Eyes on the skies
We’re supposed to have a spring time severe weather outbreak here this evening so I’m keeping an eye on what is happening west of us. These storms in Arkansas, where there have already been confirmed tornado touchdowns, will be here in around 5 to 6 hours.
It’s way early for this kind of weather but it’s also way too warm for this time of the year. It’s also way too early for me to have to start paying the roofers to repair storm damage.
Big Bang Thursday
Thursday means Big Bang Theory and Person of Interest. It’s also the only night of the week that sort of centers around TV for me.
Since I got my refurb Dell Streak 7, I rarely use my iPod Touch anymore. I’ve been playing IHeartRadio quite a lot. I listen to a lot of 70’s music and I’m sure they will be inserting AARP and Geritol commercials into my feed at some point. You can listen to my Fleetwood Mac themed station here.
Other than that, I am still battling sinus woes. I woke up with another headache this morning at 4:15AM. It’s really starting to get annoying. And, the earlier I get up, the earlier I want to go back to sleep. I’ve also “wrenched” my back (that’s the only word I can think to describe the constant discomfort). Getting old is a real pain – literally.
At least there is just one more day in this week.
Tuesday: I get sick, fuss about work, finish The Fault in Our Stars, and watch Courageous all in just 23 hours
Though I have never written about it here before, I have a fun thing called chronic hypoglycemia. This is really just a fancy term for low blood sugar that comes and goes. I spent a lot of time going to the doctor with it when I was a kid. As an adult, I’ve had to be quite careful what I eat and what I don’t eat. I typically only have what I would call “a bad attack” once every six months or so.
The odd part is that I am never really sure what will turn a mild (better eat something now) deal into a full blown (I don’t have enough energy to walk and wonder if I am in need of an ambulance) deal. Also, these things happen so rarely that I typically miss whatever signs there are that would warn me that the little blood sugar dwarves are about to have a riot in my insides.
Before I went to bed last night, I felt a small headache coming on. We had a big change in the weather coming so I thought it must be sinuses. I woke up at midnight still hurting and took some sinus pills. Then, I woke up at 2AM and thought my head was coming off my body and barely had enough energy to get from the bed to the bathroom thinking this was a stomach bug because, well, don’t worry about that part. That’s when it hit me that this was the blood sugar plummeting. Thus we have the paradox of low blood sugar – you must eat to recover but you feel so bad that the last thing you want to do is eat. And, I get so nervous and edgy that I can’t lay down. I have to sit up for all of this because laying down seems to make it worse.
I finally ate enough Ritz crackers and drank enough Coke to start to feel alive again but I never could go back to sleep. So, here I am, 23 hours later, sitting at the kitchen table typing out another entry in the blog. Also, you really need a full day and a night of sleep to get over a real good low blood sugar spell so I felt like warmed over in the hot sunshine crap all day and it was busy as all get out at work but I still propped myself up in my office chair and just kept going.
Sitting in the office window all day gave me a front row seat to all of the lightning. I had to finally close the blinds since I have no desire to leave this world being electrocuted while filling in a Sharepoint form.
The tornado missed us here but a bit west and a bit south and a bit north of us people had roofs ripped off. We complain about the snow but then get a reminder of just how nasty spring gets around here these days.
Now, I can’t sleep. Partially because I was stupid enough to look at my Blackberry at 7PM and saw an email that made me so angry that I nearly spit fire and partially because I still had 150 pages to go in The Fault in Our Stars at 9PM and got so engrossed in it that I had to finish the rest of the book and now I can’t stop thinking about it. I had read a review somewhere that said it was as good Catcher in the Rye, which I have read multiple times starting in 1987. I disagree. It was better than Catcher in the Rye because these characters never stopped caring and never stopped trying. It was funny, it was honest, and yes, it was sad. One thing is certain – I may never read The Catcher in the Rye again.
Even sadder than the things in the book that I will not reveal here, it is over and part of the book is about another book that the main character is sad about because it ended with so many questions. TFIOS didn’t end with a ton of unanswered questions but it did leave you hoping for more and I personally hope that the assumption I have about the way the story would have truly ended if it were another 50 pages long might not really be right. At least us readers are left with that hope.
It was also the first real book, as in not an e-book, that I have read in a long time and I really found myself getting frustrated with the pages wanting to close and not being able to get comfortable holding the book. Either the Nook has really spoiled me or I am achieving a level of fantastic laziness in my middle age. Now I have to figure out what I am going to read next.
Oh! I almost forgot but after supper we did sit down and (in between work email-related rage fits) watch Courageous. We had watched Fireproof a while back and these movies are pretty similar. I was curious about this one and I was a bit let down. To me, Fireproof was much more believable. I think one problem was that there were too many characters in Courageous and they were trying to tell too many stories and teach too many moral lessons. This also rushed the whole story.
A lot of people seem to think it is a life-changing movie but I just kept thinking that maybe things happen like this in a Christian-themed Disney World but not in real life. I tend to think that there is a certain danger in presenting people with a false idea that being a Christian solves (or leads to a nearly immediate solution of) all of our problems. When people realize that is not the case, they turn away from being a Christian and go right back to “winging it”. Faith means trying to live with the right goals in mind and trying to look to a higher power when things are and are not going right. You’re not going to hit the mark every time and you’re not going to get the answer you want every time.
That was my Tuesday – take it or leave it. At times, I would have rather left it but all-in-all it worked out just fine.
Wynton Marsalis talks about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
CBS This Morning really seems to get better everyday. I taped it this morning so I could go back and watch it later and I’m glad I did. This is one of the best tributes to Dr. King that I have ever seen.
http://cnettv.cnet.com/av/video/cbsnews/atlantis2/cbsnews_player_embed.swf
The Weekend in Pictures
We still have a lot of coughing going on in this house as the upper respiratory crud is continuing to make the rounds. Everyone seems to be getting better but the progress is very slow. It’s annoyingly slow. At least we’re not having an upchuck fest like these people in Canada. I think I had a sympathetic stomach ache just reading about it.
The weekend for the kids started on Friday due to our massive blizzard that came in Thursday afternoon. Watch this video to relive the horror of the 1/2 inch of snow we got that closed down all of the schools and totally gridlocked all traffic.
Here is the pic from Friday night. I think we were on the way to Chili’s. It was o.k., average, whatever. I would have preferred Waffle House.
I drove over to see my parents on Saturday. Check out all of the salt still on the roads!
I got back home to find my pre-ordered copy of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars had finally arrived! I follow John Green on Twitter and Tumblr and I kept reading all of these incredible reviews of this book so I had to order it. I just started reading it today so I’ll post a quick review when I am done.
John Green signed 150,000 preorders yet Walmart managed to get rare unsigned copies and sent me one! Am I special or what?!?
I guess I could return it to Walmart for a signed copy (they had some left a couple of days ago) but I’m just going to suck it up and keep my ultra-rare unsigned copy.
And, yes, you might think I am a bit old to be reading young adult but John Green is nothing like the little bit of young adult I read growing up. Remember I Am The Cheese or A Separate Peace? The Young Adult category is nothing like that now. The big plus is that this will get handed down to the kids when they are old enough to read it.
That leads us to Saturday night and another picture. It was still pretty windy when I took this one.
Now it is Sunday and we weren’t worth two dollars today. Driving west in the afternoon is no fun at all.
For some reason, I felt the need to commemorate mile 143,538 in the amazing Ford Contour.
That’s my weekend. I’m watching some Golden Globes now. Everyone but me is off tomorrow so I am quite jealous. There is a nice grocery list for them to deal with tomorrow so at least they will be tortured a little. That makes me feel better.
A new level in laziness – achieved
Why turn around to watch the news on TV when you can pop in your Hauppauge WinTV-HVR850 USB tv tuner in your laptop and stick an antenna up in the window?
I bought this thing almost three years ago and doubt I’ve used it for more than 3 hours. I spent around 10 hours a day working on the laptop and I kept thinking – I wish I could catch the news or weather without having to stop what I am working on. Voila! I open WinTV and there is our local CBS station in a nice window right next to what I am working on.
Next, I just need to install a potty in my work chair and bring in a mini fridge.
Hey, Twitter! Quit whining about Google Search+.
Skip reading this today if you don’t want to read another one of my tech-induced rants.
Earlier today, MG Siegler pointed out this tweet from Twitter’s General Counsel, Alex Macgillivray:
Folks asked for examples. Here’s what a user searching for “@wwe” will be shown on the new @Google. twitter.com/amac/status/15…
— Alex Macgillivray (@amac) January 11, 2012
Twitter is offended because they feel that they are being “buried” in Google’s search results under the new Google Search+. I think that this is Google promoting their own service which they have a right to as a company. I don’t see Twitter freely promoting its competitors anywhere so I have no idea why they expect their competitors to do so.
Take a closer look at the picture:
Now, look at what is just barely down the page:
Twitter is actually the fourth result! They are whining about being the fourth result. Big whoop! I don’t think it’s hard to find at all. And, why would Google “showcase” a result for a competing service for free?
Finally, Twitter doesn’t even title the page “@wwe”. Why would a search engine index it as @wwe (and give Twitter the coveted top result) if that is not even the title of their page?
Should Google, again for free, create a script to insert that in there for them? I certainly don’t think so.
Does Google have a responsibility to mankind to be Twitter-friendly? Give me a break.
People need to seriously get a grip. It’s business. It’s not a charity and it’s not an anti-Twitter conspiracy. Twitter, stick a Google search box at the top of your page for free and maybe I’ll reconsider.
Sunless Sunday
Another typical Sunday here. We started with a fast food breakfast (McDonalds). We went to church. We had lunch. We came home and lazied around for a while. I clipped coupons. I emptied the dishwasher. I continued to play with my new gadget, the Dell Streak 7, and admired its new red case. I think I finally figured out while it has been eating battery power all night while it “sleeps”.
Our youngest daughter started feeling puny so I stayed home from evening church to give her more time to rest. We’re both starting to get colds. It’s probably the wonderful weather (warm/wet/cold/dry/repeat) that is getting us.
I read some work emails. We ate Chinese for supper. I did not watch the news because I didn’t want to have a news-induced freak-out that I would then have to blog about. I did not watch football because it’s over for the Titans and I really could care less about the rest of the teams still playing. I did listen to some podcasts and I even read some.
That was Sunless Sunday. Tomorrow is No Fun Monday. Boooooooooo.
Democracy=Every 3 years, take a year to poop on the President
Is it any wonder why our country seems to get less and less respect around the world with each passing year? Our election years have disintegrated into a circus where a stage full of monkeys fling poop and they don’t just fling poop on each other, they fling it on our President and his administration.
The poop flinging is going on right now on national television.
I am not an Obama fan. I think our country is a mess and whether it is him or all of the people surrounding him in the White House, we’ve got a grade A mess on our hands. However, we have a stage full of politicians that cannot tell us what they will do to fix things – they can only complain about how broken everything is and they point the finger squarely at Obama.
Of course, this is the same way Obama ended up in office four years ago.
Can an election occur where we have people who put making this country better above and beyond everything else? I don’t think it can happen without a huge overhaul of election laws. The $$$ has got to be taken out of these campaigns. As Stephen Colbert has shown us, it’s way too easy to hide behind a PAC (or a Super-PAC). It’s all about who has the money. The elections are bought and then the legislation is bought by the same people hiding behind lobbyists.
Yes, it’s been like this for years but it is getting worse and worse and the people no longer have a voice because we (the very few that still vote) are bought by the constant barrage of commercials. We also don’t do the research. Many people voted for Barack Obama because they were voting against Sarah Palin. What a terrible way to have to make sure an important choice.
And, the primary/caucus process is a mess. Look at Iowa – around 122,000 people out of approx. 2 million registered votes had enough power that one candidate is already out. I agree with this article at the Huffington Post – these candidates won nothing. New Hampshire will be no better. Also, do these early voting states really reflect what people in more urban states (like California or Florida or New York) want?
We’ll all just have to do our best to watch this process with amusement and not let it make us any more bitter than we already are. I’m already looking forward to heading to the polls in November and placing my vote to that special candidate who is least likely to destroy our country for three years before we get to fling poop at him/her and then go through all of this again.
