Mark is really the "house-husband" now. He wrapped the gift I bought him. He probably would have filled out the label too if I hadn't made the snarky remark that he was really turning into the house-husband. ;-)
Although, as I pointed out, at least I actually swiped the debit card and entered the pin myself. It could have been worse, he could have BOUGHT it for himself AND labeled it in addition to wrapping it, hehehe.

I was impressed though, just one Christmas of wrapping stuff (something like a whopping 4 items), and his wrapping skills looked much improved.
(Love you honey!)


Speaking of Christmas gifts.... I need to spend this week trying to get them made for my family. Kalli may be mostly over this cold, but it's still hard to get anything done... especially when I'm not even home for 10 hours every day. It used to bug me that it would take me all day long to get 1-2 hours worth of work done, but at least back when I was here all day, I actually even managed to get THAT stuff done.

It always takes me a while to adapt to new schedules and routines. Let's just say I still have to start figuring out how to have dinner prepared each night, because I really haven't been eating well (let alone cooking) in the last couple of months. And then there's the bit of trying to consistently get the laundry even washed every weekend. Let's not even go down the path of actually getting it folded. :-P

So, today is making up for yesterday.

I enjoyed a nice Christmas celebration with my husband's family. We even got to bring Tristin along, for the second-to-last time Mark's going to see him for some months. The poor guy (both of them) :-( ... Luckily it was at least a court-ordered that Mark gets to Skype with him 3 times a week... so maybe Mark won't be a total stranger the next time Tristin sees him. (But really, this whole thing is going to wreak havoc on their relationship... not to mention the last tiny threads of anything familiar the kid had after his mom's husband moved out.) I feel really sorry for him, but then I do think about all of the other kids who have it way worse with n neglectful parents, being treated like dirt, being abandoned so their parents can go party or do drugs or something, etc, etc. Tristin has it better than my own little nephew, Rhys (who I also feel sorry for. My brother is ok with him, but I don't think his mom's friends are).

The kids had a blast, and so did the adults. I'll get some photos posted sometime (as well as the myriad of others I need to get online... it's been months).
Mark's mom cried when she said goodbye to Tristin, and Mark started to tear up too. :-(


After we dropped Tristin off and came home, I got back to working on the media server. By the evening, I had brought it downstairs and hooked it up to the TV. I apparently still had to install a few drivers, but after that it's up and running! So, it's working great all except for not having the 1 terabyte HD in it. I'm glad to report that the HD is still functioning spectacularly via Mark's little external hub-type-thing for it... so whatever that problem is must lie entirely within the adapter. We have all of our files and Mark has been transferring the rest of them (but of course, over USB 1.0 is pretty much just as slow as over cat-5).

My mother in law gave me cash for Christmas, and I'm thinking maybe I'm just going to spend it on a wireless keyboard and mouse for the media server. Why? Because they'd be like the remote control... especially since we can't keep the keyboard and mouse down by the box, because the kids would get into it.
What about the box, you say? Well, I have the awesomest case for my computer: it locks. You can lock the side door on that gives you access to the insides, but it also has a front door/cover thing that locks so you can't get to any of the drives or the power button or anything. (This box was probably designed for building a server, not a personal computer.)
But I dunno, I could also use some new pants..... ;-)


I swear I had something much more worthwhile to post about, but I forgot whatever that was by the time I opened up semagic.

There's this tanning salon up on Garland that has a banner on it reading something like, "Ultrabronz yourself here" or something.
And today as we drove past it, I said to Mark, "Ultrabronz... that just doesn't sound like a very good selling point. It makes me think I'd walk out bright orange, ya know?"

But now, thanks to failblog, I really know what the "Ultrabronz" look must be.
( See for yourself... )

Mark has this SATA-to-USB device, and so we just plugged in our 1T hard drive and Windows did it's plug-n-play thing and viola, it works! We have all of our files! Thank the gods!
So now we just have to return this POS SATA-to-PATA adapter and either get another one or get something else (since obviously USB is going to be a bit slow as a primary way to keep using this HD. It's so effin' huge because we were hoping to rip some of our DVDs to it and play them right off of the computer).

Excitement!

Today is starting to make up for yesterday. :-P

And three days later I finally have a working computer again.

It was not a case of over-heating (I really didn't think it was but was hopeful it was something that simple). Every single time I would boot, the machine would freeze. Sometimes it would freeze prior to actually booting windows, other times it would boot up and run for 10 minutes before freezing. I tried unplugging every combination of hard drives and CD drive except for the obvious one: the one windows is installed on. Nothing made a difference.

After fighting and fighting with the machine (for two days), and watching the problem just get worse and worse so that I couldn't even get Safe Mode to boot up, I gave up and just reinstalled Windows. Luckily, I had found my CD and see that I had written the key on it (which is good, cuz I'm not sure where else it would have been!).

During the reinstall process, I had our new 1T drive giving us some issues. First it froze up each time I tried to do chkdsk on it, and then later when I was reinstalling, it showed up the first time with the correct label and file system format, but ended up freezing the installer. On a second try, the installer failed altogether (think BSOD for the freakin' Windows installer). On the third try the drive was reported at the correct capacity, but listed as having 100% free space and being unformatted (or at least of an "unknown" type).

I continued with installation, and when the computer reboot (after copying the install files to the main hard drive) to proceed with actually installing things, it froze up again. I then got inside the machine and unplugged the 1T HD entirely. After doing that, the computer ran perfectly.

I went ahead with installing windows and it worked like a charm. After installing a few programs and some updates, the machine needed to be restarted, so I did so and plugged the 1T HD back in while the power was off. Once again, the system locked up before Windows was even booted.
*sigh*
Unplugged the HD again and viola, Windows boots perfectly.


I'm rather annoyed. We had transferred 30 GB of our files to that drive before it died. It's BRAND FUCKING NEW. So's the SATA-to-PATA adapter. Because we have no SATA machines in this house, I can't diagnose if it's a problem with the HD or the adapter without turning to a friend who CAN plug it into their machine.
I really hope it's the adapter because that's 30 GB of our files! It also seems more logical that it would be the adapter... this thing isn't the most rigid looking piece of hardware (even though I always tried to be very delicate with it).


So yeah: UGH!
But at least I finally have a working machine again......... sans the big drive and ALL of my music and audio books, and half of Mark's.
>_<


And that wasn't the lot of other things that went wrong for me today. One of them is that I need to buy YET ANOTHER power cord for my laptop... this will be cord number FOUR.
The others are things let's just not bother to mention. We can just say that it felt like nothing went right for me today. To top it off, I was EXTREMELY grumpy all day (this is EXTREMELY rare for me to be THAT grumpy!) from not getting enough sleep all week nor eating properly. The sandwich I went to Safeway and bought and ate for dinner tonight really seems to have helped. *sheepish look for not having eaten better... although to my defense, I was going to buy a sandwich at The Daily Grind today but no, they decided they needed to close an hour early (so before I got my free latte, b/c it was free latte day at work)... just pile that onto the list of things that didn't go my way today.*

But if I sit back and really look at it, things really weren't THAT bad today. My little girl is still on the mend from her cold (as in still gradually and consistently improving). I qualified for all of these cool perks when I went to the bank today to open a savings account (for my taxes; as a contractor I'm responsible for deducting my own). I had a great time at my company's Christmas party last night (and while I didn't get a bonus because I'm not an actual employee, at least they let us contractors come to all of their for-employees fun functions like this). Nothing else beyond my two computers broke today. And I could go on and on if I really wanted to -- really, the list of sucky stuff that happened to me pales in comparison to all the things that didn't go wrong. ;-)


A little protein, a little rescue remedy. Now I should go see how much more I can improve with a little sleep. ;-)

Tomorrow we're celebrating Christmas with Mark's family (and Tristin ... only a few more days before he's being moved away). We ran to the store tonight and managed to buy a few gifts for Mark's family members. I'm hoping to actually have the time next week to make gifts for my family.
I really fail at gifts for the past couple of years. I didn't even get my husband (or anyone else for that matter) an anniversary or birthday gift... just because I don't know what to buy/forget to go shopping early enough before the occasion.

Gotta love broken stuff.
;-)

If I'd have had been drinking something when I read this, I think it would have come up through my nose!

(Can you tell I'm done doing my own work and now I'm just trying to keep myself preoccupied by getting other people to give me some of their work to do? ... Which means I am kind of screwing around online too :-P)


Yeah, this is me opening Agent in every browser I have installed so that I can test our live chat product (where you can chat with real, live operators once you've become completely frustrated with the virtual agent, heh).


The best part to note, a fact that most of us know well, is that nothing can ever look the same in two different browsers, can it?
They have Firefox and IE looking pretty similar, but there are still quite a few differences. Not as many are immediately apparent from a screenshot though... not like all the rest of these (Safari is too wide, Chrome has funny scrollbars that you can't get rid of no matter how much you resize the window, Opera doesn't allow windows to exist outside of the main Opera window (not a flaw, definitely an intended "feature")).


I dunno, I just decided to take a picture of it because:
a) I'm bored :-P
b) I don't usually have 5 Agents open and I thought it was kind of funny to see them all sitting there as well as how different they all look (when they're supposed to be the same).



Ok, ok, I'll go back to working now. :-P

Hey my free-accountin' LJ friends. If you have been thinking about upgrading to a paid account, talk to me (or any paid/perm member) and I'll hook you up with a $10 off coupon.
http://community.livejournal.com/paidmembers/23977.html

10 8 left!

Someday we'll get this media server all hooked up and running. We're making progress, but it just takes a long time.
Four hours to format the new hard drive last night (1 terabyte -- rock! ... but a lot to format), and more hours to transfer all of Mark's music and videos across a cat-5 cable (yeah, we could plug the HD right into his computer but then we'd have to open it up :-P ). It's probably been going for 3 hours now, and there are still lots of files left to be moved... so that will be an all night thing. After we get the files moved, then we can relocate the box downstairs and see if plugging it into the TV even works at all. We moved the files over here before trying it on the TV because obviously it would be faster to transfer them through a wire than over the wireless (although 802.11 N is pretty fast).
So far it's looking good though! Everything is working and all we have left to test out is the s-video adapter!


Kalli seems to be on the mend. She only threw up once last night and it was before she went to bed. After that we made it through the whole night without mommy being puked all over! She also woke up fewer times in the night and only had a mild fever.
Today Mark reported that she still didn't want to have a bottle, but that she was interested in some solids again: mostly salty foods; understandably, since she has thrown up so much. He even said that she got up and played a little bit, including while Tristin and daphyn were here.
Tonight when I got home she, naturally, fell asleep. But I did get a little bit of awake-baby time from 9-10 although she was really only awake because she seemed to be having some discomfort, which I could not remedy, so she whined for most of that hour. C'est le vie.


The snow has been melting like crazy today. No surprise, as it's currently 43 degrees. (Last week it was what, SIX?) This morning it was too slushy and nasty to bike OR walk to the bus (only one of my Sorrels has a shoelace), so I just drove and took the skywalks from the Parkade. Tomorrow though, I'm riding the bike... because the roads are almost all clear and if it's still so warm will probably be completely clear by morning.
Riding the bus sucks because they have such lousy availability, and driving sucks because parking costs $6 a day (and I know that's only 1/2 an hour of my time each day, but I'm a stinge!).



... I still have to update about my week with my Japanese friend, don't I?
Well... maybe one of these days when I'm on the laptop, it's connected to the internet, and have the camera card in there. ;-P

Tried to ride my bike to work in the snow today. I didn't even make it 25 feet.

I don't know if it was simply because you can't really ride a bike through snow that's more than 1 inch deep, or if it was because I didn't have studded tires... but I couldn't keep the bike going in a straight line.

So, back to the garage it was... and then to sit in the house and wait for 30 minutes until it was time for the next bus. Stupid under-funded lousy Spokane bus system.

The good news is, that guy loaning the studded tires out got back to me and said there was someone ahead of me but in 2 weeks (well, 2 weeks from when he picks them up) I could try them out for myself! (If there's even any snow then...)

Took Kallisti to the doctor today.

I was able to go by DSHS and have them print me out a new coupon. The best and most amazing part of all was that I only had to spend about 5 minutes there (ah-freakin-MAZING!).

Her appointment was at 11, so I just stayed home from work until afterward. Of course, that meant I didn't get to work until 2 ... but as Kalli spent most of the day asleep, I was able to stay at work until 7:30 (and believe it or not, there was still another QA guy there when I left!). My first day "on my own" and it went great.
This morning when deciding that I would not go to work until the afternoon, I called my mother and asked if she would be able to drive Mark to court tomorrow. So, mom's doing that so that I can go to work. Yippie, thanks mom! (Poor sick baby who has to ride in the car all day though. *frown*)

Our visit at the C.H.A.S. clinic was really quite good. First off, it's a freakin' doctor's office, second off it's a sliding-scale, low-income, work-with-the-"no-for-good-worthless-poor"-people-of-Spokane sort of clinic. They treated us with the same professional and courteous attitude as any full-rate clinic would have; we only had to wait 20 minutes for the doctor once in the exam room, instead of 45+; the doctor's lung exam didn't match the oxygen machine's numbers so he brought in another doc for a second opinion; we weren't given any lectures or disapproving looks for not vaccinating Kallisti; and in general we were just treated with dignity. It was really cool. (Loads better than Planned Parenthood ever has been!)

After the doctor was all done checking out Kalli, conferring with a colleague (the clinic's pediatrician, who we hadn't actually been scheduled with), having the ped. check Kalli, and conferring with each other again, they told us she seemed to be pretty ok... beyond having a cold and all. He said they were going to go ahead and treat her for the flu and gave us a prescription for Tamiflu. I believe he said he wasn't sure that she actually HAD the flu, but that he was going to treat her for it anyhow. I forget... :-S
She has been vomiting, and had a little diarrhea (and when she hasn't had diarrhea, she's had nothing at all, which has been more prevalent), and a high fever. But otherwise she hasn't had any of the more typical flu symptoms, especially respiratory stuff: cough, runny nose, breathing troubles, etc.
I also wonder because while Mark did catch it, he's not THAT ill. He threw up maybe once or twice on Saturday night, but that's it. If he ran a fever, it wasn't for long and it wasn't very high. Mark doesn't have a very good immune system, especially with his autoimmune disorders... so if it were the flu I'd just expect it to have hit him quite a bit harder, ya know?

We scheduled a followup appointment for Friday, which they said we could cancel if she was feeling better by then.

Until then, we'll see if she can keep the Tamiflu down. First dose was a no-go. Although, she didn't vomit for about 20 minutes, so she may have gotten a significant portion of it. But then, everything came up, and then more, and more, and more, until it was all gone (yeah, she had a few dry heaves, the poor thing). It's interesting... I don't know if she's getting used to it or feeling defeated, but she doesn't appear to be as miserable when she's about to vomit. She just looks like she's so exhausted with being sick. The poor thing. :-(


I have been very thirsty today. I'm not sure if it's because my body is going through more fluids because my own immune system is trying to keep me from catching what Kalli has, or if it's because Kallisti has been nursing like mad and my body is suddenly needing to produce a bunch more milk. Or heck, it could be a bit of both... because my neck glands DO seem a little swollen.




Oh, and the last thing is something some of you already saw on Twitter. I had my knowledge corrected today by the handout they gave us about fevers. I was very concerned when Kalli's fever was getting to 105 (equiv. 104 oral) because I thought that was the temperature at which brain damage could start... so once it got that high I would whip out the Tylenol and tepid baths. The paper corrected me that it's not until 108 that brain damage can happen, so whfew! (And it makes more sense... why would the body be so wont to get so hot it did damage to a very important organ?)
Now, she is certainly absolutely miserable when she's that warm, but she's not playing Russian roulette with her brain like I was worried she was. I hate to see my baby miserable, and I can sympathize with the aching she must be going through... but at the same time, if her fever can do it's job, she might just get to kick this virus, ya know?

All those people out there who have been hoping for a white Christmas are probably so excited to see all of this fluffy white stuff coming out of the sky..... unless they read the forecast and saw that it's all going to melt away over the next few days with our "balmy" (compared to last week's single digits!) 35-40 degree highs.

Ah, gotta love Spokane weather.

On the same token, however, I may just be trying my hand at snow cycling tomorrow morning. I pulled out the mountain bike and slapped my pannier rack on it. Of course, it still has no water bottle cage, nor a kickstand. And I didn't even get anywhere near even completing the task of swapping out the handlebars with my other MTB.
Then there's the fact that I'm essentially broke, so there aren't any studded tires or fenders on the thing.
So... we'll see. Especially since I hear studs are pretty important for winter cycling.
Although, there is this guy who has some studs out for short term loans (longer if no one else is in line)... I should probably see if he still has a pair available -- at least it might get me a couple of weeks on the bike in the snow.

Beyond being broke, I don't really want to invest in studded tires right now (about $90-150 a PIECE) because I have plans to sink some cash (when I have it, harr harr) into a new bike and I'm hoping to get something that I can throw skinny slicks on in the summer and thicker studs on in the winter (but probably not as thick as MTB tires, which is why I don't want to invest in some, new). Of course, I don't know for certain that this is really possible, but there's my reasoning for ya.

Six to seven inches they say.
Seems like they're always off... either we get 4 inches, or we get 18... we'll see.
;-)

The poor baby :-(

She's had a high fever yesterday and today (and a low one for the days preceding those, all the way back to Tuesday night). The last 3 nights she's been vomiting (but only at night). The last two nights/mornings, her temperature has been climbing too high... and of course Tylenol never keeps it down for more than 2 or 3 hours but you're supposed to wait 4 hours before giving another dose. So, tonight I went out to replenish our supply of Motrin, which lasts 8 hours and if her temp rises before that 8 hours is up, I can alternate it with Tylenol, and all of that jazz.

The poor, poor thing. :-(
It's hard enough to spend all day strapped to a pathetically sick child and feeling horrible and a bit worried for her... but it just compounds things when it takes two adults to force her down into a tepid bath because she didn't keep the Motrin down and her fever is 105 (rectal, but still dangerously high!). I have just give her a new dose of Motrin, and so far it's staying down. She seems to do better when she's sitting up, and right now she has passed out on my chest.


Of course, Murphy's Law or something... when you actually need something, you can't find it.
We have every one of her medical coupons from June through November, but can we find the December one anywhere? No.
And, if the state had canceled her medicaid for some reason, they would have sent a letter about it and I haven't seen one of those either.
She really needs to go to the doctor, damnit I wish we could find that thing.
I'm going to have Mark call them tomorrow to see if he can request a reprint or something. But, if we're SOL, then we're SOL and we'll be taking her to the doctor anyways and just paying for it... because she needs to go... she's had a fever for a while now.

I'm not worried about dehydration yet, but I'm just plain worried about how not only is this dragging out, it has really started to get worse this weekend. Of course, there's probably nothing more we can do if it's viral, but we want to be sure it's not bacterial or something. I presume that drinking breast milk should make it difficult to get a bacterial thing... but probably not impossible.

I'm hoping to still go to work tomorrow. I already have to take Tuesday off to take Mark to court, and I don't get paid for any time that I'm not at work. (Plus, I already lost a few hours a couple weeks ago for Mark's court, and an hour last week.... and then the last paycheck I lost an entire week because Satoka was here.)
But yeah, we'll see.
I'd be coming home to take them to the doctor, but hoping to otherwise be at work.
She does better during the day... she always does better during the day. Not sure if that's normal or just her. Her fever actually went away or nearly did during mid-day. She has still spent most of the day sleeping, but she wasn't burning up for part of it.


:-(

I'm in for a long weekend.
Of course, I shouldn't feel so worn down, because Mark's already been putting up with this all week.

I have been puked on, while sleeping, in my bed, four times.
Kalli has had a fever since Tuesday night (but never over 103, more often it has been low enough that we haven't even bothered to temp her).
Today was worse for her, she wouldn't let me put her down at all and spent most of the day sleeping, or laying on my chest and whining. I have watched a lot of TV today... most all of it kids' stuff. She did take a 2-ish hour nap, part of it was during while we had company here... so THAT was nice. Otherwise, she "went to bed" (hard to tell when she has spent most of the last few days sleeping) at 9, and didn't let me get out of bed until 9:45. After I got out of bed, Mark and I started watching a "grown up" movie... which we probably made it 40-60 minutes into before she woke up again.

At some point I gave her some Tylenol, because she was just miserable and has been putting up with a fever for days. She cooled down for like an hour, MAYBE 2, and is warming back up again.

I thought she wasn't going to let me get out of the bed again... but when she wet her diaper, I got up to go and get her a new one. Shortly after I got out of bed, she went back to sleep and has, more or less, stayed that way (it's been a whopping 10-15 minutes now).
And it's 1 am, and so much for getting to do anything for myself today... even including washing some dishes.
All it has been around here since Wednesday is just holding a sick baby, seeing if we can placate the poor thing with the TV or reading books, and just waiting for the time to pass. She keeps asking for baths, and I'll draw one up or start to, and then she tells me that she DOESN'T want one. It seems like she wants to try anything in hopes that she'll feel better but doesn't really know what might work. She spends much of the day whining and asking for things, but when you go to give it to her, she slaps it away or otherwise "changes her mind" like with the bath.

Well, she's starting to fuss again, and I need to go brush my teeth and get in bed because I've given up.
I was hoping to go to temple tomorrow, but it looks doubtful.


Poor baby. :-(

I do hope, however, that I don't get puked all over tonight. I mean, at least it's 100% milk puke, so it doesn't smell that bad, but still... it's still gross, and it still sucks to sleep on a rough towel that gets all wrinkled up below you.

Windows updates and their automatic install (and therefore automatic system reboot) happened a couple days ago and killed the wireless on my laptop (because it randomly works when it "feels" like it, and otherwise stops especially when the machine loses power). Don't ask me why I haven't disabled the automatic part of the windows updates and just spared myself this issue (because it happens frequently enough, and then I have to wait like 2 weeks for the wireless to decide it wants to work again).

So anyhow, rather than lug the laptop back upstairs, perch it on top of the partially-in-pieces desktop box, plug it in to the router, and THEN go, I just decided to put the desktop box back together and fire it up. Mind you, we're still waiting on a PATA->SATA adapter so we can fire up the [fuckin' huge] (1TB) hard drive, and the video card, and the VGA->S-video adapter... but at least the wireless card was plugged in. So, I anchored that down, plugged my DVD drive back in, closed the case, and fired 'er up.

After getting the wireless card installed (and discovering in the process that my CD-RW drive doesn't seem to read CDs right anymore), I decided to test out these new awesomely awesome wireless speaker receivers we have. I hooked the transmitter up to my machine (which has an awesome USB interface), and then we plugged one set of speakers into the transmitter, and another into one of the receivers. Pretty effin' sweet. The transmitter directly interfaces with Windows so that changing the volume or muting it also does the same on my machine. Naturally, the speakers plugged into the transmitter follow suit.
BUT, this all has no effect on the set hooked up to the receiver! You can mute the volume on Windows and still hear it over on the receiver. How cool is that?
And just in general, how cool is it to have the same thing playing on speakers in 5 different rooms around the house?

We haven't tested the range of these yet (like can we really get every room in the house if we wanted), but still, pretty sweet!
I'm looking forward to actually being able to hear the music when I'm in the kitchen, or the library, or even having the option to mute it in the room I'm in while Mark keeps listening wherever he is.

So, now we're just still waiting for the last of those components (maybe they'll all get here tomorrow?), and then soon we'll be in business for watching Hulu on the TV in the living room, or listening to MP3s in 5 different rooms all at once. ;-)