Payday arrived, and I was able to visit a walk-in clinic yesterday morning. Turns out a large part of the severity of my symptoms over the past few weeks was due to a case of bronchitis that followed on from the cold, so it wasn’t the sudden worsening of my allergy-induced asthma that I feared it was. I’ve been prescribed antibiotics and a new bronchodilator, and should be my old self again soon.
I’ve been under the weather for nearly the whole month! That’s gotta be a new record.
First, it started out as some sort of cold/flu bug, then my allergy-induced asthma kicked in overtime and stretched it out. Normally the asthma isn’t a big deal, and I used to be able to keep it in check with an over-the-counter inhaler. Unfortunately, all OTC inhalers containing chlorofluorocarbon propellants were taken off the market on December 31, 2011. Apparently, a few years ago, some green eco-friendly legislation was passed by Congress to ban CFCs because they make the hole in the ozone layer bigger, and the clock ran out on December 31 for Primatene Mist.
Anyway, that means I now have to visit a doctor and get on a prescription regimen if I want to feel like my old self again. That’ll cost me $150 if I go to one of the local clinics. We’ve been eating ramen noodles and pretzels for most of the month because my wife got screwed out of her January teaching hours at the last minute by her pointy headed boss, and my earnings alone are barely enough to keep the bills paid. I don’t have $150. In comparison, a Primatene Mist refill only cost me $18 at the local grocery store back when it was available. That was nice while it lasted.
I’ve had to improvise by substituting the Primatene tablets, which are still available. Unfortunately, the reason I was using the inhaler in the first place is because it was faster-acting, more effective, and didn’t have the side effects that the tablets do. The ephedrine (the bronchodilator component) in the tablets is a stimulant that also wires me like caffeine, and the guaifenesin (the expectorant component) makes me pee like a racehorse every 45-60 minutes. So, between the overstimulation and the full bladder, my sleeping patterns are out of whack.
In addition to that, the 20-plus minutes it takes for the tablets to kick in and their relatively short half life means they’re just not an adequate substitute for a fast-acting inhaler if an actual attack occurs, and I’d just as soon avoid an expensive trip to the emergency room, which also means I have to use them prophylactically instead of only when I need them. It’s not an ideal treatment regimen by any stretch, but it’ll have to do until I can afford to see the doctor.
I guess nobody told our politicians that sunburned Antarctic penguins aren’t a voting constituency! 😆
Been a while since my last blog post, hasn’t it? Sorry about that!
This morning, Mrs E and I helped deliver packages of gifts and food to needy people as part of the Operation Blue Santa program. It was nice to see such a huge turnout–so many volunteers showed up at the local police substation to help deliver the goodies that there was a long line of cars spilling out of the substation’s parking lot, and by the time Mrs E’s truck reached the loading zone, we’d already unloaded half of the big truck that came from the warehouse. We delivered to 7 households ourselves in 2 trips (big boxes!), and when we loaded up for the second trip, the warehouse truck was practically emptied and there were several cars behind us. It was very heartening to see so many volunteers. Lots of them even brought the kids and made it a family thing.
We took a break to eat breakfast at home after our second delivery run, and it was at this point that I broke into a little old lady’s house with a screwdriver.
Well, actually, I just wanted an excuse to say “I broke into a little old lady’s house with a screwdriver” with a straight face. The little old lady was our next door neighbor Mrs Grace, and she and her husband Mr John were locked out of her house.
Anyway, we went to the central Operation Blue Santa warehouse after our breakfast. I was expecting to make at least another delivery run, but there were apparently so many volunteers there that it was practically emptied before noon. They were bringing back undeliverable boxes at this point, and they started the volunteers’ barbecue early. The line for that took nearly half an hour to get to the food itself, and they had some entertainment to keep the volunteers amused while in line.
There was a local boy band which I’m told put on a good show, a screen/projector showing video footage from earlier in the operation, Blue Santa and Mrs. Blue Santa (yes, exactly like it sounds), and my favorite part of the entertainment: the spangly blue-suited Elvis Presley impersonator. That was hilarious–the man had the pelvic moves down pat, some seriously impressive sideburns, and he had a bunch of silk-ish scarves that he was handing out to women who caught his eye. Mrs E was one of them, and I nearly died laughing when he danced up to Mrs E and put a pink Elvis scarf around her neck.
The barbecue was good. Nice brisket and awesome sausages that had a nice spicy afterbite to them. We came home, passed out on the sofa from the ensuing meat coma, and came to about an hour ago. It was a pretty good day, and the sheer number of volunteers who showed up really did a lot for my flagging opinion of the human race as a whole.
I mean, there’s so much negativity and sensationalism in the news that you’d think we were a modern Sodom and Gomorrah in dire need of a visit from a bolide of significant size, but that quickly gets put into perspective by something as simple as visiting a local charity or taking part in one of these programs that help other people. You see how many genuinely nice people there are out there, and you get to see the faces of the people who are being helped by these programs. It makes a guy feel pretty good.
What else have I been up to…well, besides our modest little part in Operation Blue Santa today, not much that’s newsworthy. 2 birthdays in November (Mrs E and her dad), Thanksgiving with the stepkids, a wedding reception (My stepdaughter Sara and her husband Alan got married in South America a while ago), I turned 37 earlier this month, I added 6 new items to the Ebbles Labs section of the WWG catalog, and…I think that’s the entire remainder of the list of notable events.
Okay, on the hobby/work front: Mrs E also introduced me to one of her friends back in November, who is a dollhouse miniatures enthusiast. I came away from that conversation rather taken with and fascinated by that hobby. I’m planning to dip my toe in those waters, because I see intriguing modeling possibilities in the much larger size of 1:12 and 1:6 scale items, and I think it’d be a fun thing to do. I mean, can you imagine the amount of detail I could pack into a model that big? It’s a good thing I have a printer that can feed up to 13×19″ paper.
This is also the time of the year where my fascination with whimsical toys resurfaces and I find myself experimenting with one of my longtime projects. I’ve been working on a sort of paper minifig (think of a little block person like Lego people, Kubricks, or Minimates, except made of paper) for a few years now. Normally, I complete the holiday quarter without being fully satisfied with my efforts for any number of reasons, but I’m getting very close to something that I’m happy with this year. In particular:
I’m hoping that I finally nail it this year. I’m planning to start a separate part-time side business selling preprinted paper toys and dollhouse furnishings sometime in the new year. It’s a different market and a new challenge for me, and it lets me scratch a creative itch that I can’t in my current line of work.
Okay, that’s it for now. 🙂
I’ve been thinking for the past few days about the differences between now and back in 2003, when I first got started. Specifically, in the area of online shopping.
It’s amazing to me, that after all this time, the user experience during online shopping still sucks. It’s not so bad the first time, but when you find other stores you want to shop at, you’re likely to run into differences in the user experience. I don’t really like this. For me, the optimal user experience should be similar to walking into a real store. You pull out some cash or you swipe a debit/credit card, and you leave with a bagful of goodies. Short, sweet, easy. No passwords to remember, no worrying about the safety of your personal information, just pay the cashier and leave with your purchases.
Of course, this isn’t literally possible online–if only to prevent fraud and maintain some sort of accountability, there needs to be some step to establish that you’re really who you say you are. So, online businesses have to ask for your name, address, card number, and all that, and they pass it along to their payment gateway, which will verify or decline the transaction. That’s unavoidable, but it can be made relatively painless. Not completely painless, but relatively painless. I’m gonna share some purely hypothetical thoughts on that subject over the next few pages of this post.
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I jumped on a Kindle ebook reader yesterday, after 4 things happened this week: Amazon released a new Kindle lineup starting at $79, my Amazon store card balance recovered from the Photoshop CS5 purchase a few months ago, I came into a ton of free ebooks earlier in the week courtesy of the Baen Free Library that I don’t like reading on my laptop, and I had also gotten to thinking that it’d be fun for me to get back into developing interactive fiction with a toy like this.
It arrived a couple of hours ago. Yeah, I opted for one day shipping because patience is not my strongest suit, and I didn’t want to wait until Monday or Tuesday to get it. I just ordered a second one about half an hour ago, as a matter of fact. It was the only way I could get the first one back from Mrs E, who spent most of the afternoon running around the duplex playing keep-away and triumphantly shouting that it belonged to her.
Anyway, about the interactive fiction thing: I’ve always loved choose-your-own-adventure books and text adventure games. They’re a fun programming challenge, have a retro charm, and unlike graphically sophisticated media like videogames or movies, the barrier to entry is much lower. All you need (besides the tools) is some imagination and the ability to write engaging prose, and the fact that it leverages skills that I don’t routinely use at work makes dabbling in interactive fiction a very enjoyable diversion for me.
The Kindle software development kit isn’t out of private beta yet, but that’s okay because I’m planning to write a web-based interactive fiction engine in PHP that serves Kindle-friendly webpages as output. It’s gonna be fun, especially since I want to use Guncrawl mechanics to handle task and combat resolution under the hood.