Thanks for the crossed fingers everyone!
Shadow, hope you feel better soon.
Cloud Maiden and I mustered energy enough to heat up leftovers. We both agreed we need to exercise more before we turn into shapeless blobs stuffed with ramen and coffee and cigarettes.
The Mafia game has taken an interesting turn. I love these games.
Home from the game, Canes won, and Stillman got a natural hat trick.
Rosie, I worked at a pahrmacy for ten years. I’m immune to communicable diseases now.
snowbunny, hope the finger gets better. At least it’s just a flesh wound.
FCM, I like Monty Python, too.
Shadow, remember, those who cannot do, teach. Hope the migraine gets better.
Hey!
And those who cannot teach, manage. 
If you want to be sure it reaches Mooooooooom, you may want to verify it’s not white chocolate. Or send one of each, the white kind as a handler’s fee.
Ouchies, ay!, sighs and so forth as needed; best wishes to Haze. Anything that means needing less paperwork for a while is a Good Thing.
LiLi, one of the few things in which Middlebro and SiL saved in their wedding (I know I’m asocial, but really, was 300 guests necessary?) was the video and photographs. They did get a photographer but got the smallest pack he offered (Hallelujah, cos the Everything pack would have meant 3h shooting between wedding and lunch and the hungry hordes might have rebelled); the pics that people usually like best in their wedding album? The ones shot by a friend who’s managed to get his job to pay for his 25 zillion filters (he’s a college professor in AgEng). For the videos though, they borrowed two cameras from friends and gave one to her bro, one to his bro. Lilbro had practiced a couple times and his filming came out quite nicely, he knew how to move the camera at the right speed. SiLBro got the hang of it after the first few sequences, too. Just an idea…
And a friend didn’t ask for a wedding cake. They got several kinds of cakes and pies instead; the party was small and close-knit enough that they could figure out which kinds would be more popular.
True, dat… White Chocolate will be sampled. Thoroughly.
Grrrrr… went to pick up some meds for Special Teen this morning. Seems her name somehow got dropped from the HMO’s computerized list of Special Super Duper Insurance Benefits. Again. :rolleyes: Ended up having to shell out the full price of the meds instead of just the co-pay :mad:. Over $200 :eek: :mad:
Oh, when I phoned in she was listed on the CSR’s monitor, of course. Just not on the list that the pharmacy sees. It will take 10 days to update :rolleyes:. Oh, they will refund. Eventually :rolleyes:. And I’ll make enough of a stink that they’ll probably refund the co-pay as well and I’ll get the stuff, ultimately, for free… but sheesh, people, keep your f&%ing computers updated!!! And SYNCHRONIZED!!!*
hugs to all those feeling under the weather, hurting, going through other stuff or just feeling lazy in general.
**Haze **-- when is your interview for the teaching position? You will keep us posted, right?
Up and caffeinating, and ready to leave for work to make a bit more credit time today! I dunno, but it seems like the change back to standard time has been a good thing for me. 
Only partially awake right now, though, so hugs and boos, where appropriate. laughs Have a good Tuesday, mumpers.
We got a sheet cake from the grocery store for our wedding cake. It was all that was available on December 28th. It was quite yummy, if not as picturesque and frilly as some.
Blue and rosie, hope you feel better today.
I woke up when the alarm went off at five. I’m up, bathed, dressed (well, in yoga pants and t-shirt), and thinking about having breakfast and then going back to bed and lying around for a bit. I don’t have anything scheduled until eleven, so this is a ridiculous time to be awake.
At work. Need tea. Am prepared to string up Don Twanna by her scrawny little neck tomorrow after leaving me a 'mare of a job.
So I think I got a total of 3 hours sleep last night, but in half hour burst separated by an hour of awakedness. I do feel better than yesterday, but that’s because the rain has arrived. Overnight, I enjoyed the sound of the wind and the wind (really - to me, if it isn’t violently windy and/or thundering, it’s like a white noise machine) however, I think my gutters are askew or there’s some new piece of metal under the drain pipe because all night I heard DRIP DRIPDRIP DRIP . . . . . .DRIP dripdripdrip DRIP DRIP. . . . . .dripdripdripdrip DRIP and further irregularities in the (lack of) pattern. Had there been a pattern, I probably could have fallen asleep to it, but noooOOoooo.
FCM - I just nominsted you for POTUS
scout, good luck with the photog? Have a good caterer? Yes, I know it would be a bit of a delivery charge. Actually, I think the whole wedding industry is quite a rackett.
Well, yesterday was one of the worst days that I’ve had in a long time. I’d say that I spent over half of the day crying. And that’s all I care to remember and relive about yesterday.
Today I woke up from a dream in which I was crying. No actual crying, though. Maybe I’ll actually make it to work today for longer than 2 minutes.
I’m not real happy with my BF, I think I’ll call him TVMan from now on because he restores them for a living, but I’m not sure that what has happened was really anybody’s fault. Ok, so maybe this part of yesterday deserves to be relived. I ended up at TVMan’s house last night and when we were getting ready to go to sleep I was finally talking about what had happened during the day. We talked for about 2 minutes before he fell asleep and I started crying. And kept crying and he kept sleeping. I felt very alone. So I got up and drove all the way back home because I figured that I could be miserable and alone in my own bed. I know he’s a newbie to dealing with secondhand depression and I also know that I could’ve woken him up. I just didn’t, though, I guess.
Hopefully today will be better.
ETA: Maybe I’m just trying to go with the MMP theme of miserableness this week. 
{{{Purple}}}
So, Li-li, enjoying your leave by sleeping late?
If you don’t do it now… you certainly won’t do it after the rugrat makes his debut!
Mornin’. Caffeinating.
Upon reflection, based on the amount of crap I caught at the rescue squad meeting last night, I’m going to regale y’all with the tale of The Day I Mooned the Mayberry Baptist Church soon. Gotta write it up first.
CookieKid - sorry to hear you had another bad day. Maybe today will be better for you and you can come back to cheer up the whole MMP. You could be the MMP saviour for the week!
I am having a better afternoon now that I’ve had one of those lightbulb-above-head moments and finally worked out that the reason I’ve had so much trouble doing what Don Twanna wanted, is because her instructions (which aren’t brilliant to start with) are missing a vital step in the proceedings.
The more cynical amongst us would think she’d left it out deliberately so that I’d have to confess tomorrow that I couldn’t complete the job…but she has been thwarted and the BooFae has won!
Celebratory hugs all round, I think. And chocolate to those who prefer. Although who would honestly prefer chocolate to a hug? Especially from me…
I’ve always loved a good church moonin’ tale.
Home, showered, tahred. Yays, boos, etc. as needed.
Good luck with MIL taters. Continued good thoughts and prayers headed out. Glad you enjoyed the pic.
Ok, off to beddy bye shortly. It was a looooooooooooooooooooong night just like I thought it’d be.
When you forward your completed work to whoever should receive it, be sure to remark that “it may be a good idea to document the process of running this job; due to lack of documentation Don Twanna inadvertently describe the required process slightly imperfectly, causing some waste of time yesterday.”
All nice and “what? I’m not accusing her of anything!”-y. Yes, I have an evil mind sometimes.
If I hug you nice enough, I’m sure you’ll also share your chocolate with me in the future 
Gutenmorgen, meine freunde. I am feeling inexplicably German this morning, apparently. Coffee is good, weather is cold. According to my PDA, 3°/37F actual, -2°/28F apparent. Yes, LiLi, I know it’s November, but this feels too cold even for that. I’m wearing two layers of clothing today, and I still regret not reattaching the outer layer of my coat. It was so cold last night that MindWife I insisted I go out for another coffee that night, something we don’t often do. I suggested an alternative method to warming up, but my objection was overruled and the verdict was hot, steamy caffeine. (This was later overturned on appeal.)
BooFae - Hooray for outsmarting the petty passive-aggressive beast! Never try and pull one over on a Doper. Unless losing turns your crank, anyway. And I see no reason hugs and chocolate need to be mutually exclusive. In fact, one of them has been known to lead to the other.
VBob - This ought to be a good story. I always suspected there were better religious stories about asses than the bit about Balaam and Jehovah.
Special1 - Hi! You must be new to bureaucracy. I always hate it when one hand has no idea what the other hand is doing even when they’re supposed to work closely together. I seriously don’t understand how hard it could possibly be to get all your gears in place before opening the doors to the public. Obscure and unique situations that never came up in planning I can understand being unprepared for, but something as common as making sure that your system’s data agrees with the other systems it interacts with seems pretty trivial. But then, I suppose that lack of understanding is why I’m not an engineer.
Duty calls.
My interview is next Monday. I have to come up with a teaching demonstration. Ugh.
Need more coffee. MORE COFFEE.
Did I give hugs to Kid? :: hugs :: You can have a kiss too. :: muah ::
(sorry for re-hashing the obvious. I wrote this for my fire tale collection first, then posted it here. Usually it’s the other way around; hence more back story than usual)
I apologize in advance, for there is a lot of back story to get through to reach the meat and payoff in this tale.
Two years ago, I had a gastric bypass and lost 130 lbs., which enabled me to handle becoming a firefighter and EMT. Over the last few months, I’ve let my dietary discipline slack, and I’ve gained back 25-30 lbs. Not enough to get in the way of the physical activity, but enough that my diabetes and blood pressure problems have come back a little bit. After a good butt-chewing by my doctor, I promised I’d behave myself by re-losing the weight and getting everything put right.
My wife had a double knee replacement late October, and as I write this, she’s been either in the hospital or a rehab unit for 2 weeks and change. With that much time available as a bachelor, I cleaned out the fridge and pantry, and went back to my diet with a vengeance. I haven’t bothered to jump on the scales, but I’ve lost enough weight already that my belt had to tighten a notch. Most of the time, That’s A Good Thing.
The other point to make warming up is that I’m a Lutheran, living in a county where you can count non-fundamentalists on two hands. I go to a church in an adjoining county, and frequently show up in nice blue jeans and a nice shirt.
So to the story. I was on the way home from church in Betsytown Sunday, contemplating stopping by the station to pick up leftovers from the previous day’s fundraiser, when there was a page for a man at the Mayberry Baptist Church having passed out. I had just finished a shift before heading to Betsytown, so I knew there was no one pulling duty for the day. I was 5 miles out and headed that way, so I called in.
About a minute later, my fire chief gets on the radio and says that the patient came around and was declining treatment and transport. Well, OK, I won’t pick up the unit, but I still want 2 more quarts of that Brunswick Stew we were selling, so I stopped. Just as I was getting ready to go out the door, the phone rang. It was the patient’s wife. We’ll call her Patsy; she’s part of the emergency service structure, and well known enough that I can’t even say in what manner in order to protect her husband’s privacy. This is what we consider to be a ‘family’ call.
Her husband had passed out again, and she was frantic. “He’s going to the hospital on the ambulance before I kill him myself and put him in the morgue!” I rolled, praying someone would answer the call, since I needed a partner. Soon enough, I hear that Chuck, my assistant fire chief, was going to meet me at the church.
I pull up, and Chuck is out front waiting. I parked, and started gathering my stuff. I carry a large hand radio, along with a fire pager and my cell phone. A lot of weight on my loose belt…
The patient was lying on the floor with a suit jacket under his head, and 4 or 5 good Baptist women were gathered around him, fanning him with their church bulletins. Everyone was dressed in their stereotypical Sunday best, and here I was in blue jeans…
<snerk>
We loaded him onto the stretcher, and I felt a bit of a breeze in back as I lifted him up. I did a real quick tuck, and we carried him out and loaded him into the unit. Getting in is two large steps, and as I went up, I first felt another breeze, and then a wedgie (!). My head whipped around to see Patsy hiking my drawers for me. “Bob, be a little more careful next time…” I also saw that a large chunk of the congregation saw this happen, including about 1/3 of my fire station. If I wasn’t so intent on working on Patsy’s husband, I’d have been embarrassed.
His vitals were mostly good, but his blood oxygen was too low. We put him on oxygen, and it came up quickly. No problems with him during transport, but I was almost T-boned near the hospital when some self-absorbed moron decided he didn’t have to yield to lights and siren.
The scary part was after we got him inside and turned over. Chuck and I were talking to Patsy, and she told us that when he went down the second time, a cardiac nurse in the congregation found no pulse or respiration, and she started compressions while Patsy did old-fashioned mouth to mouth. Three compressions re-established a pulse, and he came around. :eek: