Frantic

Talk about your freakouts! Man. I can't think of the last time I felt like I did tonight.

I've been working on a website for a client; the site is supposed to be handed over tomorrow. It's written in .jsp, which I don't really know, but I can fake it for the main part of the site. There were some backend apps, though, that I couldn't write, and an admin tool for updating the info. We hired a programmer to do those parts freelance, and he's been working nights and weekends to get it finished for us, since he also has a day job.

Tonight he asked me if I could do something on the site, and then he took off to run an errand. I made my change, and then was uploading the file to the server. I went to the website to refresh the page and see how my change looked, but it wasn't there. I refreshed a couple of times, then checked the server, and discovered that I had uploaded the wrong file, and had accidentally overwritten something else.

And when I went back to the site, the admin tool was totally broken.

Bob said he didn't think he'd ever heard me use such bad language, or so many in a row, or for so long a period. I couldn't sit still; I got up and paced, and pulled my hair, and Pyewacket ran up and bit my ankles. For some reason, it upsets her when I'm upset -- she's done it before. Bob had to put her in the bathroom, because I couldn't settle down. I just thought, oh my God, oh my God, what am I going to do?? I knew he could fix it, but would he have to stay up all night to do it?

I was just frantic.

I tried to sit down and knit, but my hands were shaking too bad.

So I just sat in front of the computer and waited for him to come back. When he did, it turned out that he did have a backup, but more importantly, I hadn't done anything at all. The file I had overwritten was unimportant, an old template. The site was broken because of a bug that just coincidentally happened at the same time that I was uploading my file. When Bob came in while I was talking to the programmer, he said I looked demented. I said I was trying to decide if I was going to cry from relief.

What an adrenaline rush. My God.

And on top of a week that's been more or less all frenzy, all the time.

I'm going to bed now.

previous | next

Dental, and other, adventures

I don't think I mentioned that Dinah had to have dental surgery, too, this week. I had taken her in the weekend before last for her bi-monthly anal gland expression, and while she was there, the vet looked at her teeth and said that she really needed to have something done. Every time I take them in, he says they need to have their teeth cleaned, but I just say, yeah, yeah, I know, and don't do anything about it. For one thing, it's tremendously expensive, because they have to put them under to do it.

Usually both of the cats let him mess with them and, while it doesn't make them happy, of course, they don't put up a fuss. But this time, when he just barely touched her gum, she struggled and jerked, and would have bitten him if his assistant hadn't a good hold on her. So I said, okay, let's do it, and made an appointment to take her in this morning.

And maybe I was feeling sympathetic because of my own tooth pain.

So I took her in early this morning and picked her up tonight, and wrote a check in an amount that Bob said I shouldn't divulge, because people would think we were insane (or that he was, I guess) to pay so much for a medical procedure on a cat. I disagree, though. I think people (or at least I do) would think he was compassionate. I do believe that when you take an animal into your home, you take responsibility for them, and you don't get rid of them when they become inconvenient or expensive (within reason, of course).

It seemed like this would be a good thing to do for her, and I think it will make her feel better. One of the signs of painful teeth, he said, was finding that the cat had vomited food that obviously hadn't been digested or chewed at all, and we've been seeing that, so I do think we had some concrete evidence that she needed it.

In any event, it's done, and hopefully she'll feel better.

Yesterday just wasn't a good day. I was thinking about having to get up early and get Dinah to the vet by 7:00 (I always hate to get up early), and thinking about having to leave work early to pick her up, and having to pay so much money. And then I called CompUSA to ask them about my computer; I'd waited until Wednesday to call, giving them a few days after the promised week, and taking into account the holiday.

It turned out that it hadn't even been looked at. It had been there 11 days. Turns out that the Mac technician had been on vacation. I don't have anything against someone taking vacation; everyone needs time off. What I object to is that no one bothered to tell me. And, when I called, the technician tried a hard sell on me to buy an external drive to back up my data on, without even looking at the computer or having any idea whether it would be necessary.

I realize that it's my responsibility to back up my data, not theirs, but it just rubbed me the wrong way. He said that if I wanted a data back-up, I would have to purchase an 80 GB drive, which would be $100, plus a case for it, at $35. When I asked him if he couldn't just back it up to a drive that they had, and then restore it, he said yes, that that would be $70, and that they really recommend buying the external drive because then the customer (that would be me), has the ability to do their own backups in the future.

It felt like he was "teaching me a lesson," and I didn't like that. I also didn't like the fact that he said he would have to do the back-up first, before he did anything else, and that basically he wouldn't touch it unless I told him that I would either purchase the backup, or give him the okay to erase everything on the computer. When I took it in, I talked to the department manager, who said that it might be a simple hardware issue, in which case the necessity of doing an OS reinstall wouldn't come up. He said he would put a note on the paperwork that if a reinstall became necessary, the tech would call me and I could decide whether I wanted to pay for a backup.

Anyway, I just didn't like the attitude of the guy, and I wasn't pleased with them sitting on the repair for nearly two weeks, so after I thought about it, I called them back and said to please not do anything, that I was going to come in and pick it up and take it somewhere else (the Apple store). The only reason I didn't take it there originally was that CompUSA was closer. A bad decision, I now see, two weeks later.

When I went to the vet's office to pick up Dinah tonight, the vet came out and talked to me about her surgery and what we need to do for her, and we got to talking about dentistry in general, my recent dental experience, and his. He said that he had recently had a porcelain filling to replace an old amalgam one, and he said that the porcelain was thicker, and it changed his bite, causing his jaw to hurt.

When he said that, a lightbulb went on over my head. My tooth/mouth has been feeling fine when I get up in the morning, and I feel pretty good all day, but by the time I'm heading home, my jaw is aching. I just realized that it must be because I'm trying not to chew on the "bad" side; I'm favoring it, and obviously that means that I'm holding my jaw differently, thus pain at the end of the day. I guess I'll just have to live with it for a few more days until I feel comfortable putting pressure on the spot where the tooth used to be, but at least now it makes sense.

previous | next

Mashed potatoes

I guess it was about a month ago. I don't think I mentioned it here -- it was the morning that my computer first started acting weird. We had had a thunderstorm the night before, and I had shut the eMac down. It's connected to a UPS (uninterruptable power source), so it shouldn't be a problem, but if we're expecting a severe storm, we usually shut the computers down. Anyway, the next morning, when I tried to turn it on, it wouldn't come on. I tried a couple of times, but no luck. Great.

So I went off to work feeling terribly discouraged. I thought maybe getting breakfast at McDonald's would help--I thought I deserved it--so I drove through and got a bagel sandwich. I took a bite, something felt weird, and I discovered that I had broken a tooth, a molar.

When I got to work, Simon barked to welcome me, and I walked into Dave's office to say good morning. He (Dave, not Simon) looked at my face, said "Are you okay?" and I burst into tears. Not a good day.

Fast forward. Bob got the computer to start up later that day, and my tooth didn't seem to be bothering me, so I tried not to worry about either one of them. But last week, both things went bad. The computer refused to start up again, and my tooth started hurting. We took the computer in to CompUSA to be fixed on Saturday, and later that day, I was lying in bed with my tooth throbbing, loading up on ibuprofen and making a bargain that I would call the dentist on Monday if my tooth would just stop hurting . . .

I have good teeth, mostly, and I haven't been to the dentist in way too long. Bob goes all the time, and I know I should, but I just don't. By Sunday it had stopped hurting, but I knew it was only a matter of time. I called Bob's dentist on Monday and said that I had a toothache, and they said they might be able to work me in that day, but since it wasn't currently hurting, I said it wasn't an emergency, and that any time that week would probably be fine. So I got an appointment early on Wednesday.

The dentist examined me, they took x-rays, and he said that there was a "big hole" in my wisdom tooth on the bottom left. I had never had my wisdom teeth out, they had never bothered me before. But now I had a bad one, and I had to decide what to do. I had been hoping for a filling, or a crown, but that obviously wasn't going to work. The dentist recommended having all of my wisdom teeth out eventually, but obviously I needed to get something done right away with the bad one. He got me a referral to an oral surgeon, who said he could work me in, so I drove over there from the dentist's office.

The dentist had said that for just one tooth, they could probably extract it with a local, whereas if they removed all four of them, they would knock me out. But when the dentist talked to the surgeon on the phone, he said he was uncomfortable with recommending a local until he saw me. When I got over there and talked to him, he said he could do it either way, but that it was probably going to be hard to remove. He left it up to me, and I said that I was perfectly okay with being asleep for it. It didn't look like I was going to be able to go back to work either way.

So he gave me a valium, and told me to come back at 2:00 with someone who could drive me home. I guess it was about 11:00 then. I asked him if I could eat, and he said no, that I couldn't eat for six hours before surgery, that was why he wanted me to come back at 2:00--I told him I'd eaten some yogurt at about 8:00 before I went to the dentist. So I met Bob at home, took about a half our nap in my chair, took my valium, and we headed back.

We didn't have to wait very long, maybe a half hour, before they called me in. The surgeon was there, and his assistant, and they arranged me in the chair, gave me oxygen, and started an IV. I said, "Wow, I can feel it already" as the drug entered my system, and the surgeon smiled, and said, "Are you relaxing?" and I was gone.

Thirty seconds later (yeah, probably more like a half hour, but it felt instantaneous to me), they were helping me out of the chair and taking me to a couch to lie down. The rest of it is kind of hazy -- they went and got Bob, and showed him how to pack my tooth with gauze, and gave him prescriptions for pain medication, and sent him down to get the car while they wheeled me downstairs in a wheelchair.

We went to Target to get the prescription filled and to get a few things that they said I could eat. We got yogurt and soup and juice and ice cream, and then we stopped at Boston Market and got mashed potatoes and gravy and macaroni and cheese.

When we got home I took a pain pill and ate some lukewarm mashed potatoes (they said not to eat anything hot, not to drink anything with a straw, no soda (nothing fizzy), just warm or cold soft things), and went to bed, where I stayed for about twelve hours. Bob woke me up when he needed to change the gauze, replace my ice pack, or give me a pain pill. He always takes such good care of me--and I've needed it a lot lately!

They told me to stay home from work today, so I did, but I spent quite a bit of time this morning on the computer answering email and doing a few small jobs that I could do from home. I went back to bed early this afternoon and slept a few more hours.

I'm just taking ibuprofen now--I haven't had a pain pill for awhile--so I think I'll be fine to go to work tomorrow. I guess I'll take mashed potatoes and gravy for lunch.

previous | next

Update

It's not that there hasn't been anything going on. There was the morning I pulled out of the garage to see someone sleeping in the backyard on an air mattress, with a baby blue blanket over him. I called Bob from the car, and he said, "Is it a vagrant?" and I said, well, no, I don't think so, he's got an air mattress and a blanket. Bob called me later and said that there were two guys out there, and we guessed that they must have been guests of one of our neighbors who decided to sleep outside . . . who knows? They were gone when I got home. But it was a little disorienting.

Then there was the day that Bob called me at work -- a day when it was, if not over 100 degrees, at least very close to it -- to tell me that he had been out in the backyard on a ladder cutting limbs off of one of the trees because they were leaning over the neighbor's fence and she's trying to sell her house, so he didn't want our tree limbs to be a negative factor. Out there, in the 100 degree heat, on a ladder, with a saw, with no one else around.

I let him know that I didn't think that was a very good idea at all, I yelled at him a little, frankly. Then I called him back later and said, "I wasn't really mad at you, you know. I was just worried about you. The kind of mad that a parent feels when their kid does something dumb. Like when they say, are you okay? And when they are, they smack them for running out into the street, or whatever."

Then my desktop computer died. The eMac. A few weeks ago I had shut it down, and it wouldn't come back on. I tried restarting it several times, and it was just totally dead. Then after I went to work, Bob tried restarting it a few times, and (okay, he smacked it a few times), and he got it to start up. But ever since then, it's been kind of weird waking up from sleep, i.e., the screen will come on, and then go away, and then slowly come on again.

And then Monday night, when I woke it up, it gave me kind of a "disco" screen, flashing and weird stuff, then when I finally got a screen that didn't flash, it showed all the colors of the desktop picture (a big pink peony), but they were kind of just blurred across the screen . . .

After that, it would power on, but I didn't have any video at all.

I was pretty bummed out about it, but then I remembered that Bob had bought it for me, and being the thoughtful person that he is, he had also bought the extended warranty! What forethought! So I called Apple, and they talked me through the various tests to be sure it wasn't a software issue (I knew it wasn't, but I humored them), and they gave me a case number to take in to get it fixed. I'll have to wait until Bob can go with me, because I can barely lift the thing. I had to open it up when I had the tech on the phone, and the access port is on the bottom, so I had to lift it and carry it and lay it facedown on the dining room table on a towel, then after I pushed the button they wanted me to push, I had to turn it over (the hardest part), pick it up and take it back over to my desk. Very awkward. At least the iMac has a handle.

Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, there was the day that Jeff brought his girlfriend's Yorkie to work. That was fun. What a cute little dog! Jeff put one of the other dogs' beds (Dave, Simon and Jojo were on vacation that day) up on his desk and the little guy curled up and went to sleep. He's so tiny! It's a lot of fun having dogs at work.

previous | next

What I'm reading

I'm listening to a wonderful book in the car right now -- Second Glance, by Jodi Picoult. It's a love story and a mystery and a ghost story, all wrapped up in one. There's one story involving a young man who's tried over and over again to kill himself, but been unsuccessful--he no longer wants to live after the death of his fiancé, but nothing he does seems to work. He has a sister who's a librarian, and a nephew who has a rare illness that will probably cause him to die young.

There's another story about a young bride in the 1930's and her sad life and death, one about a development company that wants to build a strip mall on top of a possible Indian burial ground, and a single mother with a young daughter who may be seeing ghosts, or she may be psychotic. I'm in the last third of the book, and all of the story lines are coming together. There are quite a few goose-bumpy, shivery moments; I can hardly stand to stop listening when I get where I'm going. At least it makes the drive to and from work interesting.

I think I mentioned the other day that I'm on a "theme" mystery kick. In the past couple of weeks I've read the four "dead end job mysteries" by Elaine Viets: Shop Till You Drop (dead-end job: sales clerk at exclusive boutique), Murder Between the Covers (chain bookstore clerk), Dying to Call You (telemarketer), and Just Murdered (bridal shop clerk).

In these books, 42 year old Helen is in hiding from her ex-husband and is forced to work a series of "dead-end jobs" that will pay her in cash, because she can't take the risk of applying for a job that would cause her to show up on government records. She lives in a tacky apartment complex in Ft. Lauderdale populated with an interesting cast of Florida characters.

Sometimes I just want something light, that I don't have to give a lot of thought to. Something entertaining. Okay, that's mostly all the time. I choose the books I read because I want to relax and be entertained. I don't have a lot of time to read anymore, so I'm pretty discriminating. If I'm going to devote my time to a book (and spend my money on it), I want to be sure it's something that I'm going to enjoy.

The fifth book in the series--Murder Unleashed--has Helen working as a dog groomer. It just came out in hardback, so I've put it on my wait list at the library.

In their apparent quest to make Amazon.com the place where the world goes to buy absolutely everything, Amazon is now selling groceries (non-perishable items only). I can't remember now how I got to the page, but I discovered that they're selling Stash tea, and they even have some of the loose teas, like the Kopili Assam that Bob likes. It's about the same price as it is at Stash, so not really a bargain, but it's nice to know that there's another place to order it from.

previous | next