Category: Personal

Happy new year, everyone!

Obviously I’ve not just had a vacation from work this past week, but a vacation from posting as well. I’d like to say I’ve been insanely busy, but I’ve really just been somewhat busy and otherwise rather lazy.

Debbi’s cold has unfortunately stuck around for the whole vacation, and it’s hit her a lot harder than mine did me: She’s had such bad congestion she’s sometimes had trouble breathing, and has gone on powerful coughing jags, one night it’s was bad enough that she didn’t get to sleep until 8 in the morning. It’s really been brutal, and it’s sucked that it hit her during our vacation. It’s almost like she caught one cold, and then caught a second cold in the middle of the first one. But the symptoms have been progressing like a cold, and she hasn’t had a fever or nausea, so we’re pretty sure it’s “just” a cold, and not the flu or something uglier.

On the bright side, she got her car bumper replaced, since the old one got banged up when she ran into a ladder lying on the freeway a few weeks ago.

Last week we were watching the cat of my friend Andrew, Sir Meows-a-Lot, who is still a kitten. I think he’s about 8 months old, but Andrew has said he’s younger. But he seems bigger than a 6-month-old to me. He’s full of meow and loves to chase the laser pointer, and purrs madly when you pick him up. We wore him out completely each day we visited, so we all had a good time.

I’ve spent a lot of the vacation in the study. Mostly I’ve been getting my Magic cards organized, as they were getting to be a mess last month, and I made a few new decks. But I’ve also gone through some books and packed them up to sell to Bookbuyers next month. I also catalogued my recent comic book purchases, and organized some comics I don’t want to keep anymore, either putting them in my “to sell” boxes or throwing them out (if I don’t think I can get anything for them). I tidied up the “big closet o’ stuff”, moving the Babylon 5 script books into it. So things are getting cleaner up there. I really need to go to Storables and order some wall-mounted shelving for the closet, since then we’ll be able to stash a lot more stuff in there.

Since Debbi was still laying low, we had a quiet New Year’s last night, having take-out Indian food with Subrata and Susan, and watching DVDs for the evening. Their son Ajay is getting quite big, and will probably be crawling soon!

I’ve never been big on New Year’s resolutions, and I haven’t done a great job of keeping them when I have made them, so I have none this year. What I mostly hope is that I can hit the ground running after this vacation, having recharged my batteries, and not just be highly productive at work but make some progress on some personal projects I’ve long wanted to work on. Of course, January is shaping up to be a busy month already, so we’ll see how that goes!

In the meantime, I’d be happy just for Debbi to get well.

A quiet day here at the ol’ homestead. I’ve nearly kicked my cold, but Debbi’s still weighed down by hers, so we stayed home, opened presents, watched TV, and phoned our families.

I’ve cooked dinner the last two nights: Last night I sautéed marinated chicken cutlets, served with gravy, and made rice pilaf on the side. Tonight I baked meatloaf (bacon-wrapped!) with potatoes gratin on the side, and steamed carrots. A giant stack of dirty dishes later and everything turned out really well. I’m always a little surprised when I can put things together like that and it ends up yummy.

It looks like the rain is coming to an end and it’ll warm up by early next week. With any luck Debbi will shake her cold and we can have a pleasant vacation.

I hope the holidays are treating you and yours well. If I haven’t talked with you lately, feel free to drop my a line or look me up on IM and say ‘hi’.

My cold has been lingering all week. At least I don’t have the bone-tired feeling which tells me my body is spending a large amount of its energy fighting it off, but I still have the congestion and – the worst part – the annoying cough. I’m slowly getting better, and I’ve certainly been well enough to go to work, but it’s been frustrating.

On top of that, Debbi came down with the cold last night, and is home from work today. Amazing that it took her a week to come down with it (assuming it’s the same cold, and not some different cold that I’ll be catching in a few days). Hopefully she’ll get over it faster than I have, as it’s taken me a long time to shake it; usually I get over my colds except for some post-nasal drip within three days.

Meanwhile, we’re having ridiculously cold weather here, for the Bay Area: Highs in the 50s or even 40s, and lows below freezing. Contrary to popular belief, we do usually have a few below-freezing nights during the winter, but this cold snap has been around for a week, and it’s going to stick around through at least the weekend. Brr. We’re supposed to get more rain soon, which is fine; I just wish it’d warm up a little.

Despite the cold weather, the trees around here still haven’t dropped all their leaves. Usually I get out the leaf blower and suck up the leaves in my back yard over Thanksgiving. This year it looks like I won’t even be able to do it over Christmas. Well, maybe the next round of storms will blow the rest of the leaves to the ground.

Anyway, I’m just about done with my Christmas shopping, despite getting a ridiculously late start this year. So that’s something. I’m looking forward to have a nice quiet Christmas. But then, don’t I every year?

It’s been a pretty rough week since we got back from Disneyland.

Wednesday on her drive home, Debbi’s car hit a ladder which was lying on the freeway. Actually it sounds like it practically hit her: She says it was a couple of lanes over in the road, and another car hit it, which sent it spinning across the road towards her. It looks like it did a pretty good number on her bumper, but thankfully it seems like the bumper protected the rest of the car from being damaged.

Wednesday evening I came down with a cold which laid me low on Thursday: I woke up and called in sick to work, and then went back to sleep for several hours. I was better on Friday and went in to work largely because I wanted to say goodbye to our departing intern. But today I’ve still been pretty sick. We started putting up our Christmas lights, but I ran out of gas pretty quickly, and slept for several hours this afternoon. This meant that we ended up skipping Debbi’s company party, which like last year was held at the Giants ballpark. I’d been looking forward to going, but being sick and the weather being cold (with a chance of rain) we decided it wasn’t a good idea. Bummer.

So we’re having a quiet night at home, and probably more of the same tomorrow. The middle of the holiday season isn’t a great time to get stalled out for several days – I’m well behind on my Christmas shopping – so hopefully I can knock this thing out of my system tomorrow.

I went in for my annual eye exam this morning. Things haven’t changed: I’m still blind as a bat. 🙂 But fortunately they make lenses for that.

I’m slowly coming around to thinking about getting laser eye surgery. Mainly I think it would be handy to simplify things as I become farsighted, so I don’t need bifocals as soon (if at all). My eye doctor said that laser surgery would mean I’d need reading glasses sooner than otherwise, but I think she just meant that I’d have trouble seeing close up as my ability to change my eyes’ focus degrades with age, which is the same problem that people who aren’t nearsighted have anyway. But since my left eye is significantly more nearsighted than my right, this would probably still be a win for me (the disparity means I almost never read without lenses anyway).

Through the magic of Wikipedia, I learned today that there is in fact a farsightedness condition which is the opposite of nearsightedness. I think most people (including myself) think of farsightedness as “what happens to everyone’s vision as they get older”, but in fact this is yet another condition. I don’t think I’ve ever (to my knowledge) met someone who has true farsightedness, whereas nearsightedness and presbyopia are both quite common.

Anyway. Good to know my eyes are in the same shape they’ve been in for years. I don’t know what I’d do without them.

People are putting Christmas lights up on their houses, Christmas tree farms are in business, and heck, we even went out and bought an artificial Christmas tree yesterday. It must be the holiday season.

You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find an artificial Christmas tree that doesn’t have its own lights built-in, and that doesn’t have little artificial pine cones, or berries, or snow-tipped branches. I.e., things the cats could chew off and eat. As for the lights, we don’t need them because we already have plenty of our own. But we found one after hitting several stores, at Lowe’s, which actually had the best selection of anywhere we went. We decided to get an artificial tree because the price of real trees has been going through the roof the last few years. I don’t mind paying $20 or even $30 for a tree, but $40 and up is getting ridiculous for something we’re only going to have up for 3 or 4 weeks. So we’ll give this a try.

The holiday season of course starts with Thanksgiving. (Well, it does unless you’re a retailer who’s had Christmas decorations up since before Halloween, but if you did, then there’s something wrong with you.) We had a low-key Thanksgiving in which we cooked a turkey and all the sides. Debbi actually did most of the cooking, for which I was thankful. 🙂 But she was very pleased that she managed to time everything to come out at nearly the same time. I took a walk down to the supermarket in the middle of it all to pick up a few things we’d forgotten, and it was a gorgeous day.

Unfortunately, another sign of the season is the sight of stores closing due to the poor economy. The chain Mervyn’s (which competes in the clothing and housewares markets with Sears and Kohl’s) is going out of business after several years of struggling. The nearby Circuit City is closing, too, as part of the electronics retailer’s efforts to stay afloat. (This particular site used to be a Good Guys! store; I wonder what’ll follow it?) So we went around to see if there was anything we wanted to pick up. And we got a bunch of other shopping in, too.

We’re also looking for some stuff for home improvement projects. Well, one project isn’t ‘improvement’ so much as ‘replacement’, since the light on the upstairs porch went AWOL when we got our complex painted. I liked the old light – it gave off a lot of light, which is nice for sitting up there during warm summer evenings – and would like to get a similar one.

But we’d also like to replace the light fixtures downstairs. All three of them use halogen bulbs, which are low-profile, but the three bulbs total something like 700 watts (or more), so I’d like to get lights that we can use compact fluorescent bulbs in, which will cut our energy use by hundreds of watts. Which would be good because we sometimes manage to overload the circuit and trip the breaker downstairs. I’m hoping that replacing light fixtures will be pretty easy, but first we have to find some we like. The typical home improvement stores tend to stock only “traditional” style fixtures, and I want something more modern, so we’ll probably have to hit the lighting stores to find what we want.

So that’s been our weekend. Well, that and Debbi went to the Harvest Festival on Friday with her friends. Today we’re just going to stay home and watch football, I think.

Which ain’t a bad idea because another sign of the season is that it’s starting to get chilly outside.