Exceedingly Mundane

Saturday was a good day.

Tim slept late since he was up till 3:15 AM Friday night working on Hambones. After he got up, we went to the clinic and got my ears “fixed”. I was a little disappointed that they didn’t use a machine to clear the ear canal – the nurse came in with a squirt water bottle with a small attachment at the end of a hose, and used that to irrigate my ears! It worked, thank goodness, but I don’t think it got nearly as much out as the machine would have. Next time, I’ll have to go back to the ENT and get it done with the machine. But — the good news is that my ear opened back up, stopped hurting, and I was back to normal! 😀 Tim, for one, was very glad I’m sure, since the ear ache had made me a bit grouchy!

We did something yesterday that I had never done before – we went to two movies back to back! I’ve never splurged on anything like that in my life, and once I mentioned that to Tim, he seemed to think it was time to experience a full day of movies at the theatre, so off we went! We went to see “Mr & Mrs Smith” first (good, not outstanding, but fun). Then we walked across to the mall (Northpark) to get Tim a watch battery as his watch had died. We tried Penney’s first, but after searching for a while, the watch guy said he didn’t have the right battery and sent us to a jewelers in the mall. They did have the right battery, and offered a lifetime guarantee on the battery, and will replace it free as long as he still has this watch. But, they had to keep it a while longer, so we left it with the jeweler and walked back to the theatre for the second part of our double feature – the movie Tim wanted to see – “The Longest Yard”. It was good too, but did have a lot of rough language, especially at the beginning. Once it got to the football part, we liked it a lot better! We rate them about the same, about a 6 or 7 on our 1-10 scale we use at Hambones.

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Ouch, my ear is worse today. I’m going to go to the MEA Clinic near my house in a little while, once Tim is up and I see if I can persuade him to go with me. If not, then I’ll go on up by myself. We tried to put more drops in the left ear last night and that apparently was a big mistake. It’s much worse now, totally clogged up and I can’t hear a thing out of it now.

We went out last night (as previously reported at the end of this post) and got Tim’s dad a gift card and also went to eat at the Mexican place we like out on Lakeland, called El Torero. We ate an entire basket of chips, but only ate half of our entree and brought the rest home for lunch today. I had my favorite there, a shrimp quesadilla, and Tim had the fajita quesadilla (chicken).

After we got in, I was flipping TV channels and found “Four Weddings and a Funeral” on Lifetime.

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From this site:

1. What do you wear to bed? Pink pajamas

2. What side of the bed do you sleep on? Left

3. Do you sleep with a stuffed animal? No, not unless you count Tim!

4. Blanket/bed hog? No, Tim is the hog, he pulls them away from me, and I only get about 1/8 of the bed 🙂 He thinks I’m his body pillow too. I learned long ago to sleep with arms and legs thrown over on me 😀

5. Do you make your bed everyday? Yes, absolutely. Even when I’m sick. Even when we get up in the AM to leave for vacation. Something my momma taught me to do! 😆

Feast Fifty-Two
Friday, June 17, 2005

Appetizer
What’s one word or phrase that you use a lot? Hmm… Whatever… Yeah Right… stuff like that! I also try to say “I love you” to Tim as many times during the day as possible. Unless I’m totally mad at him 😛

Soup
Name something you always seem to put off until the last minute. Making a doctor’s appointment for the dreaded female doctor. Mopping the kitchen floor (I will never have white vinyl floors ever again).

Salad
What was the last great bumper sticker you saw? I can’t remember.

Main Course
If you could be invisible for one day, how would you spend your time? Hmmm, I’m pretty invisible as it is most days. Let’s see, I’d like to follow our president GW Bush around for a day and see what he does.

Dessert
Describe your hair. Well, as of late morning, it’s shorter, shinier and very brown! 🙂 Got it cut and my roots done today

I woke up this morning with a bit of an earache. I have been noticing for the past several days (or maybe a week or more) that my ear was starting to feel stopped up. I have had this most all of my life. As gross as it is, here’s the plain truth – I’m a “high wax” producer, as my ENT says. I produce more ear wax than normal people and my body doesn’t “dispose” of it like regular people do. Mine builds up and has to be periodically cleaned out. I try the drops at home from time to time, and they help some, but it usually builds to a point where I have to go to the doctor and have them clean them out.

I called my ENT here in Ridgeland this morning and was promptly informed that my doctor “doesn’t do that irrigation method” any more. Apparently it’s “out of date”. Well. Hmmph. Whatever. Plus, he’s booked up for 3 weeks and I don’t want to wait that long. I guess he’s not my ENT any more! 🙂 Anyway, I called the MEA clinic here and they have the equipment (or so the receptionist said when she came back from hold, she SAID she checked) to flush out my ears and irrigate the ear canal and clean out the built up wax. I am going to give the drops another day or two, but then I think I’m going to have to go to the clinic and get them cleaned out properly. It’s not an earache per se, in that it’s not throbbing or painful. It’s just that it’s stopped up, I can’t hear out of it well, it sort of rings like a vacuum in there, or the sound you hear when you stick a big seashell up to your ear. 🙂 It’s just really annoying and I don’t want to leave on vacation with it like this.

Ok, on to more topics. I’m sure that was gross and boring and tedious. If you want more tedium, click the -More- link to hear about what the Air Conditioning repair guy said and did last night to our AC unit, and also to hear about my day. Consider yourself warned!

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::Calling in Sick::

Onesome: I can’t come in– Have you ever locked yourself out of the house or the car? How’d it happen, and how did you get back in? I can’t ever remember locking myself out of the house or car. I think I’m too anal about checking, about having my keys in my hand, and then locking the car with my remote on my keyring. If I have ever done it in the past, I have no recollection of it. 🙂

Twosome: to work today– What is your dream job and why? To be a mom. Not gonna happen though.

Threesome: because I…– What’s the worst excuse you’ve ever given or heard of for not going into work/ school? Why did you really call in? Geesh, I was the most conscientious school kid and office worker on the planet. I can remember only cutting a class a few times in college – and that was for a freshman level computer class they added to my computer minor program track, that I had to go back and take when I was a senior. I could have taught the class to the freshman. My teacher (who was also my advisor and the department head) once asked me after class, why are you coming, you don’t have to come to this class. So I finally started cutting one day a week or so and even then I felt guilty. I don’t think I ever called into work sick when I wasn’t and would most often go into work even though I was sick. Must be that work-ethic from Fred and Dodie that was pounded into me growing up.

Well, I don’t like to give up on things, especially books (even though most of you advised me to put it down – read the original post and comments here) . So, I dug in my heels and persevered and finished my latest book, “Sushi for Beginners” by Marian Keyes. You can read my review of it here on Hambones.org.

I did rather enjoy it towards the end and wanted to see how it turned out. It tied things up nicely, which is very important to me. I don’t like books that end badly or leave me hanging.

I have one more checked out from the library, the next one in the numbered Stephanie Plum series – “Hot Six”. I started it last night since Tim was locked up in the computer room till after midnight working on Hambones.

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YEAH! Hambones is back up and running, thanks to all of Tim’s hard work. He worked about 14 hours yesterday and last night, off and on, on upgrading the site. Well, not really an upgrade. He wiped the server clean and started over with a newer version of SUSE, the Linux software we use. He got all of the data back, and still has a few things to work on in the background (email and other components), but for the most part, for what regular users see and use — it is all back and all fine. He has a lot of things he still wants to do, but nothing (hopefully!) that will affect users. We’ve been down quite a bit the last week or so, and we apologize for that. Hopefully it will be a bit before we have to take the site down again. When we get a new hard drive, we’ll take it down again, but maybe we can put that off until we get back from vacation.

It was nice having him home yesterday, even though he was mostly locked away in the computer room day and night. 🙂 He went back to work today, and I imagine it was a nice break for him! He will have to leave on time today, as we have an air conditioning service guy coming out this afternoon. Our AC unit is running constantly, and it is taking several hours to drop the temperature by one degree in the house. Tim and I are both worried that we’ll burn up the compressor at that rate! We hope it’s just low on freon or needs cleaning or maintenance. I don’t even want to think what a new heating/cooling unit is going to cost us if it has to be replaced. Everybody keep their fingers crossed! 😀

I’m trying to be really quiet this morning, as Tim didn’t get to sleep till nearly 4AM. We knew he had to work last night, starting about 11 PM on a project, but we thought he would work from home, as normal. But, as luck would have it, our cable modem service was acting up (I couldn’t get web pages to load), which affected what he needed to be able to do, plus now that we have Vonage, it affected his phone call needs. So, poor thing, about 10:30 he had to drive into the office and work from there.

He had wanted to work on Hambones last night, in between waiting on things to run on his project. So, he took the main site down earlier in the evening, and started doing a full backup. He likes to take it down so that no one will post anything new, and so we can get a full backup and not lose a single bit of data. However, about the time the backup finished, and he was ready to start working on upgrading the site, it was time to go into work, so he didn’t get to work on it. So, we’ll have to do this again, either tonight or tomorrow, or soon. Tim really wants and needs to get this software installed, so look for more down time for Hambones.org. Sorry 🙁

Today is going to be a nice day. Tim told me last night that he will be working from home after he wakes up, so it will be nice to have him around later on today. 🙂 I might not get my workout in, but everything else should fit in nicely with him here.

that is the question of the day. Please read below and cast your vote in the form of a reply (I need to find a poll system for my blog!) 🙂

How many of you have started a book, and not been thrilled with it, and then just abandoned it? I seem to have a completion complex that drives me to complete what I start. I hate to give up on a book and not see it through to the end. I had this dilemma a few weeks ago when I was reading trying to read “Blue Shoe” by Anne Lamott. (You can check out the review here). I really struggled to finish it and was rather disappointed at the end that I “sort of wasted” my time reading it.

I am starting to feel that way, a bit, about the one I’m currently reading – “Sushi for Beginners” by Marian Keyes. I like the premise (remember, I read “chic lit”) – career girl working at a London magazine, thinks she is on the fast track to a glamorous promotion to New York, only to find she’s been shunted off to the hinterlands (Ireland) to helm a new start-up magazine there. She’s learning the ropes, the different culture, the people, the new city, etc. I like it, per se, but it is soooo slow. It’s dragging along like a dental appointment. I’m only 1/3 of the way through it (and it’s about 425 pages long). I just can’t decide whether to keep plugging along (maybe it will get better?), or just chuck it and read the next one on my list. Mind you, I check these out of the library, so I’m not out any money. But still. I hate to give up on anything.

Can anyone out there help me solve my dilemma?

Well, I’ve been signed up for Blingo for a couple of months now and had finally decided that I wasn’t going to win anything. But I just did! I’m so excited! I was hoping for an iPod mini or a year’s worth of movie rentals, but hey, I’m still excited to have won a free movie ticket!

And a closeup 😆

Please go sign up under me if you’re interested, I have a Blingo button on the side of this blog. 😀

Since I seem to be on a flower kick, here’s two photos to show how much our lantana that we planted in the new planter has grown.

When we planted it back in April, it looked like this:

And now, it’s a lot bigger!

I’ve been taking a lot of photos lately of all of my flowers outside. They are all blooming so well and look so good. I lament (well, fuss!) to Tim nearly every day that I hate that they are all going to die while we are gone on vacation. Unless it rains every day or two, they won’t make it. Most of them are in pots and in this heat and humidity, they need water every 24-36 hours or they shrivel and start to die. Oh well, they’ve looked good for nearly two months now!

I learned a new trick. I took several pictures and merged them into a little photo collage using one of my photo editing software’s functions. Learn something new every day!

I do quite a bit of blog-surfing, and I frequently run across memes, quizzes and questionnaires that I like, and want to do in my blog. I found this one a few weeks ago, and filed it away “for a rainy day”. 😀 I really like this one, although for most of you, it’s a little on the long side. I have seen it several places, but I believe the first place was at Denise Pauley’s blog (she’s a scrapbooker). 🙂

It counts down, so click on the -More- link if you want to see the whole thing. 😀

Ten things I do everyday:

1. Eat breakfast
2. Watch TV
3. Check my email and check on Hambones
4. Tell Tim “I love you”
5. Worry about something
6. Read something (newspaper, magazine, book, mail)
7. Brush my teeth
8. Take a shower or bath
9. Take all my meds
10. Sleep

Nine favorite shows of all time:
{in no particular order}

1. Mad About You
2. The Cosby Show
3. Bonanza
4. Little House on the Prairie
5. Happy Days
6. Sisters
7. Survivor
8. Amazing Race
9. 7th Heaven

Eight junk food favorites:

1. Soft Drinks (Dr Pepper, IBC root beer, Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, etc)
2. Pizza (pepperoni & mushroom or All the Meats)
3. Chili Cheese Fritos
4. Chili Cheese Fries (maybe some ranch dressing in there too!)
5. Funyuns
6. Banana Splits or Hot Fudge Sundaes
7. M&M’s
8. Anything chocolate!

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We’ve had a really nice, quiet laid-back kind of day today. The kind that normally drives poor Tim nuts. Poor baby. I love them though. I love quiet restful Sundays, where we can watch tv, play games, play on the computer, read, etc. When I was working, I craved them – a chance to recharge my batteries. Still love them.

We had a tv movie-watching marathon all afternoon (Monte Walsh, Crossfire Trail and Gladiator), and now Tim is checking out “Into the West”, waiting on the NBA game to come on. I think I’ll go read my book while he’s watching basketball. I got my menu all planned out and posted for the week, so I feel like I’m ahead of the game on some things. 🙂