Every sick day should be like this

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One of the tests was for autoimmune diseases! It really isn’t lupus!

I’m about to write a whole bit about all the fun & productive stuff I’ve done today since I didn’t have to go to work because I’m on medical leave.  Let me start with this, though: we have an elderly cat.  I got her when I moved to Chicago in 1998, so she’s seventeen and some change, not that you can tell from interacting with her.  She has been a puker for as long as I’ve owned her.  Last night I was ripped out of sleep by the sound of a cat preparing to hork on my bed.  I snapped awake and tossed her out of bed, resolving to clean up whatever she did to the floor in the morning (this may be why the carpet in my bedroom is so shitty) and then rolled over and went basically immediately back to sleep.

And then it happened twice more in the next hour.

And the third time it triggered another of the same type of attack/”episode” things that have been keeping me out of work lately.  The only difference is this happened in the middle of the night, but it was the same thing: simultaneously freezing cold and sweating, nauseous, weak, shallow breathing, generally awful.

Turns out, when your cat wakes you up trying to hork, it generates a bit of an adrenaline surge, and the third such event in maybe an hour fucked me up bad.  I still say there’s something wrong with my adrenal glands, but I keep getting test results from all the blood I had sucked out of me on Saturday and so far everything is normal, so I have no goddamn idea what the hell is going on.  I do know I couldn’t have gotten out of bed at 6 if my life had depended on it; I didn’t feel human until 11, at which point I was able to haul myself out of bed and take a shower and start my day.

How do I feel now?  Completely fine.  Which is the most frustrating thing about this; I’m either completely fine or I have medical professionals hovering over me and telling me to go to the ER.  It kinda sucks.

But anyway.  I did a whole bunch of shit today!  Have the rest of my day up to now in bullet point form:

  • Went to the bank to clarify some stuff about our recent mortgage refinancing.  Turns out I need to pay my own homeowners insurance now as the bank doesn’t do escrow.  Annoying, but manageable.
  • Checked a couple of mattress stores for a new bed for my son, who is now big enough for a twin bed.
  • Bought my son a bed at one of said stores, which will be here tomorrow.
  • Had lunch at Five Guys, a rare treat since basically just setting foot in the place will probably kill the boy, who has a peanut allergy.
  • Went to the Apple Store and scratched my “need a new thing” itch by buying one of these.  Almost certainly not the wisest use of my money, but I use two monitors and the massively increased size over the previous version won me over.  Using a trackpad instead of a mouse is wonderful.
  • I’m generally a big fan of Apple’s fetish for minimalism, but it really hurts them on mice and keyboards.  I can’t use their mice at all, and this is my keyboard on my desktop.
  • Actually saw one of the $17,000 Apple Watches in person for the first time, and walked away surprised by the fact that I actually prefer the look of my $250 Pebble Time Steel.  The leather on the Apple Watch actually looks kinda chintzy, and the gold is way too shiny for my tastes.
  • Speaking of surprising things, walking past a Mennonite woman piloting an electronic wheelchair via an app on her iPhone was my moment of Zen for the day.
  • Hit the grocery on the way home.
  • Since getting home, I’ve applied for a job and done some light cleaning.  I’m making dinner tonight, too.  Chorizo Mac and Cheese!

Tonight: Walking Dead!  Assuming, like, my son doesn’t jump at me from around a corner and put me in a coma or something.  I’m naming my disease Reverse Hulk Syndrome until someone comes up with something better.

Whining: do not read

whining4Blech.

An announcement: I’m tired of basically the entire world right now, particularly the American politics and Internet parts of the world, but also including wide swaths of the entertainment and publishing and technology industries.  I have this weird Need for a New Thing going on right now that might indicate that capitalism has finally carved an unfillable hole in my soul and may just indicate that I’ve spent most of the last three weeks sitting around the house and not doing much.

Also possible: that I’m just Sundaying.  My doctor has already told me I’m not going back to work next week, meaning the next day that I need/get to leave the house to earn a living will be a week from Tuesday, since we’ve got a fall break coming up next weekend.  I need, somehow, to put together lesson plans when I have no real idea what’s gone on in my classroom for the next two days and don’t actually have any textbooks or materials handy.  That’s going to be interestingly tricky, and by “interestingly tricky” I mean “I very well may try to have one of the other fifth grade teachers write my lesson plans for me.”  Which I’m sure they’ll be very happy to do, seeing as how I’ve been totally useless to anyone I work with for the entire month of October.

I need to find something to do today other than kvetching and staring at electronic screens.  I have a couple of fiction projects that I want to work on this week but I feel like I probably ought not to worry about them today in favor of… something else.  Anything else.   I just dunno what.

What’s new in your life?  Gimme something interesting I don’t know about that I need to check out.

In which I dislike some things and like other things

It has been… a really rough week.

For like ten minutes now, that’s been the only sentence of the post.  I had four kids in my afternoon class inside the office before they even got to my class for real— one for bullshit heading down the stairs, two for post-lunch bullshit on the way up the stairs, and the fourth for what she was doing when I came back into the room after dropping the previous two off.

I came home early yesterday because I simply couldn’t cope with the idea of dealing with my afternoon class.  Just couldn’t do it. I basically had a panic attack in the morning and insisted that they cover me in the afternoon.  Luckily, our building secretary loves me so she was able to take care of it.  I came home and collapsed into bed for a few hours and then spent the evening job-hunting again.  I made it through today, and a couple of suspensions from the Magnificent Four will likely help with tomorrow, but…

Yeah.

Anybody knows anything about a job I might be good for– especially if it involves telecommuting and I can do it from anywhere, because chances are I’m not uprooting my family to move to you– let me know.


One good thing that’s happened this week: my Pebble Time Steel finally showed up!  It’s one of these two watches:

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One of those two models cost $250 and is on my wrist right now; the other costs $17000 and… is not.  I know I’ve made this point a bunch of times before– probably every time I’ve mentioned the Pebble Time Steel– but I just find it so insanely ridiculous that I can’t stop talking about it.

A quick review?  Well, it’s basically the same as my original Pebble, with a color screen, a bit more stylish… styling, and a few days more battery life.  There’s also a microphone on it but apparently that feature’s not available for the iPhone version of their app yet.  In other words, I love it, but most of the differences between it and the original are cosmetic.  The new Timeline interface is interesting but hardly life-altering.  I still halfway suspect that my next watch will be an Apple Watch but they need to radically improve the battery life before I jump ship.  The battery on the PTS is supposed to last ten days between charges.  The Apple Watch needs to be charged every night.  The prettier screen simply cannot overcome that difference, especially when you include the considerably higher price of the Apple Watch.

So, yeah: point is, I like it, and eventually somebody’s gonna crack my skull open for it and then be very disappointed.  But, hey: I won’t have to teach anymore once the mugger kills me!

#WeekendCoffeeShare: Reasonable Positivity Edition

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If we were having coffee, I’d be pretty happy.  I badly want to be having coffee right now, but our coffeepot wants for a vinegaring, and it’s running slllooooowwwwww.  

All in all, it wasn’t a bad week.  The boy made it through a week of school with no poopery issues.  At my school, we had a couple of notable suspensions that kept my afternoon class functional all week, and the first math test of the year went way better than I thought it was going to.  My homeroom girls ate the thing alive, and my afternoon class showed a somewhat unexpected haves-and-have-nots pattern, where the kids either did great or very poorly.  I was expecting the poorly part, mind you, as they don’t pay attention and there’s way too many special ed kids in there to be able to teach them effectively, but the number of them that did really well was really gratifying.  What I didn’t see was kids in the middle.  They either missed one or two or they missed eight.

I would probably point at my wrist at some point and remark about how there wasn’t a brand-new Pebble Time Steel on it, because the post office is screwing with me (if you want to take it personallly) or having some issues with their tracking system if you don’t.  The tracking on the package is simultaneously insisting both that my watch is in California (where it has been since “shipping” on Tuesday) and that it will arrive yesterday.  I’m crossing my fingers that a slew of updates will pop all at once and I’m getting it today.  We’ll see.

I am looking forward to being mugged when some nitwit mistakes my $250 red and gold Pebble for a $17,000 Apple Watch, by the way.

And then I’d point out that it’s #SilerSaturday again, and Skylights is free, and since Skylights is my favorite of my books you really ought to download it and give it a read because it’s great.

How’re you?

A #Scrivener help beg

The internet isn’t cooperating.  I love the hell out of Scrivener’s Compile feature, especially the way it builds the Table of Contents for me without me having to carefully hyperlink everything.  But:

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Does anyone know how to prevent it from actually adding the “Chapter Seventy” part in front of the chapter title?  Because it’s doing that throughout and I’d prefer that it not do that.  I’ve been fiddling and haven’t figured out what the problem is yet.

(EDIT: Figured it out, naturally.  Leaving the post up so you can get a gander at some chapter titles.)

In which everything is awesome

Just spent about half an hour outside playing with one of these babies:

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That’s a Phantom 3 Professional quadcopter, with a 4K camera on a goddamn gimbal, meaning you can swoop past things at an angle and the image stays smooth and level.  The shots look outstanding; I haven’t pulled them from the SD card yet to check them out at full-res, though.  I did make a dumb mistake where every picture I took shows my address, so you don’t get to see any of my footage yet, but I’ll keep fiddling with it this weekend.

It’s not mine, sadly.  We bought it with the last of the grant money last year, and are going to use it for our media productions class– the camera is that good.  But someone had to learn to fly it first, so I demanded first right of geekdom and brought it home.  It costs roughly $usedcar, so I need to be damn careful I don’t screw it up.  But damn, was that fun.

What’s this mean?

  

In which nowhere is safe

I’m writing this at 9 PM on Sunday.

Be aware that as of the time you read this I’m about 11 hours into a 24-hour internet blackout.  I won’t be posting again or even looking at the blog until after I’ve seen THE WALKING DEAD, and notifications for all my interwubz apps except for text messaging are turned off on my phone.

OMG RUN WILD EVERYBODY