  🙂

I was searched the internet for inspiration (of the non-movie speech kind) and didn’t find any.  I’m sure I didn’t look hard enough, but I lack the energy.  The guy I trained today took all the energy I had.  He’d leave the room for a break or for lunch or something, and I’d just slump back into my chair.  I got home a little on the early side, so I went for a run, but that didn’t go as well as Tuesday’s run.  I don’t feel invincible today.  I feel like a noodle.  A cooked one.

Another linking post

It’s been a link-filled day.  Actually, it’s just been a link-filled couple of hours, and that includes the time from the morning.  Not much time playing on the internet today.  Lots of time running around a federal building downtown (from corner to corner and up and down nine floors (yay for elevators, but I really wish this building would put in those moving sidewalks like in the airport)) and then lots of time in a cramped room that can barely be called a conference room.  It’s more like a storage closet that happened to have a LAN drop and a phone.  But hey, I’m home, I’ve had dinner, I’ve watched an episode of The Inbetweeners, and I’m about to run away to my room to dampen the sound of the band in the basement.  It’s not fair that I complain about them all the time.  I like them, and they’re good, and I (mostly) like their song choices, but listening to the same songs over and over at such a high volume, in the evening after work when all I want to do is relax (and write run-on sentences), gets old.

Anyway, the links.  Dooce made me laugh again, but I’m a little scared that leprechauns are going to tap at my window in the night.  Also, check out these pictures at Desire To Inspire.  Min, I can see you in this house.  Some of the rooms more than others (the 1st, 6th, 9th, and 12th pictures in particular).

For Mom, here’s a link to a really funny Passover-ish post at Three Word Chant.  Happy almost Passover!  (At Wegman’s, of course, Passover started two weeks ago and will go on for quite some time.  No procrastination for them.)

http://www.desiretoinspire.net/blog/2010/3/10/kate-morris.html

This is not my real post for today

I mean, it’s real, but it’s not the only one.  I really shouldn’t be doing this right now, but I found a couple of links you’ll enjoy and I wanted you to have them sooner rather than later.  I’m thoughtful like that.  First, The Bloggess posted her weekly wrap-up a little late, but it’s funny as usual and she posted a link to this other thing that I think is great.  In so many ways.  And I  just realized (like right this second) that Scott Adams (the second link) is the creator of Dilbert.  The post I linked to just became awesome-er.

One more and then I really have to stop (for now): I found this blog over the weekend, and I love it.  Today’s post speaks to me.

Lest you think I only blog about convulsing dogs…

…(’cause it sure feels like that sometimes)…I’ll write about something else.   Like how disgustingly good it feels to run when you’re in the third or fourth or fifth mile and you’ve gotten past the REALLY tight calves and you’re running slightly downhill and “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie starts to play and you’re singing along (through the panting) and you know you’re  hungry, but it’s not that long before John will be home and you can hug him (I can hug him – nobody gave you permission), but maybe not until after the shower ’cause no one appreciates a sweaty hug (and did I mention that my fifth mile is mostly downhill and I was flying?), and then we’ll grill hot dogs for dinner.  ‘Cause it’s spring!  Close enough, anyway.  It was 63 degrees out when I left the house to run this evening.

I finished The Road the other day (Sunday, I think).  I know Mom and Dad thought it was the most depressing thing they’ve ever read, but I liked it.  Yes, it was a bit (a lot) depressing, but that doesn’t make it a bad book.  I definitely want to see the movie.  And now I’m re-reading Bel Canto.  I love it.  It’s beautiful, it’s lyrical, and all of a sudden I feel like I’m in a Frank Sinatra song (“You’re much to much, and just too very very to ever be in Webster’s dictionary”).  Anyway, I love it.

A night off

I’m taking the evening off from the internet, you guys.  I spent all day staring at the computer at work (much more than usual), with NO breaks, doing tedious things (but listening to good music).  Anyway, my eyes have said NO MORE to the computer screen.  So I’m going to strain them a different way and read.

Someday I should be prepared for the Oscars

It’s Oscar Night, so I might as well talk about it, right?  But first, I have to see who’s nominated and find out if I even saw any of these movies.  Last year, I hadn’t seen a single Oscar-nominated movie by the time the awards rolled around.

Okay, I’ve checked.  Of movies that were either nominated for themselves or had an actor nominated, I’ve seen Avatar (liked it, but for a technical category, not Best Picture.  I mean, come on, it was a 3D remake of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest!), Julie & Julia, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  Soooo, none of the really good ones.

We’ll watch the beginning for Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, but that’s about it.  I’ll check out the highlights online tomorrow.  We’re going to spend our evening finishing Batman Begins (we got too sleepy to finish it last night) with pizza (and maybe wine – classy, I know).

Oh, we caught up on Lost this morning over breakfast, so Mom, Dad, Mindy, call me tomorrow and we’ll chat.

5 miles? Not so bad.

SPRING!  I know it’s not spring yet, but it’s starting to look like it.  It’s sunny, it got up to 50 degrees, we ran a race, the dogs spent the day outside, and I almost opened some windows.  More progress on that tomorrow, hopefully, since the high is supposed to be 55 (!).  It’s been a very cold winter, and I am SO ready for it to be over.

For the last two and a half weeks, ever since John coaxed/supported/shamed me into registering with him for the 5-mile race, I’ve been dreading today.  I wasn’t at ALL prepared to run 5 miles (high winds, snow and ice on the sidewalks, and being forced to run in the neighborhood streets are my main excuses), so my plan was to run as much as I could, counting on adrenaline to help a little, keep a steady pace, and then if I need to walk, try to walk only for one minute and then jog for at least three minutes before walking again.  So I had a plan.  I also took a peek at last year’s race results and I knew that at least a handful of people took between 70 and 85 minutes to complete the race, so I was fairly confident I wouldn’t be last.  But you never know.  Maybe those people decided never to run 5 miles again so they didn’t bother registering this year.  I told John (who wasn’t feeling all that great about it, either) to look for me around 60-67 minutes.  Closer to 67.

It was a beautiful morning (and it’s been a beautiful day), but pretty breezy, so it was still plenty cold (wind chill in the upper 20s, I think).  We joined the crowd at the starting line and John asked me where I wanted to fit in: front, middle, or back?  Definitely not the front (I’ll get trampled, plus I’ll just be in the way of all those super-serious, super-fast runners), and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be in the back (why start there?  I’ll get there eventually on my own), but in the middle, there’d be all the psychological pressure of watching all those runners pass me along the way.  I said something to that effect to John as we threaded our way to the back of the first third of the crowd, and he said, “Well, you know what it’s like.”  I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean that I should be used to watching runners pass me.  Pretty sure.  🙂

The course took us through neighborhoods in Ashburn John and I don’t typically see, and there were a few people out cheering us on.  There was a big hill near the end of the first mile, and just after it, a woman shouted from her front porch, “It’s all downhill from here!”  She was mostly right.  There were a couple of times the course doubled back on itself, so I could see that I wasn’t actually last, or even that close to last (definitely in the last third, last fourth, maybe even last fifth – I’ll post numbers when the results are up).  One of the times we doubled back, though, I saw a guy juggling.  While running.  He had 5 (maybe 4, but I think five) red balls in the air at once while he jogged up the hill.  Pretty cool, very weird.

Just after the 3-mile mark, I realized I was doing better than expected, averaging about an 11-minute mile, and I started daydreaming about finishing in under an hour.  I wondered if John would even be looking at the finish line that early.  (Of course he would.  There isn’t much else to look at.)  Any walking I did was for less than a minute and not all that often (4 or 5 times total), and I was still on track at the 4th mile, so I ran the entire 5th mile and managed to pick up the pace at the very end, enough to feel like I was going to throw up as I crossed the finish line.  That’s the way to do it.  🙂  It passed, quickly, and John was there, and my time on the clock was just under 55 minutes.  I don’t remember exactly what, but my official time should be lower since it didn’t start until I crossed the starting line.  My watch said 54:24.  You know that means?  That I can do that without training for it?  It means I can do better.  And it was fun and I liked it and I won’t be afraid to do it again.  Another side effect: my fear of 10Ks disappeared.  I can DO this.

I just checked.  Results have been posted.  My official time (matches my watch exactly, for once) is 54:24.  Out of 280 women, I finished 241st.  John finished 197th out of 316 men with an 8:45 pace.  My pace was 10:53.

I can do better than that.

Anyway, we got home, had breakfast, cleaned up (ourselves, not anything silly like the house), and then John had to stay close to his computer since he’s on call to work today.  I talked to Jess (we’re making lots of plans), and then we filed our taxes.  John wants to buy an external hard drive today (and I need a new Scalzi book) AND I really want sushi for dinner, so we’re heading out soon to do all (at least some) of that.  The big decision for the evening is whether we eat out or bring sushi home (and snuggle in for TV or a movie).  Tough call.

Links within links within links…

The end of the workday couldn’t get here fast enough for me.  Nothing against work, but I really wanted to be home.  And now I am, and now it’s Friday night, and now I have to face a 5-mile race in the morning.  If I can treat it like a regular workout, I should be fine.  I just don’t want to finish last.  Please don’t let me be last.

You know how when you look something up in wikipedia, you end up clicking this link, then that link, then this one over here, and back to this one, until you end up reading an article that has NOTHING to do with the first one you read?  (I know you do.)  That doesn’t happen to me as much out of wikipedia, for some reason.  I tend not to click through, or at least not through as many layers, on other websites.  I wonder why.  Well, I don’t, for whatever reason, but I did today, and I found this blog post about an old Newsweek article from 1995 about how the internet won’t last.

How did I get there?

I’m glad you asked.

I started at the latest post on John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, and clicked on the link there to an article from Laptop Magazine where he was quoted about what technology he uses now that  makes him feel like he’s living in the future.  That article links to the Three Word Chant blog post that found the 1995 Newsweek article (and makes fun of it).  It’s this last link (or the first one, several paragraphs up) that I want you to read, but the Laptop Magazine article is interesting, and Whatever can be entertaining.  Have I mentioned that I love John Scalzi’s science fiction?  I’ve read Old Man’s War and The Android’s Dream, and I really liked them both.  Wish I had another of his books to read now that I’ve finished Ender in Exile