My feet get cold. Dead cold. I think I inherited bad circulation from my mother. When my feet are cold my whole body is cold, so I often wear socks. I am not a big fan of socks, they aren’t thick enough, what I needed was slippers! So for the past few months I’ve been looking for some good slippers, I found them at LLBean.com. Last week I ordered myself a pair of original style Wicked Good Slippers. They arrived today.

(I’m also wearing my L. L. Bean flannel pajamas in that, yay Maine!)

These slippers are wicked good.

Tomorrow I have the day off. I’ll spend the morning doing work-related stuff (working on and printing my resume yet again, talking with the temp agency and such), then in the afternoon I’m going out with a couple friends for Mexican food %d Then in the evening it’s movie night! Yay!

Last night I was finishing up work, packing up my bag and walked to the front door. It was snowing.

SNOWING? That wasn’t in the forecast!

Worst of all, it was 5 pm, and traffic in this area is bad.

Did I say bad? It’s worse than that. Traffic in the Philadelphia area can be a nightmare, and the currenty job I’m on happens to be in a traffic epicenter. When it’s not rush hour it takes about 25 minutes to get to where I am working, which isn’t bad. But during rush hour it takes at least an hour, most of which is spent in very slow stop and go traffic.

It took us a half hour to go .4 mile last night.

This morning I got up and called the snow line at the company, they weren’t opening until 9:00 because of the snow. “So we’ll leave at 8, no problem.” I thought.

At 9:45 I wasn’t so sure. Ended up calling the temp agency telling them I wouldn’t make it in. We still hadn’t gotten there and Michael had to go to work too! It was such a mess. Not to mention the foul mood it’s put me in. How can people stand to be in traffic for 2 hours? I can’t imagine working in that location full time.

I’ll be working there again tomorrow, but my hours are earlier, which means I have to get up earlier, bleh. I hope the traffic is better an hour earlier.

When I was 13 I started getting very severe heartburn. I was lucky to have a father very familiar with acid reflux to notice the symptoms and show me the bottle of tums. After one especially notable spaghetti dinner, where my chest hurt so much that I cried, I finally let my mother set up a doctor’s appointment for me.

Because my father had acid reflux, and the average time of onset is early teens, that’s what the doctor diagnosed me with. He suggested that I change my diet (hard when you’re 13) and keep some tums handy. When Pepcid AC (the first preventative heartburn drug to hit the over the counter market) came out the doctor told me I should get into the habit of taking it an hour before I eat anything that gave me heartburn. He also told me that surgery was an option if the heartburn continued to be “makes me cry” bad.

All through high school I carried around Pepcid AC and had a pocketful of tums, I just got used to it.

After I left home I stuck with it, when I lived in NY same thing. But while I was living in NY another stomach ailment showed up, lactose intolerance. I’d always had trouble with dairy (I had already cut back on it when I was younger because they thought it had something to do with my migranes), but this was a real stomach problem with it, gas and upset stomach. I decided to limit my dairy intake even more.

Then I went to a friend’s father’s birthday and had a delicious steak. I was sick for 2 days.

Then I went out with another friend to get a Rochester “burger garbage plate.” I was sick for over a day.

Wait, I see a pattern here, my stomach has problems with beef! Looking back there are more times when I can see that’s what caused whatever sickness I was having, but it’s with these two that I finally made the connection.

When I moved here to Philadelphia and moved in with Michael I cut all beef and pork from my diet. We began eating healthier, cooking our own food. We still ate out often and a bottle of rolaids followed. But then we started not eating out so much. About 4 months ago I realized that the same bottle of rolaids had been in the bathroom cabinet for months, that’s unheard of! I used to go through a bottle every few weeks. I was feeling so much better not having heartburn so often that I even stopped my 10 year habit of carrying around anacids everywhere.

I felt so good that I started eating pepperoni and beef again. Boy did I miss pepperoni pizza, and steak? MmmMmm! I missed steak. It seemed like things were going good, I was feeling good, and expanding my diet felt really great.

Slowly I started taking more anacids. On New Years I got some really bad heartburn when I was drinking. This friday my heartburn was almost enough to ruin my night, and with too much dairy on top of it I was forced to go to bed. Now I’m back to getting heartburn a few times a week! Damn it!

So it looks like I’ll need to go back to my no beef or pork diet again. Giving up pepperoni and steak once was hard, doing it again… sigh. I have a vegetarian cookbook that I got from my parents, a lot of grain-based meals that I might want to try out. I need to avoid too much dairy and too much soy as well, since both give me stomach problems when I eat too much of them.

I hate my stomach.

The snow started a little before 10 am yesterday, and is just now stopping. We ended up with 10 inches (25.4 cm).

I spent part of the day working on CSS stuff, I should really pick up a book on CSS, the stuff at csszengarden is pretty amazing, I’d like to make princessleia.com have such a dynamic design, so just changing a css file can completely alter the layout.

I also finished Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and started on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Still fun, they aren’t losing their charm (which surprised me). All while snuggled by the fire with Michael and Caligula.

Michael took this picture last night:

And I took this one of a tree outside this morning:

I love snow.

Ouch x_X

I know quite well that I shouldn’t have too much dairy, it makes my stomach miserable. But every once in a while I binge and relearn how awful it makes me feel, like last night.

It was movie night at our house, and we had a few friends over, we were having fun. I had 4 or 5 pieces of very cheesey pizza with some beer, then I started on the death drink: Milk + buttershots + kahula. Boy did that taste good going down, sorta like one of those Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee Coolattas. After I finished that I thought I’d try some orange juice and vanilla vodka.

About halfway through the orange juice and vanilla vodka drink my stomach started feeling upset. I went for the tums, ate about half a dozen, and sat back down with friends to watch Black Books. But my stomach really felt bad, so I got a glass of water, the bottle of tums, and went to “lie down for a little bit.” By the time I woke up it was 3 am, everyone had left, and Michael was coming to bed.

Now I feel… sore. I think I slept on my hand when I crashed into bed. I really didn’t drink that much, but the rollar coaster my stomach went through exhausted me.

Well it’s my own dumb fault. No more milk-based alcoholic drinks for me!

Today they’re predicting at least a foot of snow:

…WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT THROUGH SUNDAY MORNING FOR 10 TO 15 INCHES OF SNOW…

Yay! I’m so excited, we haven’t had a snow storm yet this year, and I love snow storms %D

Tonight I tried a new recipe that I found online. It was for Chicken & Broccoli Manicotti. Once I figured out what manicotti was I was ready to go. We picked up the needed ingredients at the grocery store on Sunday and tonight I made it up.

Success! But I didn’t take a picture because I was hungry. It actually looked just like the picture from the recipe site (miracle!) but without the garnish. I’m really happy it came out well, even if a bit of work is involved in getting it prepared. Oh and the manacotti weren’t as hard to stuff as I had thought %)

I was talking about food with some people this morning. We got talking about poptarts because a Swedish friend of mine is coming to the US in a couple months and he’s very excited about “getting poptarts for cheap.” Apparently the only way he can get them in Sweden is from some import store and they’re really expenaive there. So I said “I don’t like poptarts unless they’re drown in butter.” I got disgusted reponses from everyone. Sheesh, I thought it was a fairly common thing, they’re too dry otherwise.

Actually, I don’t eat poptarts anymore, after they’re covered with butter they’re still not very delicious, and that’s too much bad stuff (fat, calories, etc) to waste on something that’s not wonderful.

So how about bubbly milk? Everyone knows milk tastes better after you shake it up and there are bubbles. No? Well it’s true.

At least I don’t put ketchup on my eggs.

Our MythTV box is up and running. Michael spent a good part of the weekend working on it (details here, it’s really cool). So now I can watch any movies from our digital library on the tv with a remote *glee*

This also means that the media server is stable again. I always run irssi from our media server, but when Michael took it down to move it and turn it into a Myth box I started chatting from a friend’s server, and R2 was offline for most of the week. Now I can run everything locally again. Best of all, the media server is on Gentoo now, and has a much newer version of irssi than the debian stable box had, and it supports connecting to servers with SSL! So now both me and R2D2 are using SSL to connect to Xelium.

For R2 I just use the /connect -SSL fire.xelium.net 6697 method, since his irssi session is pretty simple, he only joins one server and two channesls, but my irssi configuration is a bit more complex, so I needed to edit my ~/.irssi/config file:

servers = (
{
address = "fire.xelium.net";
chatnet = "xelium";
port = "6697";
autoconnect = "yes";
use_ssl = "yes";
}

So now I am a secure connection!

In other IRC news, we’re adding as an IRCop on Xelium this week. It’s been a long time in coming, he’s been quite helpful to the network, and has a good head on his shoulders. And right now we need another oper, we’ve all been so busy (or sucked into WoW) lately.

Today was my last day at the temp work assignment that I’ve been at for over 4 months. I have a few options now, I need to call a company in Huntingdon Valley tomorrow, and the temp agency is going to set me up with an interview later this week. I shouldn’t be unemployed for long, but a few days off are nice, especially in the middle of winter when I am going a little crazy.

A friend of mine recently loaned me the first four books of the Harry Potter series. I kept meaning to read them, but was reluctant to buy them when so many people had copies. This friend loaned me the UK Editions. UK Editions? Apparently they’re different, most notably the title of the first is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone rather than “Sorcerer’s Stone.” So I finished reading the book and couldn’t figure out what they could have changed, plot points? Names? Oh no, they didn’t “translate” it into American English did they?

Yes! They did!

I found this page which describes the differences. I HATE WHEN THEY DO THIS! Now I realize I might speak and understand English English better than your average person because I love britcoms and have lots of brit friends, but this book isn’t hard to read, and most of these British words and terms are easy to figure out (changing room vs locker room, car park vs parking lot, sweets vs candy, dustbin vs trashcan). Why do we need to Americanize everything? Why not expose people to a bit of British culture? You’re reading a book, which means you’re not entirely opposed to putting forth some effort to entertain yourself (rather than just sitting in front of the television). Rawr.

Yesterday I was looking for something to work on, and pulled my IRC Hacks book off the shelf. I had a Hack #55 bookmarked that gave info about how to write a currency converter IRC bot. The problem? The example is in java, so I shelved it until I had time to figure out what they were doing. So yesterday I went to work on it. It used xmethods.net‘s Web Services. What the heck is a Web Service? How would I use it with Perl? I was excited to discover this article that not only explains it, but gives an example of how painfully simple it is with SOAP::Lite.

use SOAP::Lite;

print $result;

I say “painfully” simple because I’ve casually been looking for a currency conversion method for R2D2 for over a year. Everyone I’ve talked to about it said their scripts, or ones they know of used xe.com to get the current rates. But as far as I can tell xe.com says “NO NO NO!!!” to automatically leeching their info with scripts, and I don’t want to break TOS with my little bot. But this solution is so simple! And perfect! And why didn’t I know about it before?

<@pleia2onEarth> !convert eur usd
<@R2D2onHour> 1 eur is worth 1.3104 usd

I’ll probably spend some time today editing the script a little so it can do actual currency amounts too.

*wanders off*

EDIT: Well that didn’t take long, I’ve updated the script with the currency amount conversions. Now I can do:

<@pleia2onEarth> !convert 100 usd sek
<@R2D2onHour> 100 usd is worth 692.1200 sek

It still works the old way too.

The whole script can be found on the modular r2d2 page, or by clicking here.

I was sitting at work earlier this week, people came back to the office after their daily lunch trip and someone had bought a strawberry shake.

A strawberry shake is something my father asked for while we were visiting him at the hospital. Annette went to go get one, asked at the cafeteria, at the breakfast lunch stand, she was gone for about 20 minutes. She came back with all she could find, a strawberry yogurt drink. He hated it. Here he was, in his hospital bed, less than a couple weeks to live, and all he wanted was a strawberry shake, and I didn’t get it for him. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of guilt, and almost burst out crying there at my desk.

I attributed this near outburst to being so tired, and being moody, but I suspect there is more to it than that. It wasn’t about a strawberry shake, I think I’m guilty about not being there until the end. For having the feelings I had, for not visiting more, for not calling more, and for rationalizing all the reasons for these things. I didn’t think I’d feel guilty, I guess this is a part of the mourning process.

When I got home that day I pulled an envelope out of the mailbox, it contained my father’s Death Certificate and his Obituary.

“Carl A. Krumbach

SOUTH PORTLAND — Carl A. Krumbach, 53, of South Portland, died Tuesday, December 7, 2004 at a Biddeford nursin facility.

Carl was born in Englewood, N.J., the son of Otto and Jean “Lohman” Krumbach. He grew up in Ridgewood, N.J., where he was educated and a graduate of Ridgewood High School and recieved his bachelor’s degree from Bethany College in West Virginia in 1973.

In 1978 Carl established the James W. Cater Jr. Communications Scholarship at Bethany College, which continues to present annual awards to a deserving student at Bethany.

At age 19, he and his brother journeyed around the world and kept a journal of his travels. Carl worked as a Corporate benefits Consultant for Metropolitan Life and Unum for 16 years.

He is a member of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Gorham.

Survivors include three children…”

Receiving this in the mail was an interesting ending to this day.

Man, I’m tired.

I haven’t slept well this week, I don’t know why. I cut out all caffeine Tuesday in an attempt to sleep better, but it hasn’t really helped (and it’s made it quite hard to make it til 5pm at work). I thought I’d be exhausted enough wednesday night to sleep well, but I didn’t. I don’t really have more than usual on my mind, I’m not worried about things. I know I was taking NyQuil for my cold for a while, maybe my body is saying “GIMMIE QUILLY 2 SLEEP KTHX!”

Zzzzz….

There are so many things I want to write about, but I can’t stay focused, even catching up on email tonight was a struggle.

*Yawns*

Maybe it has something to do with the weather. It’s been warm (near 70 today, IN JANUARY!), humid and gloomy out.

Going to snuggle now.