Heather Meadows – Page 163 – p i x e l s c r i b b l e s

Medical update

Because you all want to know, I’m sure.

My primary physician didn’t think my cholesterol was a big deal. He said that I need to exercise more and eat a little better.

Duh. I’ve been eating crappily and sitting around all day ever since the fire.

Brooke and I went for a good walk on Thursday, and hopefully we’ll start doing that and other physical stuff on Tuesdays and/or Thursdays. I’ve also been a little more careful about what I’ve been eating in the past week, and I’m once again going to quit drinking caffeinated drinks. The migraines just aren’t worth it.

My primary physician did say he was fine with me taking thyroid medication, so I got that prescription. He also gave me a new prescription for the same blood pressure medicine I’d been on, since my BP was a lovely 150/100 when I saw him on Friday.

I quit taking my hormones when I ran out sometime around October 1. I’m supposed to wait 8 weeks and see if I have a period, and if not let my endocrinologist know. At that point, I’m also supposed to have more bloodwork done.

I don’t know if it counts, but since Thursday afternoon I’ve been having a period-like phenomenon. I’ll try to spare you the disgusting details, but suffice it to say it’s mostly similar to the first period I had after five years of not having them, except it’s much, much lighter. Like, extraordinarily light.

If it is a period, it’s very early. I just had my last period on September 23 (birthday of people who apparently hold “esoteric”, “secret” knowledge, like Sean), and it lasted about 5 or 6 days. That makes this…whatever it is about two weeks early. However, the menstrual cycle is actually lunar; when I was on the hormones, I was artificially aligning it to the solar calendar. So this could be the proper time for it to occur. (Pseudoscience!)

Of course, if this little dribble is all my body can manage, then I guess I’ll be on some sort of hormone therapy for the rest of my life.

We’ll just have to see, I guess.

In the meantime, I’m hoping the thyroid medicine, which I’ve been taking for two days now, will give me more energy like Mom said it might. I’m tired of being sluggish. “The more you do, the more you are able to do. The less you do, the less you are able to do. The more you do it, the more you are able to do it. The less you do it, the less you are able to do it.” I learned that back in kung fu. It basically means I need to get off my ass :>

The perfect woman

Cheryl has this book about birthdays. For every day of the year, the book provides a two-page personality analysis, using horoscopes and tarot readings.

May 30 people are supposed to be highly attractive, and analogized by a goddess who embodied the “perfect woman”. However, they have trouble getting things done, and would do best with freelance work.

I really wonder if that last bit even makes sense. I mean, freelance work seems appealing, until I actually have some. Then it’s just as tedious and boring as other work, with added difficulty: now I’m the one who has to be responsible, and set deadlines and schedules.

I truly think that the best career for me would be the wife of a millionaire.

Hurry up and get rich, Sean!

It’s the end of the freaking world

Or at least it feels that way, here lately.

Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, completely destroying New Orleans. 1,242 people died.

Typhoons in the pacific have killed over 200 people this year so far.

Hurricane Stan decimated Central America, tipping off floods and mudslides that have left 616 people dead, with many more missing and likely dead.

A huge earthquake killed over 3000 over 20,000 people in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan.

And, lest we forget, at the end of last year the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake triggered a tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

I just feel so powerless. Really, ultimately, what can we do to protect ourselves–from dying individually, and from extinction in general? No matter how hard you try to be safe, ultimately there’s just no way of knowing whether or not your apartment will burn up tomorrow, or be washed away in a flood, or be toppled by an earthquake, or be smashed to bits in a tornado. Is there really anything we can do? Have we caused these weather systems? Can we alter them? How?

Funky

Have you seen The Batman? I watched an episode the other day, and now it’s on again. It’s really neat! The art is just odd enough to be interesting without being irritating (so much of modern American animation art annoys me these days), and the animation is both smooth and stylistically choppy. Some CG work was obviously used, but it blends really well. I like the story, too–it’s a younger Batman, and he’s got all kinds of crazy gadgets. I guess it feels like a sequel to Batman Begins, in a way.

The opening credits are hilarious, too: music with a slightly techno, slightly 70’s flavor, bright horns for all the pows and socks–I love the reference to the Adam West series ;>

The clincher? Barbara Gordon just said, “Brucey, you are so the Batman.” XD

Another weird dream!

Last night I dreamed I was leading a group of people up a snow-covered mountain. We had to crawl through the trees and it was nighttime so visibility was very poor. I had just started to wonder if I’d made a mistake when I finally caught sight of our destination. It was a city called Hina or Hita or something similar, a place we could have reached by walking around the mountain, but apparently there was some good reason for having come up the mountain.

We all found seats in this cafeteria-style area and started getting ready for what we were supposed to do next. A girl kept asking me “What should I order?” and I said, “Whatever’s normal.” She seemed very unhappy with this answer. When I finally saw what she was asking about, I realized that it was pages and pages of questions concerning a festival we were supposed to put on (it had a name that was very familiar for me, like Apres or something–it was spelled with an e but I knew that it was supposed to be pronounced with an /i/). So I took the papers from the girl and brought them back to the committee to get opinions.

We worked through a few things, but the group was large and rowdy and I was having a little trouble maintaining order. Suddenly Audra appeared and started complaining that she ought to be the one running things. I whapped her several times with the papers and shouted, “You got to be Beta President! Now I get to be in charge!!”

Whew

The phone interview I mentioned earlier this week was postponed to today. I just got off the phone.

All I really want to say publicly about it was that I think it went well. It could be a couple weeks before I hear anything either way–let’s all cross our fingers and toes during the interim! ;>

Alphanumeric!

I was just reading the GPF archives (why? why?), and I came across this strip. Makes me grin every time…

If I ever get a virtual reality game, you can bet I’ll program it to change my clothes when I double-click my icon ;>

International organization seeking talented designers for print and video projects.

Must be creative, organized, and discreet. Your projects will include music videos, comedy shorts, news articles, and other media. You will work with existing video footage and statements and produce sleek multimedia packages that will be seen the world over.

GREAT BENEFITS include: the chance to watch the deaths of many infidels, diverse projects to flesh out your portfolio. Possible martyrdom opportunities for enthusiastic individuals!

APPLY NOW!

I just keep thinking of things

Gabe’s got pictures of the new Penny Arcade book up. This only served to remind me that I once owned the original Penny Arcade book–not the $100 one with their signatures, but still, it was the original book! The one that will never be reprinted, because it was published by that company they ended up having legal trouble with (or so I understand).

Sean also had the first Penny Arcade t-shirt, the one that just had character art on the back and “Penny Arcade” written on the front in a handwriting-style font. There was a limited run of that, and you’ll probably never see one again because the art style was totally different back then.

So many things that were rare or irreplacable were destroyed in that stupid fire ;P

Aliens!

I guess there’s a convention for people who believe in aliens going on in Lima, Peru starting on Thursday. The news article has some interesting stories, the kind you usually only hear narrated by Jonathan Frakes.

Seeing isn’t always believing. Wendelle Stevens, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, said he believed in aliens after having investigated 100 cases, despite never having seen any himself.

Stevens, thought to have the largest archive of photographs of alleged UFOs in the world, says he worked from 1947-49 in Alaska with B-29 planes fitted with special scientific instruments to “detect the visitors.”

His work there began the year the U.S. military is believed by some to have hushed up two purported crashes of alien spacecraft within a month. The Air Force denies the stories.

Stevens, who said he did not believe in aliens before his work, said it was his job to debrief the crews of the B-29s and recounted how “the radio frequency spectrum went completely haywire … and the temperature in the airplane increased. (The crew) looked out and there’s a disc next door,” he said.

He said the crew shot photographs with four different types of camera, but the military suppressed the pictures. No Air Force spokespersons could immediately comment on his remarks.

Do you believe in aliens? Or (more relevantly) do you believe they’ve visited us?

At least she didn’t say I have diabetes.

I got a call from my endocrinologist today. I’d had some bloodwork done to see how my FSH levels are, and to run some more normal tests. Well, the FSH is back up to 40, which means there is pretty much no chance it’ll ever get down to where it’s supposed to be. This isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that I’m not even worried about it. Maybe I’ve been doing a good job of preparing myself to deal with being infertile. Or maybe I’m just overwhelmed by everything else. Who knows.

What I am worried about is the rest of what she said, the part about my cholesterol being high and something being wrong with my thyroid to the point that she wants me on medication. She said that I need to have an appointment with my regular physician concerning my cholesterol as soon as possible. I’m…not actually sure what the deal is, but she’s going to mail me my lab results, which I will promptly fax to my mother.

I’ve quit taking the hormones, because I ran out of them and we were going to have me quit them anyway. If I don’t have a period in eight weeks, I’m supposed to call and tell the endocrinologist so. With my luck, I probably won’t, right?

I have been really stupid about my health since the fire. I haven’t exercised at all, and I’ve been eating like a pig. Plus, I’ve been drinking lots of sodas, including stuff with caffeine. It’s like I flushed all the hard work (well, I guess it wasn’t all that much, but it was still better than nothing) I’ve done over the past who knows how long completely down the toilet.

So, I need to rectify this situation. It is really hard to cook properly when I don’t have access to a full refrigerator and freezer or my own cookware, but you know, I just need to deal with it. And I need to hurry up and get Yama so I can start biking again. Being this unhealthy is simply unacceptable.

A lesson learned; or, an exercise in paranoid obsessive-compulsion

Eric Burns reminded me today that National Novel Writing Month is coming. (NaNoWriMo, a truncation worthy of the Japanese language!)

So. Should I do it?

I am really, really upset over losing what little I wrote about Tilya and the Mazarins. I mean, there is an infinitesimal chance that the demo guys will rake through the rubble and pluck out my hard drive, and that my writing will still be on it. But ultimately, it’s probably best to just accept that it’s lost. And the thing is, it didn’t have to be.

I was publishing the book online. It was readily available. It could have been Google-cached, or stored on the Internet Archive.

But I got skittish. I didn’t want the blog to be the “first publication” of the book, because I “might” try to get it published, and people familiar with the publishing world indicated that publishers don’t like sloppy seconds.

In other words, I wanted to protect the publishing rights for something I hadn’t even written yet.

There’s a cliche for that sort of thing, you know. It involves chickens.

If I’d left it public, I’d still have it. And you know, just because I’ve “published” it doesn’t mean a publisher won’t still be interested. There are many people who’ve been published because of their blogs.

What all this is boiling down to is: should I once again attempt a serious writing project, I will do it publicly, on a blog. Rather than bank on something that may or may not happen in the distant future, I will share my work immediately, and get feedback, and ensure that if this house burns down with all my stuff in it, at least what I’ve written will survive.

Free album with liner art!

Wil Wheaton turned me on to Harvey Danger‘s new CD, released for free by the band via Bittorrent and direct download. Is that cool or what? My copy downloaded with BitTornado in a record four minutes.

Their music seems to have changed since “Flagpole Sitta”, which was one of my favorite songs back when it came out. This album plays more like something by Ben Folds, which wasn’t what I expected, but it’s certainly not a bad thing.

Here’s Harvey Danger’s explanation behind their bold move, and here’s where you can get the music for yourself. You can buy the actual CD here, or you can contribute to the band here.

What is up, yo

David went home on Saturday. Sean and I had to get up at the ungodly hour of 8 am and drive him back to Hartsfield-Jackson, which actually wasn’t too big a deal. Drop-offs and pick-ups at the airport are pretty easy. You follow the signs, and there’s convenient parking and a quick “no waiting” area where you can do your business and drive off. We chose the latter and were back on the road in minutes (seconds?). The main issue with the drive was…the drive. I must confess that a good deal of nappage occurred. (Hopefully Sean didn’t fall asleep while he was driving.)

The rest of the weekend has been nice and fairly relaxing. I won’t get into what Sean and I did twice on Saturday, much to our combined delight, except to say that there is physical evidence, and his mother noticed.

I either have a cold, or I am allergic to something. Sean says it’s ragweed season here in beautiful Augusta, Georgia, and that may very well be what it is. All I know is that I’m stopped up, I have on-again/off-again headaches, I blow my nose every hour at least, and there’s intermittent coughing. It’s not abysmally phlegmatic, fortunately, but that may change.

This week I am putting in full time hours to do freelance/contract/what-have-you work for my former boss, Robert. I also threw together an email design for him last week. Freelance jobs are nice because you can pretty much call all the shots yourself. This project is basically data entry, and I’m actually going in to the office to do it, so it’ll be a little different, but not in a bad way. Or so I imagine.

I also have a phone interview this afternoon at 4 pm with a large company that has a base in Evans. The work involves writing, photography, and creating technical drawings. The mean salary for a person of my experience doing this work in Augusta, according to salary.com, is the same as Sean’s salary. Yee! I don’t think the job would be boring, at least not for awhile, and I definitely think it’s challenging enough to keep me busy. The things I would have to watch out for are: 1) being productive; 2) proving that I’m being productive. I didn’t spend enough time doing #2 in my last job. (Wow, that sounds like a constipation problem. Either that or it sounds like I wish I had pooped all over my last job. Hmm, I won’t deny it!)

Strangely, hundreds of strangers have not swooped in and purchased everything off our Things We Lost in the Fire Amazon Wish List. Within the first week, 9 items were purchased, and since then that number has not changed. Either I shot myself in the foot by saying “Don’t buy us stuff, we have no place to put it!” (which is technically true, but we can store things in the neighbor’s spare rooms), or everyone who was going to help out has already done so.

Believe me, I’m not trying to be ungrateful here…we have had a lot of money and gift cards and clothes and other items given to us that we would certainly not otherwise have had, and that have helped us to live relatively normally for the past several homeless weeks. I thank everyone who has helped.

But I don’t know, I guess I am just really missing all my stuff :> I have had three dreams so far about going back into the apartment and finding certain things unharmed. This morning I very unhappily remembered that my first porcelain unicorn, the only one from my collection that I decided to keep forever, is now lost. It was about an inch and a half long, pure white with light brown details and black eyes, and its horn was glued back on from where it’d broken off when I was around 5. My Uncle Steve gave it to me; he’s the one who started (and fostered) my love of unicorns. He gave me plenty of other unicorn items over the years, including stickers, but that little porcelain unicorn was always my favorite.

There’s another item I’ve been thinking wistfully about, and that’s a white mixing bowl that I always used to make brownies. It came from my mother’s ancient stand mixer. I swear that thing was made in the 50s. When my mom finally got her Kitchenaid, she got rid of the old mixer but kept the bowl…and when I moved out, the Kitchenaid and the old mixer bowl came with me, because I loved them and could use them (and because by that point my mother had invested in her Bosch industrial strength grinder/mixer thing and had no use for the Kitchenaid). Now the mixer and the old bowl are gone. And while I can replace the mixer, that bowl was pretty much one of a kind, given its age. (I take some solace in the fact that there was another white bowl, with red spots, that Mom promised me when I was a kid. I never did take it with me, so maybe it’s still in her attic. It’s not the right shape or anything, but it is filled with childhood memories, which is more the point.)

Denied these priceless treasures (there are more, of course, but I don’t have the time to get into them now), my mind has been turning to things I can replace. Why can’t I, for example, have my Kyo Kara Maoh DVDs back now? Or my other movies? Or my Japanese textbooks? And that’s what’s brought me to the fire list, and my ungrateful wondering: where are all the donations?

Woo, that’s all the mental midgetry I have time for this morning. Catch all y’alls later.

Kung fu!

I’m finally catching up on Justin Klein’s blog. While he usually (at least for most of the past year) writes about life in Kyoto, this summer he took a whirlwind tour of Asia. I’ve only just now gotten to this post, wherein Justin describes a show he saw in Beijing entitled “The Legend of Kung Fu”.

Just stop and think for a moment about how awesome that is.

While far more commercialized than the Thai boxing matches I saw on the streets of Chiang Mai, The Legend of Kung Fu was everything I could’ve hoped for and more. The basic storyline of this highly choreographed production followed the training of a monk on his quest to become a Kung Fu master, demonstrations including everything from the various animal styles to weapons to “iron body” demonstrations where a guy would place his full weight on the tips of spears that had just been used to slice fruit, bending them with his bare skin.

I’m soooo jealous. It’s too bad Justin’s camera wasn’t able to capture more of the action.