sick

It looks like it’s the season of getting sick. First, it was Seppo. Then it was Roopa. Then, it was Seppo again. Then it was Uyen. And now, it is me.

I think I have the stomach flu. I thought it was food poisoning, but I think I’m wrong. Monday at work was a sheer disaster. I had a non-stop barf fest yesterday. I barfed after I drove up to Seppo’s work. Then I barfed in the bathroom of the restaurant we met Seppo’s parents in. I had to leave the restaurant and lie down in the car, it was so bad. Then I barfed when I got home. Then I slept for like 3 hours, then got up and barfed again, spending about an hour with Roopa before going to sleep.

I’m pretty sure barfing again this morning would help things feel better, but I honestly don’t think there is anything left in there. I haven’t felt this awful in years.

t-day week(end)

I have no idea what I did on Tuesday, but here is the rest of my week.

• Wednesday:
• Go grocery shopping
• Go to doctor’s appointment
• Go grocery shopping again to pick up pie crusts I forgot the first time
• Drive to Bart station to go to SF to visit with Holly and help unpack some things then have dinner
• Rush home then to the airport to pick up Roopa
• Bake two pecan pies while chatting and fall asleep.

• Thursday:
• Wake up to call from younger cousin who is driving up
• Go back to sleep and wake up late
• Take Roopa to Bart
• Drop by Seppo’s parents’ to pick up cranberry-orange relish and sweet potatoes and grab a bite of sushi as well as bring some home to a sick Seppo
• Let Andrew in when he arrives,
• Go to Bart to pick up Holly
• Go shopping with Holly to pick up some greens, sald fixings, and a crudite platter
• Start gravy as Seppo works on butterflied turkey, realizing too late that it’s a really long gravy recipe
• Receive guests (Uyen, Charles, Long, Charlotte)
• Get food out a full hour later than estimated — heh
• Eat and eat and chat for hours

• Friday
• Sleep in
• Eat leftovers
• Hike around Lake Temescal with Seppo, cousin, and dog
• Dinner with Holly and Andre (tgf meet-n-greet? hahah) in the city, followed by hanging out at her house

• Saturday
• Lunch with Eugene and Andrew (older and younger cousins from different branches of the family) at Sahn Maru — Thanks, Eugene!
• Bring back take-out for sick-again Seppo
• Watch first episode of Freaks and Geeks, one of my NaNoWriMo rewards
• Work on NaNoWriMo for the first time in days

• Sunday
• Eat breakfast Seppo made
• Take Mobi to dog walk with Seppo
• Drive into city to meet with Leila and Roopa, then pick up Holly
• Enjoy tea for hours at Lovejoy Tea Room
• Hang out at Holly’s house with the girls
• Come home and finish NaNoWriMo
• Rewrite my self-review and finish a co-worker’s peer review

I think that was the gist of it.

Vacation: Day Three

I’m taking off the three days before the Thanksgiving day break. Counting the weekends, that’s a total of nine days off! Woo hoo! I don’t know when I last had so much time off to myself when I wasn’t going off to visit various people.

Sometimes, I need to just decompress. And I’ll have that chance! Yay!

So, today is Monday, day three of the nine day break. So far today, I slept in late, finished reading a book while still lying in bed, took my dog out for a stroll around the neighborhood and then to the dog park, came home and put in a load of laundry, and posted some comments on some blogs. The next thing for me is to start cooking dinner at some point, maybe around 3? It’s going to be the oven braised version of the short rib dish I made some time ago. I’m hoping I learned something from last time: use only a little bit of liquid, cook at a lower temperature for far longer, and use more seasoning.

I’m hoping I’ll get a little nap and some cleaning done too. Hee hee. I am giddy just thinking about the afternoon nap.

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I’ve been messing with WordPress and have migrated a snapshot of my blog to this test set-up. The thing I like about it is that all the entries are stored in a mysql database, and switching layout and themes is simply a matter of switching the css file, rather than having to “publish” all the content again to html files, as with blogger. I appreciate that the content is in fact quite independent of the layout. It makes a former UI engineer’s heart sing.

At the same time, I feel wary of moving it over, as I don’t know if frequent visitors will dislike the commenting system, or if I’ll get spammed by the blogspambots (whatever they are called). I also like that blogger has an external (to my server) backup of all my data, if something should go wrong with my setup.

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We booked a place to stay in London for our honeymoon! It will be half a block away from Oxford Street, right by the northeast corner of Hyde Park, a wimpy child’s stone’s throw to an Underground station. And what a deal it was. I highly recommend looking into Bidding for Travel, quite an aesthetically displeasing website that nonetheless has an amazing amount of information. It’s a website where people provide (free) expert help on bidding strategies on Priceline and Expedia. For instance, for hotels, here is a 13-part form you have to answer about where you want to go stay, what kind of accomodations you want, and what the lowest advertised fares you found were. Then they give you back a complete and detailed bidding strategy on how to get what you want at the lowest price. These people are scary, but really really competant.

I was able to take advantage of a bunch of discussions people were having about recently accepted bids in London, so I didn’t have to fill out the form. Now, we are trying to figure out which exact place to stay in Paris. We are going with our friend’s recommendation and will arrange for accomodations with Kudeta Home. They have several places where we want to stay, so we have to figure out which we like.

Seppo and I are quite excited about the prospect of eating our way through London and Paris. It’s so terrible! Yet so awesome. 😀

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Our invitations are coming along nicely. We’ve been playing with paper and fonts and think we are pretty much settled on what we want. Yay!

Solicitation for travel information

What specific places do you think we should see in London and Paris? What specific eateries and lodgings do you recommend? What tourist traps are ok to pass up? Lay it all on me, people. I know you have information.

Boo

Last Saturday, Seppo and I went to Becky and Alan’s house for a Halloween party. We were vastly entertained by the hosts, the guests, the food, and the pumpkins. Of the pumpkins, the most noteable was the “BOO” pumpkin that B & A carved, mostly because it was so fun to tease them about what the “300” referred to. 🙂

The costumes:

• Seppo and me: The men with “hands of blue” from Firefly.
• Becky and Alan: Bellatrix and Harry Potter.
• Uyen and Charles: Flighter Pilot Uyen and Cowboy Charles.
• Steve and Stiliana: Pirate Steve and Gypsy Stiliana.
• Steve’s friend Mike: Lab Dude Steve.
• Alexia and Joe E.: Abused Wife and Wife Beater.

I actually took photos, so I will post them at some point. For now, you can see some that the hosts posted here.

Tonight is NaNoWriMo Eve! Ack! In the coming month, you should expect not to see too many posts here but lots of posts at our Incite a Novel blog. If you want to join the blog as a member, just let me know via email or comment.

Hit and Run Update

• My pants feel the tiniest bit looser now. You can’t see it (and frankly, neither can I), but the pants definitely feel different. Portion control seems to be working. I eat everything I want to eat, just in smaller tracked quantities and stop before I feel full at the time, which means that 10 minutes later, I’ll feel full anyway.
• I’m very nervous about NaNoWriMo. I don’t feel like I have enough of a sense of the story I want to tell.
• Writing Technical Requirements Documents is rather dull, but rewarding.
• Holly is visiting next week! Woo!! She’s apartment hunting. I hope we find something awesome for her.
• ETA: I am going to try to give blood again. All the times I have tried in the past, something or another had gone wrong and I was unable to give blood. Today, I shall prevail!

Seppo’s game is out!

On the shelves today! Get it now! IGN and Gamespot don’t have proper reviews yet, but here is a preview article.

Reader average is 8.8! Excellent! I can’t wait to play it. The food system is all new and all thanks to Seppo. The social system has a lot of cool interactions and the animations are so funny and quirky. Love it!

I’m so proud of him. He’s worked like a dog on this project and I think it’ll really show. He’s been able to have a lot of input, and while no game can be truly perfect and ship on time without robot technology greatly advancing, he and the rest of the team have been able to tweak a lot of areas and add interesting dimension to the game. The control system has changed to a more directly controlling style, which, for me personally, will be a really huge positive difference.

Yay!

Fare thee well, Mrs. Parks.

I only just read this: CNN.com – Civil rights icon Rosa Parks dies at 92 – Oct 25, 2005.

🙁 It’s a very sad day indeed. May she be remembered in perpetuity for her courage in the role she played during the civil rights movement.

Movies

The next two movies I’m looking forward to are Derailed, starring Clive Owen and Jennifer Aniston (what a strange combo indeed), and Walk the Line, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon (ok, another weird combo). I like both Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, I love the era, and I love movies with music/musicians as the central component (Phoenix plays Johnny Cash), so I figure it’s gonna be hard to mess this up for me.

Strangely, the pairing reminds me of River Phoenix and Martha Plimpton. Man, I really want to watch Running on Empty again.

Productivity

Today has been full of productivity.

• Contact lens trial. I picked up my trial pair and am pretty happy with them. I have a follow-up in two weeks to see what the deposit rate on the lenses is like and how I feel about them.
• Dietary supplements. I stopped by the local natural food store and picked up some crazy multivitamins and calcium & magnesium supplements.
• Cards. I stopped by the local card shop and bought birthday cards for my niece and Seppo’s mom. I also got a card for my friend who is expecting her second baby in February.
• Invitation inquiry. While I was at the card shop, I asked about wedding invitations and looked at some books to see sample prices. This confirmed that Seppo and I should really do our own invites. I asked a friend of mine who did his own, and he said he’ll lend us his paper cutter. Nice and dangerous. 😀
• FitDay. Inspired by a friend’s fitness blog, I decided a couple of days ago to track my nutritional intake and exercise at FitDay. After mulling it over for some time, I decided to take the plunge and buy the desktop version. Having paid for something, I am more likely to try to squeeze it for every penny. 🙂
• Seppo’s Christmas present has arrived! Bwahahaha.