I apparently have some sort of curse. Seemingly without fail, when things seem to be going my way, I am happy, productive, enjoying life basically, something will come around to smack me back down. It has come to the point where I can foresee the big slapdown happening. No, I can't predict what exactly that "slapdown" entails, but it like a ( Read more... )

Thanks to Irene, the hurricane that so many poo-poo for not being intense enough, I am still without electricity. Well, at least that which I am not creating myself. This is by far the longest I have been without power since I built this place 23 years ago. Ice storms, hurricanes, etc, the longest I can remember being three days. When I contacted ( Read more... )

In our continuing quest to exist among Mother Nature's temper tantrums, Jeff and I left Hillside around 3pm or so Saturday before the weather got nasty. We kept our eyes on various weather reports, keeping a minimal setup so we could hightail it out of there at a moment's notice. Instead, we had a leisurely drive back to Jeff's 'rents place to drop ( Read more... )

So it finally happened. My credit card, or, more precisely, the number, got jacked. I got several calls from the issuing bank on Memorial day Monday telling me that the card has been deactivated because of activity not matching my usual patterns and coming from overseas. Great. Of course, I am not on the hook for these fraudulent charges, and they ( Read more... )

No, this post should not be in the process of being created at my usual place here in the midst of All That Is Mayhem. Jeff and I should be at the Rob Halford/Ozzy Osborne show in Baltimore. Instead, my body has once again decided to heap huge quantities of kibosh on just about all of our plans. Not only was tonight's much needed diversion axed, ( Read more... )

Frustrations. I has quite a few. I continue to be a slave to pain killers, though not as much as I was pre- and post-surgery. Still, getting quality sleep is near impossible, I have mostly skipped anything resembling a schedule and just collapsed when I felt exhausted enough. I will eventually awaken from discomfort, then resign myself to get out ( Read more... )

Well, it appears that the latest round of treatment might have been completely ineffective. I'll know more as the weekend passes, but it would appear that my minimally invasive options are exhausted. If I go under the knife, the recovery time would be anywhere from six to eight weeks, and could be close to a year before I can resume work. That won' ( Read more... )

A couple of wonderful people on my f-list noticed that I had deleted my LJ for about a day on Thursday. While I was mostly keeping myself from posting due to various issues, the reason for deleting my LJ was because one of my PCs got nailed with a nasty rootkit/trojan/virus trifecta through my own stupidity. Rather than risk compromise of various ( Read more... )

Jeff and I are safely home after our first camping trip of the year. It's also become the way Jeff and I celebrate his birthday. He's 47 now! Doing this one relatively close to home is a way to start off easy, make sure we have everything in order and iron out any sort of problems that might crop up. The latter did make a showing and really could ( Read more... )

Today marks two years since I lost my Mom to cancer. Right now I am too numb to really think clearly about it. We left Hillside early in the morning, and I wanted just to get home. I could not bring myself to walk up to the memorial because I knew it would have caused me to break down completely, and we'd still be there. We stopped by Jeff's ( Read more... )