dmarley | Entries tagged with life and times

I looked in the mirror today and thought, "Hey, I look great!"

I laughed out loud at Dan Patrick's singing.

I looked at pictures of kittens. Kittens!

Good grief, if I actually follow through and go knitting tomorrow, I might get a social life, too. Who knows what will happen then. :)

Okay, so, insomnia doesn't usually occasion glee, but because of the sleep apnea, for a year I have struggled with the problem of being constantly sleepy and the sleep I get never being quite enough. I have had to take three-hour naps every day for probably over a year, and while doing so has kept me functionally rested and able to drive cars without falling asleep at the wheel (well, except for that one time), it's not exactly convenient.

For the last week or so, however, I've had some insomnia. I can't seem to nap during the day as easily as I usually do, and it takes a lot longer to fall asleep at night. Yeah, it's made it a bit harder to get up on the mornings where I haven't been able to get to sleep until 2am, but to be honest? I don't care. :) It's okay to be a bit tired when you've only had four hours sleep. But guess what? I go through my day and when night comes, I'm not so tired that I feel like crying. I'm not so tired that I can't even get up. I'm just normal, everyday, "Gee, I didn't get a lot of sleep last night" tired. I had honestly forgotten what that feels like.

I had a follow-up visit to my doctor yesterday about my new migraine prevention medication and my new dose of anti-depressants (both of which appear to be working well), and I mentioned the insomnia. He said, "I think that's a good sign," and I said, "Yeah, I think so, too." :)

My New Fanfic folder, it is clean! Okay, it's supposed to be clean, because it's supposed to be just a temporary holding area for stories while I get their Smart Quotes brainwashed and labels assigned before sorting them into their Proper Places. If this is done as stories happen, it takes about a minute a day. When it's not done, and the folder is bulging with over six hundred stories, it takes four or five days.

( The tedious details of how it took fifteen years to realize that sorting by an author's full name is a Good Idea. )

Now all I have to do is work my way through the 1,700 untagged stories in the Torchwood folder...

Today was the Purim carnival at Boo's school. It was a bit touch and go whether or not she'd be able to go, because she was out of school Wednesday with a fever, and couldn't go Thursday because she still had it Wednesday evening and couldn't go back until she'd been fever-free for 24 hours. But, today dawned with no fever for over a day, so she pulled on her ballerina costume and set off.

Apparently they had some sort of ticket system to trade for things, and she came home with a paper bag full. Her haul from the carnival included:

Neon pink vampire fangs

Pink sparkly lip gloss

Face paint

Pony tattoo

Fairy tattoo

Pink polished nails

Grogger

For those of you not familiar with Purim, one of the traditions is to make noise to drown out the evil vizier Haman's name every time it's uttered during the reading/telling of the Megilla, the story of how Esther saved the Jews from Haman's plot to kill them. Groggers are the preferred noisemakers for this purpose, and Boo helpfully demonstrated her enthusiasm for the holiday by shouting "Haman, Haman, Haman" and spinning her grogger. A lot.

We'd usually be at the Purim shabbat service tonight (if only to see how the rabbis would top the Dr. Seuss costumes from last year), but Boo's still coughing a bit and we decided to keep her home. Also, I'm still adjusting to new levels of meds and I'm not too keen on big social events right now. Even if they involve having handfuls candy flung at me.

I just finished adding publication years to all my Delicious bookmarks. I started doing it to the new bookmarks back in November, but I had an enormous backlog that could only be tackled by loading every freakin' story and looking at the date on it. (If there was an easier way, don't tell me. Please.) I was able to use the bulk edit function, so at least I only had to make two or three passes to get a bunch of bookmarks done at a time. It was the only thing that saved me.

It was tedious as crap, but the task did give me a chance to check for broken links, and also replace all the "+" signs with spaces on the Livejournal tag links so they'll actually work again.

Statistics

Bookmarks updated: 1 Gazillion (Okay, about 1,200. It just seemed like more.)
Broken links deleted: 13 (Surprised it was that few, actually)
Journals deleted while I was updating links to them: 1 (ETA: Journals un-deleted the following day: 1)
Bookmarks eaten by Delicious: 1
Number of times same link subsequently eaten until successfully re-added: 3 (Suspect Delicious may be getting wise to 50-tag workarounds. Also, yay for backing up Delicious bookmarks a lot.)

( Breakdown by year, if you're interested )

My brain is mush. I've been staring at the stories from today's

torchwood_three for ages, and two of them are the kind of thing I love to read: angsty and innovatively written and surreal and they feature Tosh, but the words are just slithering right across me and I can't seem to understand either of them. This might be put down to the complex writing, except that all the other stories seem to be over my head, too. Including the drabbles.

Diagnosis: Temporary reader error

Treatment: Nap

ETA, four hours later...: Ah, much better. Okay, so I'm not sure I understood either story any better, but I did enjoy them both very much, and that's the important thing. :)

Important Writing Tip: If you decide to update your stories on an archive (that you kind of forgot you had them on) and need to use a different HTML tag than the one you just laboriously replaced your ancient ASCII asterisks with, make sure you copy the files to the new working folder. That way, when you inevitably screw up the search and replace (as usual) and need to trash the duplicate files and re-copy them from the originals, you won't go back to the original folder and say, "Hey, where are the originals..." and have to spend twenty minutes replacing the old HTML.

(Yes, yes, I have backups. But they were across the room. And I possibly didn't think of using them until I was almost done.)

No, really, I've been using computers for twenty-five years. Honest.

I am approaching a state of readiness for my journey west. I am slightly more ready than I'd anticipated being today, because I made my last-minute run for last-minute items today instead of tomorrow. I had no intention of setting foot in any store the day after Christmas, but about two this afternoon I heard a thump downstairs. A few seconds after, my cell phone rang. My husband was calling me from the floor of the hallway, where he was lying after his back had locked up on him.

I got him up and onto the couch with a heating pad, then made an emergency run to the store for muscle relaxants. (Some things are, after all, just a bit more important than avoiding the post-Christmas rush.)

The good news is that Al is much, much better now. At first he couldn't even stand up, but just a few minutes ago he was able to walk up the stairs to the bedroom by himself. Much relief all around. And, while I was at the store getting things he needed (for instance, a six-pack of medicinal Guinness), I picked up the last two or three things I needed for the trip. Not the way I would have chosen to get prepared, but it worked out.

In between driving Al crazy asking him fifty billion times if he needed anything, I also took care of my computer transfer today, shuffling files from the Mac to the Netbook (in the process eradicating Smart Quotes from about 200 stories so I could read them gibberish-free on said Netbook...and I really wish I was kidding), converting and updating files on the iPod, making backups for me, making backups for my mom's iPod, and generally trying to make sure that everything I want will travel with me and I can survive if there's no internet. :)

I've also test-packed my carry-on bag, and everything seems okay. I'll have to unpack half of it at security because I'll have my computer, camera, GPS, iPod(s) and Boo's DVD player to run through, not to mention my CPAP machine, but that's why I also plan to get to the airport Very Early.

Needless to say, I'm not looking forward to flying right now. I'm not nervous about the flying part, but I'm worried about last-minute security measures. I've already cut way back on the knitting survival kit, figuring that now is not the time to show up with 50+ double-pointed needles in a wrap.

Also, this is not the time I really want to leave my husband by himself. Based on previous history, he'll probably be more than able to take care of himself and drive and probably even go to work by Monday, but I'm not happy about jetting off less than two days after he couldn't even walk by himself, even if it was only for a few hours. It was sheer luck that he was listening to cricket over his phone when he fell, and therefore had it with him in the house. I'm thinking of asking him to Velcro the phone to his body until I get back.

I just learned that

schadenkatze died in a house fire early this morning.

lunaris1013 will be collecting donations until the end of the month for her twin

schaden_freude, who survived the fire.

I never met

schadenkatze or

schaden_freude in person, but they have nonetheless been a part of my life for over twelve years. Signal boost this to fellow SSCers if you can, and please help if you're able.

I have completed Phase One of the vacation process. For several years, my mother and stepdad have been mailing their luggage instead of checking it on the plane. They started by mailing one bag because they couldn't fit their metric crapton of ski gear into the checked bag allowance, and then eventually realized that just mailing off the bulk of their gear saved them from the crush of humanity that always surrounds the baggage belt at the Jackson airport. (Imagine about 200 people crammed into a luggage claim area about the size of a postage stamp. Then imagine them all with skis...)

This year, the mail-in option became even more attractive because American Airlines decided that checked baggage was no longer free, and would be charging $20 for the first checked bag and $30 for the second. So, I lugged my two ginormous suitcases to the FedEx office this morning and shipped them off. The cost to mail two 35lb suitcases to Wyoming? $66, only $16 more than it would have cost to check them onto the plane. And they'll be there a week ahead of time, and I won't have to fight my way through throngs of passengers to get them.

( More about carry-ons, and why CPAP machines don't count )

( Speaking of the CPAP machine, I had a follow-up about my apnea. )

( Here's what my family is doing right now )

So, remember my post about how my sister was going to have to detour around the two (2) landslides that were blocking her passage over the Smokies? And that it would make her getting home for Thanksgiving more difficult? Well, now she's going to have to make the detour while recovering from swine flu. She's feeling a lot better now, but this really hasn't been her year for easy transit home. Honestly, I'm glad I'm not a conspiracy theorist.

In other news, following up on my concerns about the new Delicious add-on for Firefox, I did a test download on a computer that I don't use much for tagging stories. Sure enough, the clever bastards had closed the loophole that (formerly) allowed users to enter more than 50 tags if they did it through the add-on pop-up window. Guess I'll be skipping that version for a while. It's not that I have a huge number of bookmarks with more than 50 tags, but some of those long stories have a lot of characters and plot devices. (Of course, the obvious solution is to streamline my tags, but that would involve, you know, work. And planning. Much easier to just not upgrade the add-on until I have to. Laziness FTW!)

Also, did I mention that I finished NaNoWriMo? :) :) :)

I am so behind on NaNoWriMo today. (So, naturally, I'm posting instead of writing.)

I've been playing with AO3 today and haven't even put word one on my NaNoWriMo story. I've got a comfortable cushion at the moment, but my goal is to be done before I go to my Mom's to become her Thanksgiving helper. The cooking process begins, ideally, two days beforehand, so that doesn't give me a whole lot of time. Granted, we're celebrating on Friday instead of Thursday this year, but that's only one extra day.

We're having Thanksgiving a day late this year for a number of reasons, one of which is that my sister lives in North Carolina. Many of you probably heard about the 1-40 landslide closing off the main route through the Smokies from North Carolina to Tennessee. A lot of you also probably saw the video of the landslide that occurred a couple hundred miles south, on Highway 64.

What you probably don't know, unless you live in the area, is that Highway 64 is one of the better alternate routes through the Smokies if one is heading from North Carolina to the area around Chattanooga, especially if one's hometown is right on 64 (like ours). My sister and brother-in-law are probably going to make lemonade from the lemons and just detour all the way through Atlanta so he can visit his family, but that's a pretty significant detour.

So, Friday Thanksgiving. At least the grocery stores will be open if we run out of stuff.

Aaah, the twice-yearly hard drive purge. Nine whole gigabytes in which to stretch out, for a while anyway. I tend to dread doing it, because while my backing up involves sticking a thumb drive in and throwing over the few tiny text files that are new, the Great Hard Drive Purge involves actually moving computer stuff around and disconnecting drives from PCs and hooking them up to Macs and other gargantuan efforts. Which is why I only tend to do it when I'm having to delete yesterday's podcasts to have room for today's.

I realize that 9GB doesn't sound like much, but my entire hard drive is only 80GB, and frankly, if it wasn't for my habit of saving certain podcasts, I'd probably not even be close to filling it up ever. Fan fiction, after all, doesn't take up a lot of space. It took me three years of obsessive story saving to hit 500MB on my Torchwood folder, after all. Though, admittedly, if I saved the HTML instead of just the text, it would likely be about ten times that size. Which is why I save the text. :)

Then again, I have about two terabytes hooked up to the PC, so it's not like I'm practicing hard drive economy anywhere else.

Greebo tried to assist in my word count yesterday. When I'm using the computer in bed he thinks it a prime opportunity for snuggle time. He may be right about this, but he also tends to want to snuggle right on top of where I'm using the mouse. This means that sometimes the mouse does things I hadn't necessarily planned, especially when I give up trying to move it around under seventeen pounds of cat and just leave it there. Yesterday, he managed to select all the text in my Nanowrimo file, and when I pasted it all in later my stats returned a miraculous 22K+ word count, almost exactly twice what the count should have been. One of us (and I have my suspicions) had duplicated the entire novel in the file.

Good kitty.

NaNoWriMo word count of 10,439 words via LOLCat

I'd totally forgotten about the NanoCat Word Counter. (Because it is very important to see my word count in as many forms as humanly possible.)

This is why I was very happy to see that the widgets are finally working today. Well, mostly working. There seems to be a bit of decimal issue with the full progress reports, but it's not a big deal. Unfortunately, I discovered that, despite my doing my own math, I actually missed my word count yesterday by 14 words. Fourteen. Words.

( Is this really a big deal? Well, okay, no. )

And yet, I have still managed to crack 10,000 words. :)

3883 / 50000 words. 8% done!

I don't know if it's aided my writing productivity, but since I started using the CPAP machine I have dreamed and dreamed and dreamed. I had regular dreams before, but it's astounding the scope and depth and length of the dreams I've had the last four nights. I guess that's what happens when I'm not waking up forty times a night and interrupting my dream cycle. My brain has free rein to work through the day's crap without interference, and it seems to be making up for lost time.

I'm a bit paranoid about NaNoWriMo this year because last year was the first year I'd ever finished early and you all know what happened then. While I feel pretty certain that that was a one-time mishap (pretty certain), I can't help but think that I should maybe push a little harder this year, too.

Just in case. :)

Yep, it's that time of year again, when I move my NaNoWriMo bookmarks up to the Toolbar. Of course, the site designers have, as usual, rearranged everything so that most of them are broken, but re-setting the links is always a nice time-waster those first few days.

I have to say that, despite thinking about what I'm going to write since the beginning of October, the actual arrival of NaNoWriMo snuck up on me this year. I've been tootling along with it in the back of my mind, then suddenly I look up and it's three days before the start.

Part of my distraction has been my nesting behavior over at the new rec journal. I'm really, really glad I moved all the rec stuff. Not only am I no longer spamming people who are not necessarily interested in the recs, I've also been able to do a lot of tagging and organizing that wasn't really practical here. I feel like the rec journal can now be an actual resource that will, hopefully, remain useful even if I stop having the time to do as much recommending.

In other news, I picked up my CPAP machine today. I think it says something that I'm looking forward to strapping the thing on at bedtime. (Probably that I'm willing to do almost anything for a good night's sleep. :))

I also discovered that if you wait until the last few days to buy Halloween candy, you a) don't have time to eat it beforehand and b) can get it on sale. Also, Cheetos are not kosher.

I had my second sleep study over the weekend, and it went really well. I used the CPAP machine all night, and did not, according to the sleep technician, have any apneas. \0/ (I did, in fact, make actual victory arms when he told me this.) I did feel claustrophobic a couple of times, but it was very mild and I was able to talk myself out of it by remembering that the machine was there to help me breathe.

The mask wasn't too bad, and didn't really keep me from sleeping. We'll see if that changes once I'm no longer so tired that I don't care, but for now I'm more than willing to strap the thing on if it means better sleep. I'm also, on advice from

thewordoffred, going to look into the possibility of just using a nose tube. We'll see.

I also found out that I apparently re-arrange my iPod in my sleep. I go to sleep listening to podcasts, and while I'm falling asleep I move the iPod from side to side as I turn over. This behavior, according to the sleep technician, does not change once I'm asleep (or, indeed, after the iPod's sleep timer has turned it off). As I toss and turn, I move the non-functioning iPod around with me without ever waking up. This may explain why I haven't yet strangled myself with the headphones in my sleep. :)

Remember the Great Boiled Egg Debate? My sister has unearthed the answer: We were all wrong.

Boo has been really fascinated by the discovery of "Ardi." It started last week, when she asked me why we have hairs all over our bodies, and I explained about our evolutionary ancestors having hair to protect them. Just a couple of days later the news about Ardi finally hit the front pages. When the drawings of what Ardi may have looked like appeared, I showed them to Boo and explained a bit about how Ardi's traits have changed some of our thoughts on hominid evolution.

But I think the big attraction for her, really, is the simple fact that Ardi--and Lucy--are girls, like her. I know it was just chance that two of the major game-changers in hominid evolution happened to be females, but it really hit me hard to see how much that simple fact changed Boo's perceptions. Ardi and Lucy might be hairy, and have ape-like features and long arms and--in Ardi's case, anyway--feet that look like hands, but they're still both girls, and she can identify with that.

I really hope that as she gets older, we don't always have to go back four million years for our female role models. :)

In order to avoid blathering incessantly about Yet Another Health Issue, I decided--this time--to wait until I had a firm diagnosis.

( The desire to fall asleep into your mashed potatoes is not normal. Just so you know. )

I'm restoring my confidence by messing with the Windows computer, and I decided that I would conduct my semi-sporadic search for a multi-file search and replace utility for Windows. At the moment, I'm completely unable to survive without TextWrangler, which allows me to re-do those teeny coding errors I might make across twenty files, and also is the secret behind my thematic lists. (What, you think I have time to read 3,000 stories for mentions of blue cupcakes? ;)) The only difficulty is that it's MacOS only.

Shockingly enough, I found one this time. It's called Actual Search and Replace and it does exactly what I want. It searches across multiple text files for words or phrases, displays them in context and also--as the name suggests--can perform multi-file search and replace. (Take that, SmartQuotes!) Joy!

Well, if "joy" means "worth $30." The free version works for thirty days, which is enough time to make a decision about buying it, but I've been really spoiled by Bare Bones freeware the last fifteen years. Still, it would possibly enable me to not go completely insane if my Mac craps out on me, which is certainly worth thirty bucks.

I just hope I'm not jinxing my Mac by eyeing other utilities...

( I just had a huge computer scare, which I am going to describe in excruciating detail under the cut. To save you the suspense, I've left the resolution outside the cut. )

The anti-climactic conclusion: Computer restarted, everything's fine, I do not have to re-sort 3,000 files from the unsorted back-up. I'm currently testing the existence of the disappeared files by backing them the fuck up. Again. Then I'm having a beer. Possibly two.

I'm also taking this as a sign that it might be time to start saving for a new Mac laptop.

Bad news first.

I had a talk with my physical therapist yesterday about DragonCon, and while he didn't say "don't go," the things we talked about led me to the conclusion that going would not be fun. Everything I want to do involves either standing in line (or sitting on the floor in line) or sitting in horrible hotel conference chairs. I finally realized that I would either be in the hotel room lying down, or in a lot of pain. While the opportunities for hotel-room socializing are not to be discounted as a primary factor in my going to the con in the first place, I finally realized that I just wasn't prepared to face the prospect of the pain involved to do anything else. Such as drive five hours and haul my luggage through the Atlanta subway. So, I'm staying home.

The silver lining to all this (there's always one :)) is that I'll be able to maybe do some bookmarking. I've been trying to figure out a way to cross-post my Delicious bookmarks directly to my journals. I've been using the always-awesome Text Wrangler to code my finder lists by hand, but it would be nice to have a way to share the links.

This can be done from Delicious with other blogs, but not with LJ-based clients. I know there are a couple of scripts that can do it, but I don't have the hosting capabilities to run them. I'm experimenting with Twitter, but the automatic Tweeting from Delicious doesn't seem to work, at least not from the LJ add-on window, and doing it from the Delicious site is a royal pain in the ass. We'll see how it goes. :)

ETA: Ha! Figured out what was wrong with the auto-Tweeting from Delicious. I've now set up LoudTwitter, so hopefully my links will now funnel back onto my journal (under a cut, of course :)). Right now, I'm only doing it on Livejournal to test it.

Why didn't I know about the iPod Sleep Timer function before?! I discovered it by accident while trying to use the (useless) alarm feature, and it's the Best Thing Ever. I go to sleep every night listening to podcasts or audio books, and the biggest drawback is that if I fall asleep before turning it off, I have to backtrack for hours to find my place (not to mention the battery issues). If I turn on the Sleep Timer, the window shrinks to fifteen or thirty minutes. Best Thing Ever.

It's the little things that count, really. :)

So. We have met Boo's new Head of School...

...and she is Yvonne Hartman.

My husband and I went to a Meet the Head of School and Have Coffee thing this morning, and as I listened to her talk and answer questions I really, really had to work hard not to roll my eyes. Okay, I understand that management jargon is probably the way Things are Done now, but I felt like I was listening to a politician dodge the press rather than a Head of School talk to parents.

I do understand that it's not an easy gig. (In fact, I was amused that the questions were evenly divided between "why aren't the kids running around more?" and "why aren't the kids studying math/science more?", neatly displaying the never-ending conflict of parent expectations in microcosm.) I don't, though, like to come away from a meeting feeling that the person in charge hasn't really said anything. I also feel like that a meeting with her would be more like a battlefield than a conversation.

It's entirely possible that this first impression will be proved wrong, and it's also possible that, even if it isn't wrong, these will be qualities that will make her a good Head of School.

That doesn't mean I won't still think of her saying, "If it's alien, it's ours," every time I see her.

One day, I'll make a post and there will be nothing medical in it. This is not that post, but let's just live in hope. :)

( The importance of the spine, and why muscles are not substitutes )

Spent the weekend at my mother's, doing iPod maintenance and continuing iPod education. My mom, as I may have mentioned, has two iPods in order to keep up with her audiobook habit. While we were on vacation, iPod number one--which had already shown signs of wear and tear--began to really screw up. I brought it home, downloaded the files from it (confirming, by the way, that it was Seriously Screwed Up), and put them all on a new iPod. So far, so good.

( This just in: WAV files are Really Big )

If you buy the same mouse for both your laptops, and for some reason are using both laptops at the same time, try not to wonder why the mouse isn't working every time you pick up the wrong one. At least not after the first three times you do it. Also, possibly be smart enough, after this has happened more than three times, to put stickers or something on one of them.

If you are smart enough to only use one laptop at a time, but have both the trackpad and mouse enabled, make sure that your cat is not sitting on the mouse while you use the trackpad, lest you become convinced that your computer has locked up.

If you don't care about the color of the yolks of your boiled eggs, move along.

If, on the other hand, you're curious about the things that are topics of earnest debate in our family while on vacation, proceed to the cut for two amazing photographs of...boiled eggs.

( No, seriously, it's pictures of boiled eggs and a summary of different ways to boil eggs so the yolks don't turn dark. Don't say I didn't warn you. )

When Boo was around a year old, I was diagnosed with arthritis on the left side of my lower back. My doctor told me it's not uncommon for new mommies to develop back problems, because we spend a lot of time picking up and carrying twenty-pound babies, and tend to do it consistently on one arm/hip. I took an anti-inflammatory for a couple of months and changed how I lifted and picked up things and how I sat, focusing on making non-spine-twisting moves and on balancing my baby-lifting. That took care of the pain, and I hadn't had any problems for the last five years.

( You can probably guess where this is going )

I'm just hoping this is the last side-effect of my fall. :)

My vacation inspired me to get back to making recordings of my stories, since I spent a great deal of time listening to the podfics of others. I did some podficcing for

amplificathon last year, when I had carpal tunnel and had to take off knitting. I must have gotten distracted by something very shiny, because I a) found two stories I'd recorded but never edited and b) realized that I never posted links to any of the ones I did finish here. D'oh! (I'll be doing both soon, by the way.)

Of course, after I'd done several stories I figured out all the stuff I was doing wrong, so there's a bit of a learning curve. I tried to spoof the learning curve by recording several stories with no intention of posting them, and only then started recording others to post, but the second hump on the curve happened, alas, after I'd posted several finished audios. Mostly the problem is that volume is too low, so it's not an epic disaster, but I would like to re-record a few of them.

Right now, I'm doing one of my longer stories, an SG1 story from 1999-2000 called "A Thousand Stars." It's about 28,000 words, which I estimate will mean a finished product of four to four and a half hours. So far, I've recorded four hours of audio, and am about halfway through the story. This kind of worries me, because at the first draft stage I expect to have audio about three to four times as long as the finished product--and it's not that I haven't been recording several different readings of every damn sentence. I'm wondering if I'm speaking faster for some reason, and if this will mean that I'll end up thinking it sucks and have to do it all over. I hope not.

I've realized that I haven't actually, formally updated anything about my wrist lately. As it happens, no news is good news, but since I've been blithering about it for months I might as well offer closure, too. :)

( I am healed! )

All in all, I feel pretty darn lucky. It was a hellish winter, but I came out of it with all the important things (for instance, knitting) still possible, and I'm not in pain anymore. This is all good. :)

In other news, I'm done rescuing files from my Mom's malfunctioning iPod, and am about three-quarters done transferring the files back into iTunes so I can load them onto her new iPod. This has taken some time, both because I want to make sure that everything's being transferred, and also because I'm converting a bunch of WAV files to MP3. She has a machine that converts cassettes into digital audio, but it saves the files as WAV and we've never really coordinated that "How to convert files to MP3" tutorial I've been promising to do for her. So far, I've saved about 50GB (!?) of space.

I've also plowed through the backlog of Torchwood stories that were posted on LJ during my vacation. Without going into brutal statistics, I estimate that I had to read roughly twice as many stories, and tagged about the same net number as I would have pre-Children of Earth. I would despair, except that I sort of suspected that this would be the case. I also saved a bunch of stories that I didn't tag, some of which may end up working their way into the rec list. We'll have to see.

All in all, it's good to be back.

Right. I'm going in. Eleven days of Torchwood fanfic, waiting to be read and tagged. And because I love my mother and am currently using my Mac to rescue the files from one of her iPods, I'm even doing it without TextWrangler. Think of me fondly.

It's 2:30am, and I've reached skip=600 on LJ. Unbelievable as it seems, that actually took me all the way back to the point where I left.

The beach was completely wonderful. I managed to keep both Boo and myself from getting sunburned, despite the fact that she did nothing but run around in the mercilessly hot sun for six solid days. There were four adults to one six-year-old, and between all of us we managed to mostly keep up with her. Mostly.

There was no internet at the condo where we stayed, and I didn't manage to get to anywhere with wireless, so even with the backwards scan through LJ I still have some catching up to do. Starting with the huge pile of Torchwood stories posted in the last ten days. :)

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for the beach. (Yay!) I won't have internet access for about the next ten days, so I won't be engaging in my usual hobbies of story-finding and Delicious tagging. I'm really hoping I can get occasional access and at least download stories and podcasts, because if not the ten-day backlog of post-Children of Earth stories alone will likely bury me.

I'm actually already packed, and am a little disconcerted with the crap-volume of my packing. Somehow, packing more than four shirts is not a priority, but having three spare sets of earphones is. I'm also thinking that, with my flip-flops and rubber beach sandals, bringing along my Birkenstocks as my civilization shoes might be overkill. There's absolutely no way, though, I'm going without both the PowerBook and the NetBook. And both iPods.

Let's also not mention the ten-day entertainment requirements for a six-year-old, which includes a shoulder bag crammed with sparkly pink My Little Pony accessories, three separate board games, and her own knitting bag.

*Checks priorities*

Yep. Looks good to me.

Take care, everyone!

Happy Birthday,

ladypredator!

I am pin-less, cast-less and have the ability to be splint-less at will. I still have a couple of stitches in (literally, like, two stitches), but those will be coming out next week. I'm cleared to do pretty much anything I want so long as it doesn't hurt beyond certain parameters. At the moment, those parameters are very small, but it's nice to be able to eat a meal without worrying about breaking my pins lifting a soup spoon.

( Medical Details )

( Personal Details )

The timing of all this good-feeling is fortuitous, as it turns out. Boo's school is going to be closed today and Monday because more than 30 kids (about a quarter of the student body) and half the teachers are sick with the flu. They haven't specified if it's H1N1 or suspected H1N1, which irritates me greatly because, hello, I'd like to know, but the school is advising everyone to avoid other people for a few days. The Jewish Community Center will be taking kids from Metro schools in the daycare-aftercare program, but kids from Akiva need to stay home. That means it'll be just me and Boo. As much as it's inconvenient, and as much as I don't want Boo or me or Al or anyone else to get sick, it's also kind of nice to be able to take care of my own kid for the first time in weeks. :)

We have also released Tom back into the wild. Or tried. We opened up the garage door for him, but as of a few minutes ago he was still hiding under his favorite shelf. He seems to be very well healed up, no sign of his injuries apart from a slight bald patch on his foot. Boo has been taking care of his medication for the last few days, and has proved a very able assistant.

~~In other words, the household is on the mend. :)~~

ETA: I should really learn not to tempt fate by posting things like the previous sentence. Right after posting the above I realized that I didn't actually feel that well. Current condition: sore throat, aches, fever 100 degrees.

I would headdesk, except that would hurt. I'll headpillow instead.

Off to surgery, wish me luck! :)

I had my final cast removed yesterday, and am sporting a highly fashionable black Velcro splint. All I have to do is refrain from breaking my pins until Monday.

( Surgery details )

In other cat news, I took Greebo in for his checkup on Tuesday. While I had Tom there, I realized that I might as well get Greebo his (overdue) shots and have him looked at. Greebo is nine years old, so I wasn't surprised that he needed his teeth cleaned. Apparently they have a nifty anesthetic that the cats can breathe that doesn't stay in their systems, so they can put older cats under for non-critical procedures like teeth cleaning. This was something we were never able to do with Sylvester. As seems to happen, he didn't need his teeth cleaned until he was too old to have his teeth cleaned. But Greebo is going to have his done in three weeks.

I also found out why, despite the fact that he was obviously huge, my other vet never mentioned Greebo's weight.

( Pictures of my big-boned cat )

I suppose you may remember my not-cat. You know, the cat who I took to have neutered, who I've been feeding for two years, who hangs out on my deck and who is emphatically not mine. That cat. (His name is Tom, by the way.)

Today, when I put out food for the cats, Tom was limping and had blood on his paw. Since he's not my cat, I of course took him straight to the vet. (Being the lawless feral stray that he is, it took me about a minute to get him in the carrier one-handed, and that was only because it took thirty seconds to chase him down. At a walk.)

( Fortunately, he's not badly hurt. )

Tom, of course, acted like the aforementioned lawless stray at the vet's office. He protested really, really loudly the whole time he was in the carrier, and on the (two-mile) drive to the vet, and for about the first three minutes in the exam room. By the end of it, he was lying sprawled on the exam table, purring up a storm while the vet poked at the cut on his paw, and not even flinching when he got his shot. He's a big sweetheart. :)

I am actually caught up listening to Dan Patrick. For a while there I was so far behind that I was listening to them fill out their brackets after North Carolina had already won the championship. Now I can get back to the three weeks of Science Friday I'm behind.

Speaking of catching up, I am now *back* up to 37 stories under my "totag" tag on Delicious. I'd knocked the list down to nearly twenty last week, then I did some story finding and committed my usual shortcut of throwing up the tag that fit with the search with a "totag" slapped on. I think I'll make it my goal this week to finish the tagging, because it's not very useful if all my new links just say "totag."

I've also been reading some of my old fanfic, as I prepare to post it on Dreamwidth. It doesn't suck nearly as much as I thought it would (or perhaps as much as I thought I should think it should). Granted, I have fifteen glorious years of suck-filled fanfic lurking unposted and (thankfully) unseen behind the first stories I post ten years ago, but on the whole, it's not so horrible that I feel the need to purge it from the internet. I itch to do some revising, mind you, and there are a couple of early stories that really do need to sort of be re-done top to bottom, but more in a "let's scrub everything and re-paint the walls and get new furniture" kind of way rather than "my god we're going to have to raze the site and start over."

The experience, though, kind of led me to thinking about certain truths I think about myself as a writer, which I may elaborate on later. Or not, depending on how the re-tagging goes.

I had my penultimate orthopedic visit today. It went very well, and I'm on track to have the pins removed on May 11. Yay!

There was only one hiccup. The doctor had initially intended to remove the cast and put me in a splint for two weeks. This would have the advantage that I would be able to take showers without wrapping a plastic bag around my arm...and not much else. I wouldn't really be able to take off the splint otherwise, and would have to be very, very careful so as not to break the pins in my wrist. I am not a very, very careful person. When I expressed this to the doctor, he asked, "Well, do you just want another cast?" and I said, "That would probably be best."

So, I have Bright Pink Cast #2 (they didn't have purple or yellow, the other two colors that Boo had requested, so I reverted to the number one color choice). It hasn't been too bad wearing the other casts, and I would certainly rather put up with two more weeks of plastic wrap in the shower rather than risk breaking the pins. I'll have the cast on for two weeks, then I'll go to the doctor and get it removed the Wednesday before the surgery. Presumably I can go for five days in a splint without damaging myself. We'll see. :)

I got a new cast today. It is, as the subject line suggests, green (at the request of Her Booness).

Boo had decorated the pink cast with kitties, sunshine, a flamingo and family portraits. I made sure to take pictures, because I was pretty sure the cast would be too unsanitary to keep around. As it turns out, though, the unsanitary inner layers of gauze and stockinette could be peeled away and discarded, allowing me to preserve the fiberglass part. If I can find my camera cable, I'll try to post the pictures.

They did more x-rays, and everything still seems to be in place. The doctor says I'll be in this cast for three more weeks, then in a splint for two weeks, then I'll have one more surgery to take the pins out. The pin removal is apparently miles simpler and less painful than the first surgery, and I should be ready for physical therapy within a couple of weeks. Physical therapy should take six months to a year, so in the shortest-case scenario I'll be finishing up my recovery a little over a year after I first fell. Next time, I'm landing on my head.

( Details, details )

Onward and upward. :) I feel that I can do everything that's really important (well, okay, almost everything :)). I certainly can find plenty of ways to be occupied and happy. The good things are getting better, and the bad things are diminishing. Can't ask for more than that.

Note to self:

If you haven't driven in a month, and therefore haven't drunk your regular post-school-delivery regimen of coffee, it's entirely possible that when you do test your cast-impaired driving ability by going to the coffee shop and drinking a large coffee at four in the afternoon, you will find yourself writing journal posts at 5:45am.

Just FYI.

Five Ways In Which My Life Has Improved A Lot:

1. I can type using up to nine fingers with minimal discomfort (for some reason my pinkie is taking a while to get back in the game). Only short periods right now, but considering that on Friday I couldn't even press the keys, this is pretty darn stellar.

2. I can open bottles, cans and other food packaging. This means that my husband no longer has to leave a cooler of sandwiches and a certain number of pre-opened bottles of water for me when he goes to work.

3. I can go up and down the stairs as I darn well please. Free access to the kitchen is good.

4. I can take a shower almost all by myself, instead of having to have the assisstance of my entire family. If I could just figure out how to open and squirt out the shampoo with one hand (okay, and wrap my own right arm in plastic), I'd be golden.

5. I am taking about half the amount of pain medication I was taking last week. It might *sound* fun to spend six weeks stoned on various members of the -codone family, but the reality is that I can't wait to get off the stuff. Obviously, I'm choosing to continue to take it because, well, pain sucks, but I feel that the pain is also approaching the point where I can see the end of it.

In short:

:)

I have a new cast. It's about half the size and a third the weight of the post-op splint/cast. It is also bright pink because my daughter asked if I was getting a pink cast and I said no (because I seriously had no idea that casts came in pink.) I'll apparently be getting the chance to experiment with other colors as well, because the cast will be changed every couple of weeks.

Healing seems to be proceeding. The doctor took out the stitches, and x-rays showed that the pins seemed to in the right place. The new cast leaves my fingers completely free, so as soon as I work out the post-op swelling and stiffness I'm hoping I can return to two-handed as opposed to one-fingered typing.

I'm still having to take quite a bit of pain medication, but I can also tell that, as promised, the post-op pain is rapidly dwindling. I'm hoping to be off the pain meds sooner rather than later, and I also hope to be driving again soon. All in all, things are looking up.

Hey this is Dorothy's spouse Al. Dorothy has asked me to make a quick post updating her condition. She's been through the surgery and is doing fine. The procedure went well according to the doc. Her entire right arm is in a plaster cast from her fingers to her elbow. She is taking lots of really good medication for pain and so she is doing mostly fine in that department. She will be going back to her doctor on Thursday for a checkup and a new cast. She says Hi to everyone out there and cannot wait to type her own posts soon.

My surgery is scheduled for March 2, two weeks from Monday. I am very pleased. :)

It seems as though everything is going to go pretty much as I described in my earlier post. I'll be in a cast for about two months, then I'll have to have a second surgery to remove the pins. After that, it will, hopefully, be merely a matter of recovery and physical therapy.

( Full Disclosure Section (with bonus whining) )

In the meantime, I've cheered myself up with a little self-pampering: painting my nails. So far, they have been wine-red, purple, orange and chartreuse. (My toes are pink and sparkly, but I assure you that it wasn't self-inflicted. I merely point to this as evidence that I love my daughter. ;))

In closing, I'd like share an exchange I had with the stewardess on the plane I took from Wyoming around the first of the year:

Stewardess: Did you hurt your arm skiing?
Me: Sadly, no, nothing that exciting. I fell on the stairs.
Stewardess: Oh, dear. Are you right-handed?
Me: Yep. And, of course, my favorite things to do are knitting, crossword puzzles and sudoku puzzles.
Stewardess: Have you taken up drinking?

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