Archive for the 'Personal' Category

On the fluid intake front, today I kept careful records of how much I’ve been drinking.  I didn’t make any concerted effort to drink more than usual, and don’t believe that I did.

As of this moment, out of the 96 ounces a day I’m supposed to drink, I’ve had… (doing the math)… 130 ounces.

I don’t know what exactly that means, but I’m more convinced than ever that I’m following doctor’s orders to the letter, which leaves me puzzled as to how I’m winding up dehydrated.

Pah!

Today (that is to say, Wednesday) didn’t go the way I planned.  Right about the time I was planning to go run the errands that I needed to get done, I was overcome by weakness all over and wound up headed to the emergency room for the second time in as many weeks.

It was an interesting experience.  I was so shaky and weak when I got there that they rushed me back to a room almost immediately, and got me hooked up to monitors.  When they were reasonably sure that I wasn’t about to keel over, things slowed down a lot.  Took over two and a half hours for a doctor to see me, and he spent about two minutes with me.

He ordered up some tests — which took over 45 minutes to get started.  Then we waited around two more hours for the results, which came up that I was totally fine — which, by then, I was.

The diagnosis: I still need to work on my fluid intake.

Unfortunately, after spending almost six hours at the hospital, it was no longer really feasible to get my errands done — which means they’ll have to be done tomorrow.  I expect to do them in the morning, so I may get a late start working tomorrow (er, today, I guess, technically).

The Deki Transition

We now have a very rough MDC up and running on DekiWiki.  The majority of the rough edges are my fault.  I made a PDF of the guide MindTouch wrote for how to set things up on our server and sent that to IT… and failed to check to see if it changed (which it did).  So our current setup isn’t quite right.

I’ve filed a ticket with IT to upgrade things and fix the stuff they didn’t know needed to be done, so hopefully they’ll find time for that today.

There’s also one relatively minor skin issue that’s causing some interesting problems, but that ought not to take long to fix, so hopefully we’ll get that today or tomorrow.

Then finally the testing can get underway.  There are probably going to be a few other things that will need twiddling, but until these other issues are resolved, they’ll be hard to spot.

Places

In more directly documentation related news, I’ve been finally actually moving stuff around for the Places documentation.  Among other things, this involves renaming a number of pages, and cleaning them up a bit.  We have reference document pages for each of the Places interfaces, so the Places API pages that Dietrich created are being phased into being how-to articles, since they include lots of great samples.

Things will continue to be a little dusty in the Places docs for at least a few more days.

Other Stuff

I’ll be out for a couple-three hours this afternoon.  My parents are coming to visit, arriving Friday night or Saturday morning, and my dad always appreciates it when we have a project for him.  So we’re going to go out and buy mattresses so that while Dad’s here, he can help us put together Sophie’s new big-girl bed.  She’s been sleeping in a toddler bed for about a year and a half now, and she’s ready to move into a full size bed.

I’m also going to take Friday off, so I can help my wife finish getting the house whipped into shape.

I’m tentatively planning not to take off any time while my parents are in town — they’re really here to see their granddaughter, and I’d just get in the way.  But I may work unusual hours for the first few days next week.

Figured I’d mention how I’m doing after my emergency room trip late last week.

Doing okay.  It’s surprisingly hard to increase by 50% the amount of fluids you drink.  It’s a pretty substantial change to the pattern of your life.

Now, the odd thing is that I’ve always been big on pretty much always having something to drink handy.  Problem is that it was almost always Diet Coke or something along those lines, which after my surgery in January, I’m no longer allowed to drink.  So now I have to drink different things, stuff I always thought of as “once in a while” beverages, such as juice or water.  Or milk.

I like milk (a lot), but it’s not something I sit around drinking while I work, either.

It makes it somewhat more difficult to drink a lot when the things you like the best are off the table.  In fact, of all the things I can’t eat or drink these days, diet soda is easily the one I miss the most.  And, of course, it’s one of the few things I can never have again.  That hurts a little bit more than I expected.

Anyway, I’m still having the dizzy spells, so clearly I’m not back up to snuff yet.  But they’re not as bad as they were, so hopefully I’ll have this behind me soon.

Today I had a follow-up appointment with my doctor following my surgery back in January.  Got in there and got some basic stuff done, then mentioned I’d been getting dizzy standing up lately.  So they checked my blood pressure and it was somewhat low.  Then they had me stand up, and my BP dropped so low they couldn’t read it.

That’s when they told me to head to the emergency room and get checked out.

I got to the E.R. at around 4 PM and they ran some tests (including drawing 3 vials of blood, which is pretty funny for someone they called “dangerously depleted”) and decided that I was “severely dehydrated.” They also did an EKG, took a couple of chest X-rays, and did repeated pulse and BP checks.

In the meantime, they put an I.V. in to give me fluids.  Two liters of fluids.  Took about five hours to get out of there

It was a long and frustrating day, and I got absolutely nothing worthwhile done.

This morning when I went outside, there were smears of blood on the floor in the mud room.  That was a bad start to the day.  I cleaned it up and went about my business.

Late in the afternoon, Sarah had some folks coming by for Girl Scout business, so she was hanging out outside to handle that stuff, and Sophie and I were out there with her.

Suddenly Sophie cries out, “A mouse!” and heads for the mud room.

I follow her to find Buddy (that would be the cat) dropping a small fuzzy thing at her feet.  I called out to Sophie to back off, then went to get a look.  It was a tiny, tiny baby rabbit.  About four inches long or so, with wounds around its neck and breathing erratically.

Great.

Sarah corralled Sophie out of the way and I picked the rabbit up with a shovel and, with not just a little hesitation (it was still breathing, after all), put it in the trash.  It was clearly not going to survive.

Then I mopped up the goo on the floor.

Not five minutes later, Buddy was back with another tiny little rabbit.  This one, when he dropped it, managed to make something of a very slow getaway, and I chased Buddy off.  The rabbit made its way into a corner, cowering in fear.  I donned a pair of gloves and picked it up carefully.  It had one puncture wound in its side that was oozing some kind of white fluid.  Not a good sign.  But I put it back out in the woods, hoping (probably foolishly) that it would find its way home.

By this point, it’s pretty clear that Buddy has found a den, because by the time I was done dropping the second rabbit back off in the woods, there came Buddy hopping over the fence with a third one in his mouth.  This one I managed to get him to drop, but it was badly hurt and, again, clearly not going to make it.

Sophie was following me around asking to see the rabbits and asking if they were having fun playing with Buddy.

I think I handled it about as well as I could, under the circumstances.  Basically, I figured that explaining what was really going on to a 3-year-old wasn’t going to work, so I just said that Buddy was playing with the bunnies and that I had to take them home.

Those rabbits were so tiny, they can’t have been more than a few days old, I think.  Poor things.

Of course, Buddy’s just doing what millions of years of feline evolution are telling him to do.  Can’t really fault him for that.  Still, it’s not something you really want to walk into in the morning.

I’m starting to get antsy for an iPhone, but need to wait for it to be 3G.  It’s kind of weird.  I get cranky when I’m out someplace with my iPod touch and don’t have access to a WiFi connection for Internet access.

I find it quite enjoyable to do mail and the web on it — except for the limitations on when and where I can use it.  I’m pretty confident now that I’ll be one of the losers waiting in line early before the release in order to be among the first to get one.  I’m awfully eager to get one.

It’s gotten to the point where I wholly resent my Treo for being large, cumbersome, and unpleasant to use by comparison.  This is a sad state of affairs given that only a year and a half ago, I called it the coolest gadget I’d ever seen.

The new entertainment center is now all set up, with the exception of ongoing tweaking to the configuration of the Logitech universal remote I bought. It sure is a nice setup.

Eventually I need to come up with a plan to hook up and place the surround speakers. I left them off for now because the wires we have aren’t long enough to position them properly.

I recently went out to eat dinner with my family, and ordered a simple grilled chicken breast.  What I received was something that caught my eye:

This is exactly the way the plate was presented to me upon arrival.  Now, compare to this:

It’s not every day you get a continent served up to you on a plate.  Complete with Tasmania, no less.

You may be asking what this has to do with Mozilla.  Well… nothing, really, but I thought it was the sort of oddball thing that would amuse you.

After my provider fixed my mail outage, among the messages that came in was one from my mom letting me know my grandma had died on Thursday. I’ll leave the issue of why she didn’t use the phone as a mystery for the ages.

I’m not sure what the right words are to describe how I feel. It’s not sadness, exactly. I guess maybe I feel… troubled. I’m not as close to her as I am to my mom’s parents, but I think back to all the fun we had with her when I was a kid, and those are great memories.

The fact that both of Dad’s parents suffered from Alzheimer’s leaves me nervous. What does that mean for my dad? How about for me?

Genetics can be a heartless bitch.