Psychotomy

so this weekend was our “childbearing” class. which told us about labor, the signs symptoms complications dangers options yadda etc and so on.

two days. oi. i learned many interesting things. such as:

• it will hurt
• it will be messy
• it’ll hurt

and those were the high points of hte process :o the videos did a wonderful job of making it look entirely unappealing. they need to show those vids in highschool, eesh.

of course, they covered “the coach’s” duties through all of this. “coach” is what they call the father/husband in case he’s a she, not married, or unrelated. b/c “partner” is too sexist or something. p freakin’ c :o anyway, they had this big list of things, which both kiir and I summarised very succinctly as: I do what she says. seriously, like i’m going to say to the screaming impained woman on the bed who’s having a baby “sorry, I can’t help you right now. The LIST says I’m supposed to go get you ice chips. You’ll have to massage your own damned cramp until I get back.” yeah, that’d go over well :o

one big thing was “helping find ways for the mother to relax during the process b/c tensing is bad blah blah blah” … relax … ok, so, I’ll wheel her computer in with wifi and she can play EQ2 or Vanguard between contractions? Or maybe the X360 and she can play bejeweled? damnit, being non-traditional makes somethings hard :o maybe a good book … with big letters so it’s easy to read when she’s pushing …

W. T. F.

whatevah!

i’m sure i learned some things (don’t go to the hospital at the first contraction ; wait until they’re 2 hours apart or so to start worrying * …), but it’s hard to say b/c they were all unconcious learning i think. mostly, it was boring and felt like a waste of time. I’d've rather been playing on the computer. relaxing :p

* — OK, so, the “sample labor” scenario … “You get up to go to the bathroom at 6am, and you feel a contraction, what do you do?” my first answer? “go back to bed, it’s 6am” (correct answer: it’s just one contraction, go back to bed; yay me!)

“At 8 o’clock, you feel a second contraction, what should you do” me? “keep making breakfast”; someone else? “start timing the contractions” … correct: make sure your bag is in the car and ready, in case they get more frequent … uh, it’s been 2 hours, they almost HAVE to get more frequent unless it’s braxton-hicks …

“At 9:30 you have another contraction. This one is stronger than the others, and you have to stop what you’re doing at the peak” me? “ok, wait to see how you’re doing in another hour or two”, answer: “Call your provider” …

uh, you’ve had THREE contractions in 3.5 hours!!! see if you can at least get 3 in ONE hour before you freak! eeesh. (ok, so, i’m not likely to be ‘calm and controlled’ but i hope i can not panic at that kindof range …)

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day 2!

and today i learned how to fill out my timesheet! i only have something like 20 possible billing codes, oi! dropped k at camp last night, b/c he didn’t have camp yesterday. took an hour in that process (picked up more of his meds and signed for training, but still), then decided to do dinner (another hour? cripes!) and groceries (AGAIN? AN HOUR???? wtf, do all my clocks move by hour segments???)

but i woke up on time (early, actually) today, whee go me! now i’m at work , with little to do. got another semi-voluntary project to play with though, so might be good

Posted in: k-line, work by attriel /
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taped off the two tub full baths yesterday and painted one. may paint the other tonight or something. we don’t have paints for the other two rooms yet, but the first floor needs me to cut out the wall and try again anyway :o go me!

hit ikea to look at furniture bits for the living room/dining room. since we got rid of all the old furniture, we need to get new before i can even work on reclaiming the downstairs rooms! oops, bad planning! oh well. i’ll figure something out.

K had camp saturday, and we played on the computers. i bought a new vid card, too, b/c i was peaking at 15fps in vanguard, while she was getting 30+ average. new vid card (same as hers, basically, now) i’m getting 35-40 usually, 20-30 in populous areas, and down to 15 when it hits a heavy display. which is an improvmenet over 15, 7, 1 :o really fun when i drop to .7fps now, though. “can you say over drawn???”

hopefully my new paycheck (see other post) will start helping us with the cashflow problems :o

Posted in: games, general, house by attriel /
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so! today’s my first day at my new job

we’ll ignore the last 4 months, it gets confusing :o

this morning was my orientation telecon .. except the only other person being oriented left her packet on the commuter shuttle or something, so it got moved. so, instead, i read the packet (whee), picked out the coverages we want (SHOCKING! we want top all), and did my job some. b/c i can’t actually sign up for my benefits until i get another packet in the mail. *sigh*

we’re hoping it comes in the next day or two (7-10 business is the quote, unfortunately) b/c then i can sign right up. COBRA runs out wednesday night, and I’d like to not pay the february bill on that. b/c it’s EXPENSIVE! and while the new medical will supposedly be retroactively in place to today, she’s got a labwork or two and a pair of dr’s visits before the end of feb. that i KNOW of … so we’ll spend the $ on cobra so that she has coverage listed at the time. b/c i distrust “retroactive” yaknow?

Posted in: work by attriel /
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haven’t had my scrip since monday :/ starting to have a noticeable effect on me, i think :( as in, i can suppress it for a day or so, but after 3 missed pills? i’m just getting mean again, oops

K’s at camp yesterday morning through tonight, b/c we went to see wicked in baltimore last night. pretty good show ; probably would have been better if we hadn’t seen it on broadway to compare, already. but still fun, and we like the play itself :) trying to decide if K wants another night at camp or not. ok, really, trying to decide if i want tomorrow puppy free or not. b/c i’d like to sleep in. been dead tired all freakin’ week :(

OTOH, even if he’s not home tomorrow morning, i’d probably get up by 8am ANYWAY, and after two days he’d probably sleep that long. but it’s cold, so i don’t want to take him for walks, either, which will make tomorrow evening and sunday bad :o

shoulder’s been acting up again this week. need to start hitting the gym or krav again. b/c i went to krav once in december, and really haven’t done the gym in a while at all. and i know both of them will let my muscles get enough workout that whatever nerve is pinched or surfaced or whatever that makes my shoulder ache and twinge will be relaxed, worked, whatever so that it doesn’t hurt anymore. *sigh* it’s either that, or i start stabbing myself in the shoulder with knives trying to get lucky and cut a nerve. which would probably be BAD, all things considered. and its not like i don’t need to hit the gym anyway.

*sigh* tired. cranky. achy. blergh

Posted in: general by attriel /
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so i changed the colors on the site header today. medium grey text on a litegrey-to-darkblue background.

kiir tells me the text fades into the background. she tells me the text is green.

so, happy readers, tell me. what do you think?

Posted in: general by attriel /
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yeah, so, i’ve been cleaning for MONTHS, it’s getting ridiculous. annoying too :/

they finished the floors last week (yay obviously) and after I moved the computers back, we were sitting there and we realized something … we LIKE the living room uncluttered and not packed to the gills.

well, hell. now we wanna KEEP it this way.

aw, crap.

Going to IKEA this weekend sometime to look into the bits that go with our tv stand so we can put that up and have somewhere for the dragons and fairies and such. we’re thinking of moving the small shelves from the dining room to the basement and replacing the big shelves with them. obviously, of course, we have to go through our books and figure out what we really want to keep and what we really don’t care about keeping, see if we can reduce the quantity a bit. and by “a bit” i mean “a lot” b/c we have too many books. we have 4 tall shelves (5 levels), and 7 or 8 small shelves (2-3 apiece). things are stacked double in a lot of places, and there are books in boxes from the last time i had to box books for something b/c there’s nowhere to put them.

a few months ago i cataloged the books in the living room (bookpedia! the isight barcode scanner doesn’t work right for me; first it’s hard to get the light right so it can read it, then apparently a lot of my books have OLD codes so the ISBN it reads doesn’t match my book, oops). I think I got 150-200 books. On 4 3-shelf units, counting what was laying around the room too. say 150. we have that many again in the bedroom (3 2-shelf units with her romance books, plus everything that accumulates near and around her side of the bed). then I’d imagine twice THAT in the basement. I’m willing to say we have >1000 books. 2k seems high, but I’d believe 1500. almost certainly >1000 though.

that is going to take for-FREAKIN-ever. then I’m going to have like 500-750 books that we’re getting rid of. Trying to decide if we take them to the used bookstore and sell them (i mean, even at an avg 1$/book, that’s a lotta scratch!), give them to the library (dunno if that’s deductible), or donate them for hte tax writeoff (at which point i think it might average closer to 2$/book … but has to wait a year before we get a cash benefit, and then it’s probably down to 50c/book in terms of cash value) …

kiir’s leaning towards donate/give away, becaues it’s easier. I’m thinking more the used bookstore. of course, that means I have to cart all these books to the used bookstore and hope they’re willing to buy that many books at once an’ all. but we’ll see. it’s not like we’re there yet anyway :o

first I need to start reclaiming the master and guest bedrooms. baby’s room, too, but that’s 90% removing the painting bits that I’ve left in there since i painted. wheeee

Posted in: general, house by attriel /
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project A we finished last week (good, b/c it was due last wednesday .. wonder if the people who set the deadline have looked at it at all …)

project B is on stall until we can find a way to POLITELY browbeat someone into letting us actually talk to the person with the answers. Person Z is our contact. Person Y asked a bunch of questions. Person X has the answers. Person Z never seems to get the meaning when we ask “can we talk to Person X to get the answers we need for Person Y” :/ so, we’re stalled indefinitely.

so, this week at the office I’m reading my Zend PHP Certification guide. I figure once I’m hired I’ll look into the policies on certs. If they’ll pay for them, I’ll probably go for the PHP, LPI level 2 and MySQL DBA certs. Of course, those last two are 2nd level, and each level has 2 tests, at 200$ a pop … i am SOOOO not paying for that myself :o

Otherwise, I’m making another hack at learning hindi. Why not! just b/c the last dozen times or whatever have failed miserably is no reason to think this one will too! this time I’m going with written. learn to mimic words, then learn to pronounce them. I’m going about it like your average 3-5 yr old learning to read/speak by reading aloud. Of course, hindi primers are all in devangari (the character set), and I have no basis for knowing what those mean (although I did find a site… uh, wonder where I put that URL … anyway, it goes through the alphabet and tells you how to pronounce the letters and some of the common letter-combos (like ie, ae, etc)). So I’m working with that, a big list of english words and their hindi versions in devangari, and trying to figure out how to say things.

I’m doing this by translating Dr Seuss ;) If Green Eggs and Ham, Cat in the Hat, and Horton Hears a Who are good enough to teach kids english, then they should be able to teach me some (relatively useless) hindi phrases. Once I have a base, maybe I can go from there.

I figure that I may put up the translations, assuming I can figure out if that’s allowed since Seuss is still under copyright so the fulltext isn’t online in english … otherwise, I may put up phrases or something.

And then I’m going to work on a “Hindi Primer for Americans” b/c we do NOT pronounce things like the brits. The second o in Library … wtf are you talking about? there’s NO o, let alone TWO!!! :)

Heck, if this works for me, maybe I’ll do Hebrew too. See if I can figure out how to sell my Language Mastery plan for fat cash. retire rich at the age of 25 and live high on the hog, just me and my buxom wench! And the puppy, obviously. duh!

Posted in: hindi, work by attriel /
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so, just sent an email to the third friend i’m still close with from highschool (there’s another one or two that i only talk to every few years, b/c like one lives in japan :o … wonder if i can figure out his address, i know it was supposed to be real simple … like his name @ his name or something … )

so now all (most) of my friends have been told. she’s only 6 months pregnant. it’s not like i INTENTIONALLY waited, though. i’m just lazy and i don’t figure most people care. but that’s me i guess. i’m kinda private. except, like, i post all kindsa shit here, so i’m kinda private in a public way.

yeah. ok, so whatever. they’ve all been told :p

(edit: ok so yeah, i just went ahead and looked up the (yes, blatantly obvious and easy to remember) address for my friend in japan :o  i’m sure i’ll promptly forget it again.  but now that i’ve mailed him, it’s in my records at least !)

Posted in: PI by attriel /
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So, they finished the floors tuesday. Check.

Wednesday we picked K up from camp (FINALLY … that was expensive *sigh*) and he got to come home and experience the new floors. We were worried (well I was) about him slipping and sliding everywhere on the wood and getting no traction and being incredibly unhappy about the whole bloody mess. Figuring on getting an oriental rug (or cheap knockoff) for the living room/dining room, and maybe a runner carpet for the hall. so the puppy can, you know, run on it :o

Except, apparently K is special. He has no issues with the floor yet :o Don’t know if it’s b/c he had just had camp (and he’s back this morning, heh) or if it’s related to the wood being “strip” rather than “plank” (the strips are 2″ wide, plank is usually 6-12 from what I’ve seen), so the inter-piece slat-ridges are really regular and close together. I’m thinking both. Benefit being that, while he’s tired, he gets used to the floor and how to run around on it, so when he’s revved he’ll have a better chance of not flailing around. I think he will have to slow down some, because otherwise he’s likely to slide into walls or off the stairs before he manages to stop. although i also expect he’ll just learn to start braking a touch earlier or differnetly. he’s smart. he’ll adapt.

adapting to the baby, though, that’ll be harder i imagine. we need to start getting those baby sounds cd’s played. i imagine it’ll start with him going nuts when he hears something sudden, but hopefully we can get him to start ignoring it. as long as the kid never makes sounds like a bird or a horse galloping. those sounds he’s not quite learned to accept yet in games :o

Posted in: house, k-line by attriel /
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