(Continued from hereI was in the office one Wednesday after giving Jim a ride to pick up some prescriptions and then taking him home. Apparently, they'd had to cancel his chemotherapy and made him stay home from work for a few days because his white-cell count was too low. He was feeling sick and miserable. He could barely speak, and had a ( Read more... )

(Continued from hereThroughout all of it so far, Jim had still had a positive attitude, but this -- this brought him down. From laughing and making cancer jokes, he went to an "I'm fucked" kind of attitude that hurt all of us to witness. He just wasn't the kind of guy that you can picture getting down about anything, which made it doubly hard to ( Read more... )

[Continued from hereThe company we work for, as with many others, has been having some tough times financially lately. Not surprising, what with the economic downturn and all, but still somewhat stressful, particularly to the company management whose job it is to figure out how to keep the company going. So, of course, they've been looking for ways ( Read more... )

Sometimes people ask me why I work for the company I work for. I have skills in networking, systems and database administration, systems programming, and a lot of other things that generally command higher salaries than I'm getting. I even get job offers from former clients periodically, all of them offering more money (and sometimes more benefits ( Read more... )

( Continued from hereThe Deluxe Stick Horse, found, strangely enough, in a rack at a 7-11 many years ago, is a work of art. Really it is. It is a fuzzy, completely upholstered version of the traditional stick horse: a fluffy, cute, horse's head at the top of a stick. The idea is, the child straddles the stick like a witch on a broomstick, and ( Read more... )

( Continued from here.It started out like a typical Monday. I woke up, got dressed, and came downstairs to get to work. After an hour or so, I wandered out to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Along the way, I encountered Leilani, the four-year-old, staring quizzically at The Frog ( Read more... )

(Continued from here.)

So sushirob and banshree arrived just in time for me to tackle ... the Guestroom Closet ( Read more... )

Apparently, the brief mention of the family of five currently staying with us was not sufficient, so I'll take this opportunity to elaborate, just a bit, on the situation and how it came to be ( Read more... )

So I just got my American Community Survey paperwork from the US Census bureau in the mail. Apparently, I ("Resident") have been randomly chosen to give the government information about my household and those living therein. You see, the actual census held every 10 years really isn't enough -- they need to do these little surveys in between to A) ( Read more... )

For about the last -- oh, at least six months or more -- our washing machine has been attempting lift-off into orbit. It started, as most things do, with the spin cycle.
( Read more... )