Trick or Treat!

Due to the nasty combination of a severe upset stomach, and it being very cold outside, my son's trick-or-treat jaunt was cut short. We went to the homes of a couple of friends, and then I took him out to Culver's for dinner. After a couple of french fries, I felt better. We went home, stopping at the store for popcorn and other snacks, and popped in some old horror films.

Much better, to my way of thinking, than traipsing across town collecting candy that we'll be eating until Christmas.

Don't forget! NaBloPoMo starts tomorrow!!!!

Another "Oh Crap" moment

The skirt I was going to wear tomorrow, as part of my pirate costume, is too short. I recall having about 3 yards of black fabric, somewhere. I dug around looking for it, and found the remnants of it, with cutouts in the shape of the paned sleeves I made for my court gown. Damn.

The makings of a good day...

Today has possibilities. It is decently nice out, I got to work a bit early, and the lens to laser cutter 2 was NOT broken, merely hard to clean. Yippee!!!

Now, if only my jaw would unclench. After an entire weekend of stress due to a possibly broken lens, it just will not relax.

Tomorrow - Halloween!

Weekend Pics

I took a lot of pictures this weekend, mainly because no one has been taking pictures of our campouts for awhile, and we are in need of new photos for our bulletin boards in the meeting hall. Here are a few of my favorites:

This is the cabin where we stayed this weekend. Lots of gorgeous trees...



Here is my son, taking his turn carrying the backpack:



Something interesting, under a tree:



A closer look:



Near the beginning of the trail:

WT...?

I checked out a camera to take with me to the campout this weekend. I am now importing the pics. Too bad that the person who had it previously did not delete the images off of the CF card...

Home

Tired, but we had fun. We actually hiked about six miles yesterday. Our ghostly friend did NOT make an appearance. And we discovered that none of our cell phones actually fell back last night, so we were up an hour earlier than we needed to be. Oh well. We are home early. The twelve-year old is in the tub, and I am going crazy because my hair smells like the cabin. Yuck.

I am waiting for a bath, then lunch, then a nap.

Busy

Today was the total opposite of yesterday.

Today I:

1. Went to work,
2. Helped my son with the menus and grocery list for the campout,
3. Took my son to the scout room to double-check gear, and make sure that the correct equipment was pulled,
4. Did the grocery shopping for the campout,
5. Picked up the key to the place we are going for the campout and dropped off the check,
6. Carried the groceries into the house and put them away,
7. Started a load of laundry,
8. Reminded my son three times to do homework.

And the evening is not over yet. I am going to pack my suitcase, and get our sleeping bags and stuff out of the closet. Tomorrow, I have to go buy two of those disposable pans for the lasagna, and some ice after work. Busy, busy, busy...

Eat

Well, apparently the thing that makes me feel sick after I eat is back. I've worked through this in the past, and the only thing I can do is limit the amount and types of foods that I eat. I am a bit hungry right now, but the thought of eating is making me feel icky. The texture of the food, the taste of it, the weight of it in my stomach. Ug!

So, I am going to carefully watch what I eat, paying close attention to the amounts. I will stop eating when I first start to not be hungry, and I will just eat smaller amounts during the day. Very little sugar, and dairy. Small amounts, or no meat. Gad, even potatoes sound icky right now... and that's about the most inoffensive food...

Hopefully, this will pass quickly.

What they can and cannot do when they are sick...

It's amazing, really. My son is at home, sick, for the second day now. Monday afternoon and evening, he literally just sprawled on the couch, not wanting to move for anything. Yesterday morning, he slept in until about 9, and sprawled on the couch until after lunch. After lunch, he played computer games, and gradually worked his way up to playing with Lego™, and making a mess of his room. He went to bed early. When I woke him up early this morning, from the first words he spoke, I knew he would be staying home again today (you can hear how much his throat hurts when he talks).

But, I digress. When my son was very young and I was figuring out how to be a parent, I was always told to not put any artificial restrictions on children when they are sick. Don't force them to stay in bed when they want to play. It's better for them to have as much activity as they wish. When they want to stay in bed, let them, as long as they get up and move around every once in awhile. They will let you know what they need, and what they feel up to.

Now, we have been lucky. My son does not get sick often. He is not the type of kid who will fake sick to get out of school, because he knows that #1, I'll catch him, and #2 school is important. But he also tends to try to take advantage of the situation.

For example, yesterday afternoon he felt well enough to play with Lego™, and play Warcraft, but not well enough to go to the kitchen and get a banana when he was hungry. He did end up getting it himself, when I pointed out the silliness of this, especially when he had just gotten a glass of ice water for himself, without even thinking about it.

But at the same time, I didn't want to leave him alone, in case he suddenly got sicker. I went to the grocery store yesterday afternoon, to get more soup and Dt. Pepsi, and I thought that I might as well take the cans back while I was at it. Bad idea. Took forever, for reasons that would fill another blog post, and by the time I finally finished, I felt like I had been away for hours. I quickly found what we needed (and forgot the flavored oatmeal my son wanted), and rushed home, only to realze that I had been gone a grand total of... wait for it... twenty minutes. Yes, folks, moms are weird.

In any case, his fever is gone, but he is left with a sore throat. Hopefully, with a lot of chicken noodle soup, and Ricola, he'll be feeling much better tonight. Because seriously, I couldn't take another day of this.

Home again

My son still has a sore throat, headache, but no fever (or at least, he didn't have one when he went to bed last night. He's still asleep.)

Another boring day...

So what does Geek Girl do when home with a sick child?

Well, my computer area is now clean and uncluttered. And I have caught up on reading a bunch of forum posts that I haven't had time for. I also made oatmeal for my son's breakfast, and he's looking forward to chicken noodle soup for lunch. Again.

Eventually, I will need to make my way to the grocery store for more soup and oatmeal.

His throat is really painful, and he says his back aches. He is on the couch, with a book, watching cartoons. I can tell just by looking at him that he is feely pretty crappy. The good news is that his fever is down. I am monitoring it every couple of hours, to make sure that it stays down.

Boring, boring, boring, boring day...

Prepare for non-stop work

Tomorrow, I will be staying home with a sick child. I will very specifically be making sure that he drinks enough fluids, and that his fever doesn't get too high. Since this is the flu, he will not be going to the doctor's office unless his fever gets over 102°F. Too contagious. It was the same for the chicken pox (for the love of God, don't bring him in to expose the entire waiting room full of kids. I wish more people would listen.).

So, I will be stuck at home, basically attending to the every whim of my poor, sick child.

You know he's going to abuse the situation...

If I had someone taking care of me when I was sick, I'd do the same. Since I don't, I have to suck it up and keep things going. Okay, that one time this summer, my son did make me butter toast for lunch. And it worked! Magic toast!

Anyway, I have decided that I am going to sort boxes of crap from my closet tomorrow. It will keep me busy. I may even set up a little costuming challenge for myself. Something that involves hand-finishing, so that I have something to do on these cold, fall nights, when I am sitting on the couch watching TV like a loser.

Yeah, tomorrow is gonna suck.

The Latest Victim

My son's been fighting a cold for the last few days. When he called me after school today, he sounded awful. He had a headache and a sore throat. I told him to rest on the couch until I got home.

Damn.

When I got home after work, I took his temp. Almost 100°F, and only adult tylenol in the house. He also said that he ached all over, which means... da da duh... it's probably the real flu.

You see, flu season started early this year. So early, in fact, that no flu vaccine clinics have been held. This may, in fact, have been what I had last week, and what I worked through (except for that one day when I couldn't take it anymore and stayed home to feel sorry for myself). So far, a co-worker and his wife are currently suffering from it, and my boss has as well.

So, if you think you may have the flu, but have discounted that theory because it's too early for it, think again.

Hey, the grocery shopping is done, too.

I hate grocery shopping on Sunday afternoons. Very busy time at Hy-Vee. But, I got my cart full of mostly unhealthy foods (hey, the salad, apples, bananas, and granola bars got in there by accident!), and got out of there in less than 30 minutes. Behold! The power of The List!

Yes, I am boring. Make no assumptions that this site is meant to be anything other than just what I do and what is in my head. It could be a lot worse, you know. I could actually detail a day at work for you. It would be enough to make your head explode from technical details best left to geeks.

For example:

I had to make a minor, minor change on one of the cyber cafe macs. It involved the following steps (this is why I don't use driveshield in the labs. If I had to go through this to make a small change on the lab machines, I would jump off of the atrium.)

1. Boot to openfirmware and enable firewire boot.
2. Boot from firewire drive. Copy any necessary files to the cafeHD. Move the logout hook from /etc to the admin user desktop. Have to do this in order to be able to login as admin on the cafe machine (this hook invokes a script that causes the machine to reboot on logout instead of logging out. Hence, the cafe user cannot actually logout of the machine.)
3. Reboot.
4. Logout of the cafe user
5. Login as admin. Disable driveshield.
6. Reboot
7. Logout of cafe user
8. Login as admin.
9. Change user restrictions to allow the cafe user to have the ability to make the necessary changes, say in the screensaver.
10. Logout of admin
11. Login as cafe user
12. Make the change, and make sure all windows are closed, and everything looks as it is supposed to.
13. Logout of cafe user
14. Login as admin.
15. Remove the changes made to the cafe user restrictions
16. enable driveshield.
17. Reboot.
18. Hope to God that you did everything correctly, and didn't miss anything, or you will be starting over at 1.
19. repeat for each. damn. machine.

See what I mean. Boring.

Yay! Laundry done!

And before anyone complains about another laundry post, I would like to remind my three readers that laundry makes the world go 'round.

Just think about it for a moment. Without clean laundry, what do you have? You maybe can't go out on the spur of the moment, or maybe you put off running errands, because the only clean clothes you have are either pyjamas or dressy clothes. Maybe you have to wear your least comfortable pair of jeans, instead of your favorites.

What I am trying to say, rather ineloquently, is that without clean laundry, things just don't feel right.

Things feel right for me right now.

Neighbors

I ended up sleeping on the couch last night. And then on the floor, because the couch was not comfortable (my back hurt). I tossed and turned. Finally, around 7am, I woke up, and went to my room to crawl into my bed. I just woke up.

Why didn't I just sleep in my bed last night?

Well, my bed is against the wall that separates my neighbors living room from my bed room. I don't know what the heck was going on over there, but they kept hitting the wall. I finally grabbed my pillow and made my way to the couch.

It was just an overly loud night in the apartment building. Between someone stumbling against the door to my apartment, and loud people in the hall, I did not get to sleep until around 2.

So here is it, nearly three hours after I wanted to wake up. I have laundry to do, a house to clean, and groceries to buy. The day is nearly half gone.

Urg.

Strange subjects...

"out-of-the-way forked"
"terminus wove"
"abdicate ring"
"underworld waiting room"
"peerless cessation"
"hexagonal execute"
"intensifier salmon"
"sane plumber"

Yeah. Those sound totally legit.

Another Saturday...

What I finished today:

1. Cleaned out the refrigerator.
2. Ran the dishwasher twice (once this morning after breakfast, because I forgot to run it last night, and once after cleaning out the refrigerator).
3. Took out the garbage.
4. Helped my mom solve a computer problem over the phone. In Win2K Pro.
5. Helped my son clean his room. Secret to getting cooperation: We set the timer. 15 minutes of cleaning, then 15 minutes of a DVD, in this case Over the Hedge. Repeat until finished. Took us a total of 45 minutes to clean his room. Multiply that by two of us, and we got 90 minutes of work done. He was very happy with the results. One huge box of stuffed animals to go into storage at my mom and dad's house. Everything else, to my surprise, actually was able to fit in the closet, on the shelves, or in storage containers in his room. We did not take the time to sort, which I will regret later, but I know that nothing new is going to be added.
6. Lunch
7. I made chocolate chip muffins. And ate enough that I did not eat supper, and still feel fuller than I could have believed possible.
8. Bubble bath, and pampering session! Favorite Saturday afternoon treat!
9. Designed a new court gown. I'd like two more gowns before next year's DM Faire, and for any other court events. If I watch for sales and really take my time selecting fabrics, I can do this for under $100 each. Spread out over months, this will be more affordable. Plus, I can really add those details that make a court gown worthy of being a court gown.

What I did not do:

1. Laundry. Ug. This means I have to do laundry tomorrow.
2. Vacuum or dust. I could dust in less than 15 minutes, so this really is just a case of laziness. Okay, Now I have to dust before bed... I just can't stand it.
3. Shopping. I had two 50% off coupons for JoAnn fabrics. One good Friday, one good on Saturday. I was fully planning on going today and getting a bolt of fabric with the coupon. Only at the time I was planning this, I did not have a design yet, or any other projects in mind. I resisted the urge to add to the fabric stash without a clear purpose for the fabric. They were also having a pattern sale, but for crying out loud, I have so many patterns. The only reason for buying them is that they seem to discontinue the good ones at an alarming rate. Better to buy them at 99-cents than to need it later and have to order it from the company at $12. Oh well, I think the patterns are on sale tomorrow, too.

So, more done than not done. More done than I thought I had done.

Then why do I feel like I wasted a Saturday?

Gloomy Day

I am trying to get motivated to start on my Saturday morning chores. My iPod Shuffle is charged up and ready to go. We are tackling my son's room today. That's probably why I am stalling. He has a lot of stuff that he no longer needs that should go into storage. Except we have no storage. My preference would be for about half of the toys in his room to go to Goodwill by the end of today. Realistically, I don't know if we'll purge that much stuff.

It literally has been two years since we have bought anything other than a video game, a book or a bionicle when it was not his birthday or Christmas. We have been fighting to not add to the clutter, and have been mostly successful. We got rid of a lot of stuff at the garage sale this summer. What didn't sell went straight to Goodwill. But there is still too much stuff.

The only problem with doing this is that it messes up the living room. There is no where to put this stuff while organizing. In addition, my son's room is really small. It's a huge challenge.

So, I am limiting the time spent on this project to 90 minutes. No more. I had better get started.

Boo-yah

Incredibly good BSG tonight. Probably one of the best yet. Shocked. Completely.