Geek Goddess

The promised warm front came through, it went from about 39 degrees and sleeting to 52 in a matter of about 30 minutes.

Still busy with work, but that's a good thing, if this keeps up perhaps I can re-start my emergency fund. I like to have some cash on hand for things like an unexpected vet bill or what have you, and it got drained dry due to Binky's final illness and then having to wait weeks to get paid on a job.

Ben went and volunteered over at the Asylum yesterday, nothing exciting but the lawn needed to be picked up because we've had wind and lost quite a few small branches. I've started up using the exercise bike again in the hopes of avoiding miserably sore muscles when I start the heavier yard work in a month. It's the difference between minor, easily ignored pain and several days of hobbling around, so it's well worth doing.

The bike is especially useful because it uses the same muscles I need to hike up and down the super-steep hillside. We do intend to cut some steps into that hill, but we need to finish rerouting the water runoff before we can do that, and that involves standing on said super-steep hill and trying to shovel at the same time.

We need to get a new pickaxe handle, ours broke last year. We taped it up, and while it's just fine to do minor things like chipping a bit of dirt out of the hill, it's really no good for anything more stressful.

And on that exciting note, I will end this post. :)

What do you want when you are near death?

I saw a newspaper article today that mentioned that only 25% of us had talked to our loved ones about what we wanted. Coupling this with the article How Doctors Die and the recent loss of two of our cats, I can say most emphatically what I don't want.

I do not want a feeding tube unless I have a temporary condition from which I am expected to recover. By "recover", I mean that I can be expected to have at least 60% of normal function for a person of my age.

I do not want life support unless I have a temporary condition from which I am expected to recover. By "recover", I mean that I can be expected to have at least 60% of for a person of my age.

I do not want to be resuscitated unless I have a temporary condition from which I am expected to recover. By "recover", I mean that I can be expected to have at least 60% of for a person of my age.

Barring a fatal accident, I do not want to die at the hospital. I want to be at home, with the people and things that I love.

What do you want? Have you told anyone?

Oh it's the job that never ends.. it just goes on and on my friends...

Every time my client and I think this job is ready to go, we find ANOTHER problem. Hopefully this is the last one.

Not much else going on--I've been busy trying to get things prepped so I can do the update around nine tonight--these kinds of updates are best to do as late in the evening as possible simply because it's less likely that a user will get an error and freak out. Hopefully this new query I have to do will be all worked out and successfully tested.

It's annoying because I was supposedly going to be taking a few hours off and coming back to do the update. :(

Just about ready for my second cup of coffee this morning and I have my work up on the computer and ready to go.

I've been analyzing where I get hung up getting work done--I've mentioned before that I have a really bad time dividing up work and personal time. Funny, I started to type the sentence using the phrase "where I waste time" but as I am discovering in the course of my analysis, that's a bad word to use because it doesn't adequately describe what's happening, and indirectly suggests that if I only work harder, I won't have a problem.

This change of perspective is actually enlightening because it gets me looking for road blocks instead of berating myself. For example, given the nature of my work, really, I need fairly decent chunks of uninterrupted time. Unless it''s just a tiny code fix, I need a minimum of one hour to accomplish anything.

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Wish I had something more positive to post.

We're just waiting, now. Unfortunately, the nearest emergency vet is 35 miles away, and we have no way of getting there. I wish Morpheus had taken sick earlier in the week, because we could have spared both him and us the last 24 hours. Normally the local vet would have been open yesterday, but he was closed this weekend.

That being said, he is as comfortable as we can make him. We have him on the couch, which has always been his favorite place to be, and we're taking turns sitting with him. We don't think he is suffering--for the most part, he's dozing. A couple of times he has meowed, but he always calms down immediately when one of us goes over to him and gives him a pat, so we think it's more he wants reassurance rather than that he's in any kind of pain.

That's all I have today. I'll post a picture of him later.

Long day today. Morpheus is sick, he has some kind of stomach bug. As you can well imagine, having just lost Binky, I was really worried when I didn't see improvement within 24 hours.

We brought him to the vet, my neighbor was working and the vet had to close up promptly at 5 tonight, so we ended up walking to the office. It wasn't too bad of a walk, about a mile and a half, but it was nasty out because it started snowing fairly heavily. Happily, by the time we were done with the appointment, my neighbor was on the way home so he came and picked us up so we didn't have to walk all the way back.

The vet found that Morpheus was somewhat dehydrated but was treatable at home. He's on Gatorade of all things just because the vet was out of hydrating liquid and we can't get to the grocery store until tomorrow. There is nothing horrible going on, no signs of kidney failure nor intestinal trouble, so likely it's an illness or even worms. He wasn't so sick that he couldn't be wormed, and we've been giving him about 20ml of Gatorade every 20 to 30 minutes. It's kind of a pain, but we don't want to upset his stomach further. He tolerated his antibiotic just fine.

So far so good, and in a nice piece of irony, he's starting to protest being made to drink yucky Gatorade. He of course doesn't understand that the whole reason he's feeling well enough to complain is because we've been giving him said yucky Gatorade, but that's okay. He has perked up enough that he came out and got on the couch so he could curl up with Ben--he wasn't so ill he was hiding or anything, but he had spent most of the morning in the bedroom where it's peaceful and quiet.

What I'm hoping is that we'll hit a point with the rehydration process that he'll start drinking on his own again, but realistically, that may not happen until tomorrow. If he starts drinking on his own again, we can start him on some baby food chicken, which is very gentle on the digestive tract. I'll be picking that up tomorrow.

Now I have to try to get some actual WORK done...

This is going to be a short post because it's late and I'm tired.

Got quite a bit of work done today, and gearing up to do another fairly major project. If I could only get *paid* for some of this effort I'm expending, things would be much better.

Usually it isn't that much of a problem, but in this case, one of the people I work for has been experiencing a delay in getting payment so it's the trickle-down effect.

New stories got released on the writer's group today, I've critiqued one and am halfway through my critique on another. Some good stories go through the group, if I see any of the good ones get listed as published, I will definitely recommend them.

Feeling hopeful today.

Ben has an interview down at the feed store. They tend to have problems keeping help in the mill room because it's hard physical labor. Ben doesn't mind that--he'd rather physical labor than dealing with cranky customers.

If he gets the job, it will start out part-time. Even part-time would be a help, it's been a long haul without a job.

*crosses fingers*

As promised, today was a day off.

It was amazing how cheerful I felt when I got up knowing I didn't have to accomplish anything whatsoever today.

Of course, since I was so relaxed and cheerful, I took care of a bunch of little things that I've been neglecting forever, such as not setting up my voice mail when it got changed from Verizon to Frontier. That's all set up now and all cleaned out and ready to go.

I did another critique and reviewed my story for minor changes and officially submitted it. Probably it won't get critiqued for four weeks, but in the meantime, I'm doing critiques and thinking about what's involved in truly good writing.

Got my first real stinker of a story. I was tempted not to say anything, but then I thought to myself that if it was really a stinker, the writer needed to know that.

One of the things I found was that it was *really* difficult not to pepper the critique with sarcastic zingers a la MST3K. This wasn't all bad because I did share them with Ben and we had a good laugh over the whole thing.

I was much more sedate and sober in my review, and contented myself with a little bit of sarcasm in the opening remarks--nothing that would make the author feel badly, but merely stating the actions of the character in a slightly humorous way. If he sees the joke, it will make him chuckle, if he doesn't see it, he'll just think I used an odd choice of words to restate the plot.

I was really careful to put the review into the review checker to catch anything that might have been less than diplomatic, and I had Ben read it as well. (Ben said that I was far kinder than he would have been.)

The other unexpected result was I had a worst opening line (NOT the story's opening line, something entirely different) pop into my head which was so putrid it was worthy of submission to the Bulwer-Lytton annual contest. It was duly submitted.

Now I'm going to kick back and play my game for an hour or so, enjoy the Saturday evening treat and sulk that Bleach isn't on because AS is showing some Star Wars thing.

*sighs*

No post yesterday but it's just because I got sucked into trying to finish something. By the time I realized I hadn't posted, it was time to get the hell off the computer and get some sleep.

Still trying to finish up jobs at the moment, I actually have quite a few hours out but very few checks coming in, which is always frustrating. I wish I could have several good months in a row, it would do wonders for my being able to get a little bit of a reserve so that if there were a delay in payment I wouldn't get behind.

So far so good on the writer's group, with any luck I'll be able to go over my story and get it submitted.