Monthly Archives: November 2006

by Nelia

Today’s visit

Went to see Chris and family today. It was good… very good. Aleah smiled so big when i got there that i choose to believe she remembered me from 2 days ago. 😀 She is such a sweetie. And so expressive!!! I have not been around babies in a while so maybe my memory is flawed, but I believe she communicates exceptionally well. You can hear what she is thinking in her tones. Sadly, Christina is resistant to the idea of moving to the house across the street. 🙂 Happily, my trip to the chiropractor in San Antonio and on to Austin worked our well enough that for a while i will have a good excuse to go up there more often.

I got up this morning at 5:30 and decided it was time. I have been talking about doing this for a while. The trip there was great. Traffic was fast and the temperature was wonderful. I had no trouble with sleepiness.

Drove to Austin from San Antonio with no problem.

Drove home… just outside of Austin i got sleepy, and quickly sleepier, seriously, dangerously, sleepier. Twice I had that head-drop wake-up as i drove. Scared me. I would have gone back and napped but it was too far. I was dangerous on the road. I turned up the radio, opened the windows, and pushed a little further to Bastrop where I pulled into the Wendy’s parking lot. I made sure the car doors were locked and reclined enough so my head would not fall forward but hopefully not so much i would look odd at a casual glance. (Fortunately it was cool enough that i was comfortable with the windows rolled up.) I closed my eyes, and fell instantly asleep, started awake. remembered i was not driving. fell asleep, started awake, remembered i was not driving, ditto again, and then finally dozed for a few minutes. I did not feel like i had been fully asleep, but the few minutes had refreshed me sufficiently that i thought i was ok to drive. I looked at the clock and was surprised to see i had slept for an hour and 15 minutes. Methinks i slept more soundly than i thought.

Drove the rest of the way alert.

I think if i do this as a one-day trip again i will try to nap before i leave Austin.

Is that offer of an overnight when i go to the chiropractor still open?

by luke

Christmas Eve Gift

OK, we are going to call this Christmas Eve “Tool Time” and mix up the rules a little. No drawing names, guys give to guys and girls give to girls.

We all use tools and we all have favorite tools that are, perhaps, a little unusual. It might be a tool made for something you like to do, but find you use for more than what it is intended for. It might be something that has proven handy for jobs you know the other 2 do also. (You have to give the same tool to both.)

Now a tool does not have to come from a hardware store. There are mechanic tools, cooking tools, sewing tools, sports tools, hobby tools; this can be any kind of tool.

So think about the small tools you use that you think the other 2 would like but do not have, and give one of them to both.

The one drawback to this plan is that it does not include Aleah, but she is a little young to use tools yet, unless you count a rattle or a music box.  She can be part of the girls exchange, but probably it’s best that she do that as partners with her mom.

by Nelia

Phone Survey

It is time to upgrade our phones.  We have always had Nokia, and may again, but i was wondering what brands ya’ll have and what you have to say about brands of cell phones in general.

by Nelia

Signed Up

Well, I misunderstood the rules and the deal is not as wonderful as i thought, but i signed up anyway. I guess i was ready to. I guess that the main draw is that i will be working with someone who will give me a hard time is i slip. (I have to say, when i think about it, it did sound too good to be true.)

The misunderstanding involves the money back at the end and a nutrition bar (also available as a drink). I am supposed to eat said bar twice a day. I thought the bar was included; It is not; It costs $30 a week. To add insult to misunderstanding, if you do not use the bar (which you do not have to use) you are not eligible for the money back at the end of the program. Hmmmm Let me think… If i spend an additional $30 a week for the next couple of years, they will refund me $200? I don’t think so.

On the other hand, there is a bit of good news. Because i want to lose mass quantities, they dropped the fee from the sale price of $5 a week (regular price is $7) to $3 a week. Also good is that if, at any time, and for any reason, i wish to drop the program, i can get refunded the $3 a week for the weeks i did not use. They keep some fees (the program costs more then a flat $3 a week) but it is nice to know that i can get back some of what i have paid them if i reach a point that this is not working for me. I may put in for my $3 back when it comes time for the year of maintenance. $3 x 52weeks = $156. How much is maintenance monitoring worth to me? I will decide when the time comes.

Anyway, I gave them my money and signed my name on the dotted line. I am to go in next week for my diet and my sample box of nutrition-rich, protein-rich, soy-rich bars, the ones that cost $30 for 14 bars. (I am not sold on soy. Some tell us that soy is the best source of protein ever, and some tell us that soy, when processed one way (fermented) is very good for us, but when processed other ways, is not good for us at all.)

This means that i will be on a strict diet (the first 2 weeks are referred to as “quick start” so i assume they are restrictive) that does not include Pumpkin Pie when Thanksgiving comes. This is probably not the best week to start a diet. I am not sure what i am going to do for Thanksgiving. Maybe i will talk to Luke about going to Lubys (I think they are open) and i will either eat salad and dry turkey while he feasts or I will take one meal off and have dressing with gravy, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. Probably the latter.

by Nelia

The diet effort

Well, I have decided on a new course… haven’t started down it yet, but will soon.

I went to my doctor last week. We talked about possibilities. I had been thinking about trying a weight loss program that would provide more one-on-one support… a counselor who would pester me in a way that loved ones can’t, successfully. I feel like one-on-one attention when i was slipping was the weakness of Weight Watchers. I liked being part of a group in weight watchers and i like their diet, but when i started slipping, i wish there had been someone who would call me every day and make me weight in more and just plain pester me.

L A Weight Loss has been advertising a special and i have heard good things about the program. My doctor said that she had heard good things as well and said that she thought it would be good to try it.

I went in and talked to them Friday. I liked most of what they said. So why the delay? Well, we have flex dollars for medical expenses. It is the end of the year and if we don’t use them we will loose them, and if i have a doctor’s prescription for the program, i can submit the cost and get some flex dollars back. The delay has been getting the prescription, but it is finally arranged and i will be signing up Thursday or Friday.

The main attraction of L A Weight Loss is that one-on-one attention, of course, but they have a couple of other features that i find interesting. One is that i sign up for how much weight i want to loose and they estimate how much time it will take to loose it (2 pounds a week). Then they tack on a year of maintenance and i pay the whole thing up front. (thus i am financially committed). At the end of their estimated time, if i have not lost my weight, they refund part of my money (so they have a financial stake in seeing to it that i succeed). And after the loss there is a year of maintenance. During that time i still go in periodically and weigh and discuss problems. If i keep my weight off for 6 months they refund 25% of my total fee and if I maintain for a year they refund another 25%. This gives me strong incentive to keeping the weight off for a year. The idea is, of course, that if i can maintain for a year, i can maintain forever.

So I am going to try it. It was this or lap band. I told myself that i had till the end of the year to get back on track or i was going to look into lap band. I do not want to go the surgery route, but if that is what it takes i will. The frustrating thing about resorting to surgery is that all the surgery does is make your stomach little and if i would just eat less for long enough it would shrink without the surgery. Of course, it would never get as little as the surgery makes it and with surgery it shrinks all at once and you do not have the option of binging or overeating. You physically can’t do it. (Of course, i understand that a dedicated eater can, over time, stretch the pouch they make in your stomach and eat badly and constantly so they overcome even lap band.)

by chris

Quick question…

Does working with 4101.org seem a little slow to anyone else recently?

On my end it feels like things are getting slugish in responding, new pages take a while to load…

I ask to know if it’s just me or not.

by chris

The fish are now down by one

Our salt water fishtank is now home to three fish. Our jewel damsel no longer graces our tank. It was getting too big for out tank to be comfortable. But we are nice fish owners: now it lives in the salt water tank at work, an eighty gallon tank. (vs our thirty gallon). We believe the aggressive tendencies we have observed will go away now that there is plenty of space to be had.
For the few weeks prior to the move we have been making efforts to keep our tank extra clean and happy. Water changes were stepped up a bit (we had to buy more buckets for water) and we got a bit more aggressive on scrubbing the inside of the tank. Partly to keep the glass cleaner but more to get the fish more used to us having our hands in the tank. We also picked up a few fish transport bags from the fish store. I even talked to ‘the fish guy’ at work about the best way to introduce a new fish to the work tank. (they pay him to come every two weeks or so to do regular maintenance on the tank)

The schedule was essentially this:

  • 5:00 pm – feed the fish
  • 5:10 pm – minor water change in our tank (advice #1: move the fish in clean water to help them be in a stress-free(er) environment)
  • 5:30 pm – capture the fish, put him in the bags (advice #2: get fish bags, not regular zip-locks: they are made for this)
  • 6:00pm – arrive at the office at the normal ‘bed time’ for the work fish, keep the fish light turned on, and put some food in. (advice #3: fed fish are happy and less likely to attack new fish. advice #4: do it when the fish are normally going to sleep so they will less likely to be aggressive to new fish)
  • 6:10 pm – put our fish in the work tank after doing a drip line of water to acclimate them to the new environment slowly.

The reality went something like that, if a bit behind schedule.  All has gone well for the last week though.  Last reports indicate our fish has started eating with the others and I have seen our fish swimming around the tank.  If not being sociable to other fish, at least being out and visible.

So now we are down to three fish in our home tank.  Of the three, one of them might be needing a new home shortly… if we can get her healthy enough for it anyway.

by chris

How much a workplace changes in a year

I’ve been working for my current employer for a bit over a year now. (as an official employee, not counting the starting ‘contract worker’ part) When I started I didn’t know which files had the basic classes for database transactions or report generation or screen output or any of the other wonderful things we do. Now I can have intelligent conversations that wouldn’t really make much sense to anyone outside the company. (things like: “well, getItem is defined in the baseArray class. You can use it here because WindowData extends database which extends textdata which extends baseArray. But be careful you’ve already preformed a read operation in the WindowData object lest you get null data back from baseArray; auto-initialization isn’t something written in.”

Yeah, anyway. These days I’m in charge of a project for one of our larger customers. We are developing a system for pre-processing that will help place new clients of theirs into the right categories so everyone will be able to give/recieve the proper attention. (and so clients will not need to get re-classified later; an expensive process in terms of time, paperwork, and money). This has been an ongoing project for a while now and we’re quickly closing on the ‘get it implemented now’ time… if only we could get them to decide what they really need/want. Pretty soon we’ll just do the development to meet deadlines and they’ll have to live with the result… and we’ll have to modify it to fit their work… and back..and forth. Or they can decide what they want and all will be happy and good on the due date. I can hope.

That project is of course happening on top of my regular workload. Every client needs attention and I’m not going to focus on just one.

Now, to make this even better, one of the two year+ veterans of the company has resigned. Wait, that doesn’t get the right message across. Let me restate: Last week, on Friday at lunch time, one of our group notified our secretary he was leaving, not coming back that day, and would be at his new job on Monday in another state. There was no other notice. He didn’t even tell his immediate supervisor (who was out that day) about it. Naturally his projects are now being taken over by other people in the company… but no one really knows the details of his projects. He was always very possessive about his work and would not allow anyone else near his code. (ask him a question about his code and you might get yelled at… don’t even think about proposing a code change) Needless to say this is causing a degree of stress for everyone else. Right now I’m reading up on one of his projects so I can move in as its maintainer; it’s keeping me busy.

Of course, when one thing changes others change right along side… the secretary (who really deserves a better title than that, but I am not being creative at the moment) has announced their intent to leave the company. Fortunately, unlike the two-minute warning wonder… her intent is to leave in …. May. As in seven months from now. She knows how much work she does and doesn’t want to leave the next person to have no training. (coincidently, that’s how she started off: her quite knowledgeable predecessor wasn’t around to train her for the job)

A lot has changed in a year: I now work on my own for the most part, I have my own projects, one co-worker has left without notice, and another is on the way out. Thank goodness I’m part gemini.

by Nelia

? Chris

Chris, you said you have been busy and would tell us about it.  Enquiring minds want to know.  🙂

by Ramona

Idly curious

This is mostly for Dad and for Chris, though I think it would be fun if we all played along.

But for Dad and Chris – and for no particular reason, with the understanding that asking the question is no guarentee whatsoever of any potential future action – why don’t you meander over to http://despair.com/viewall.html and jot down which 12 of these posters cause you the most pain and anguish.
And then reply here with those 12 ……..