The world we live in and life in general

So much happens on a day to day basis to me and everyone else that there is no possible way to for everyone to keep everyone posted on the goings-ons and what-nots of their lives at all times.  It’s just not possible.  So we share small samplings of our lives on bliggity blogs and our face-spaces and we move on.  Years ago we didn’t even do that much.

Kira and Michelle have both been sick for a little over a week now.  So far, I have been very lucky to not yet get sick.  The wife went through antibiotics and had no result so more than likely she has viral bronchitis just like our poor baby girl.  Kira has to breath in medicine in vapor form from a mask hooked to a loud machine.  She was basically tolerant of the experience at first but I think her patience is getting thin for that routine.  Not sure how much longer she needs that treatment but hopefully not too long.  She seems to be a bit better.

Kira continues to amaze me with her progress and ability.  Michelle continues to amaze me in taking care of Kira every day and the house and everything else.  I know she thinks I don’t appreciate her and the hard work she does every day but I do.  I really do.  I am very proud of both of them.  I really don’t think that Kira would be so well adjusted and amazingly advanced if it weren’t for Michelle being with her every day and working with her and taking care of her.

We have been getting the run-around with Graebel… again.  You may remember we had issues with them back in October of last year.  Well, to one extent or another we have had continual issues since then as well.  Now for the past few months we have been dealing with trying to get our insured items covered and repaired.  Some things have worked out and many things haven’t but nothing has gone smoothly.  You can read up on the current problems over at the wife’s site.  I have given up dealing with them and turned them over to her to deal with.  I’m betting they are now wishing that they would have just worked things out with me.  If we ever decide to move to a new city again with my current employer I will do everything I can to NOT use Graebel for that or any other move.

I’ve been busy working on a few different projects at work.  I’m working on getting some new security software rolled out to all of our computers (actually our Altiris guy is doing all the work) and I’m in the final stages of getting ready for a big office integration in New York City.  I do not look forward to being away from the wife and our little girl while working on that project and I’m sure Michelle isn’t looking forward to it either.  But I don’t have to travel too often and I’m still employed so I do what I have to do.

We were planning on migrating from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to the new Exchange 2007 and I’ve been working on the testing and planning of that for a few months.  However, now that Microsoft is releasing the next version (2010) earlier than expected, and faster than any other major revision cycle in history for that product, we are now on hold.  The idea is that we will now skip Exchange 2007 and go directly to 2010.  OK cool.  We can do that.

I have been working on some new comics for A Little Scary in my “spare” time but I missed my re-launch date of June 1st already.  I’m hoping to get a couple done soon.  Here’s hoping.  I don’t want to start up again without at least a small buffer or I’ll just end up getting discouraged again when a deadline comes and goes with no update.

Bonus points if you can tell me where I got the title of this post.

So much going on

There’s so much going on these days and so little time it seems.  I had a bad run in with the liquid shits last night and this morning so I’m taking a sick day today.  So today’s been a bit of a breather which is nice.  I got to sleep in (mostly).

We found a house and the contract negotiations are complete as of last night.  We will be closing on October 24th (when some money comes available for us) and moving in directly afterwards.  Probably just in time for the baby to be ready to do it’s impression of an Alien chestburster.  Or something like that.  That ordeal is coming to an end and then of course the constant ordeal of home ownership starts.  But that’s OK.  We know how that works already.  We’re old pros.

I still need to post pictures of my car.  Wow, I’m such a slacker.  Muse got her old car back from my Step-Mom who bought it from us when we left for Hong Kong.  Of course we had to pay for it but it makes Muse happy and that’s a good thing these days.  At least she’s no longer a menace to society driving the gigantic white truck around.  Not because she’s a bad driver but because she feels like she can run over everything if she wants too.

On Sunday we finally got mobile phones.  Finally.  I got a 8GB Apple iPhone and Muse got a red LG Shine slider.  Oh it is so nice to be tethered once more.  I’m not sure what it is but I don’t even feel comfortable being disconnected like that.  Of course now I have to figure out how to make my iPhone sync with the Bluetooth functions of my car.  Yay for technology!

What I really wish I could figure out though is how to get music onto my iPhone through iTunes.  I thought that crap was supposed to be simple?!

Well, that’s all I got.  Keep hoping that my ass is done vomiting.  I know that’s what I’m hoping.

I have a cold

I’ve been sick for over two days.  It’s just a cold.  A stupid summer cold.  My nose is either stuffed up solid or leaking like a sewage pipe emptying out toxic waste.  My voice sounds like crap.  My throat was sore for the first day and half at least but feels a little better now.

And the book I’m reading has been giving me nightmares.  And something was making noise somewhere in the flat last night.  Something larger than the lizard that has taken up residence in my bathroom.  I saw him last night when he ran into my foot.  Lizards are nice.  I don’t mind them.  Other things that go bump in the night can kiss my ass though.

I forgot to bring DayQuil with me when I left for work this morning.  So although I’m doing OK since my morning dose, I know that it will be wearing off in a few short hours and I will become a mess once more.  I’ll probably be asked to go home at that point.  Ever since that whole SARS thing, people really don’t like sick people.

Poop test results

I stopped by the doctor’s office on the way in to work today to check on those test results from my poop.  The results were overdue.  I chatted with the doc for a minute and he told me that all the tests were negative.  Huh.

Then he called me on my mobile just a bit ago and said he got additional test results since I was in there.  Odd that they break it into parts but whatever.  He told me that I have something called the Norwalk Virus.  And that there was no cure.  A bit of panic set in.

Luckily it’s not as bad as it sounds and the doc just needs to learn how to phrase things better in English.  There is no cure because it’s a virus and it just runs its course and dies off.  I did some research and found that it’s the second most common virus after the common cold in the United States and is better known as the stomach flu.  Well, that’s not nearly so bad sounding, is it?

Ah well, at least I know I’m not dying of some fancy tropical disease.  Hey look, a bright side!

Playing with my poop

My Mom called to check up on me last night and see how I was feeling.  She does that.  And to reward that action, I regaled her with the story of my upcoming play date with the toilet.  Then she told me that was wrong and that the poop specimen was NOT to be fished out of the toilet bowl.  She also said the doctors probably assumed that their patients had more common sense than to fish the poop out of the toilet water.  She does that too.  She said that if I did that, the sample would be completely contaminated with all sorts of things that may or not be mine.  She’s a Mom so of course she’s right.

I was enlightened to the fact that when you have to give a poop sample (or stool sample as my Mom says although it seems lacking in descriptive power) you normally are given a whole kit that includes a cover to place over the toilet that you poop on and even handy wipes for cleaning up after wards along with other fun poop play paraphenalia.  I guess this means that my Mom has had to play with her poop in her adult life too.  I told her I got a small clear tube with a blue plastic cap and a tiny little shovel head attached to the lid by a bubble-blower wand.  I’m fairly certain her opinion of Hong Kong medicine has gone down a notch.

She told me I could just use aluminum foil since that’s what we use for the dogs.  I told her, well yes I could.  I could just spread a sheet of foil out on the living room floor and drop my pants and aim for the shiny square.  Muse was listening to my half of the conversation by then and was rather amused.  Other suggestions were to hold a bowl in the toilet or to hold something to catch the poop.  All this talk could have proved traumatizing for someone who was not comfortable with the whole pooping process.  Not me though.  I know that Everybody Poops and I didn’t need a book to confirm it for me.

I filled Muse in on the misconceptions I seemed to have had about this whole process and the things my Mom had said.  I tried my hardest to act hurt by my wife’s laughter at my situation but it really was a lost cause.  However once she recovered from laughing at me she picked herself up off the floor (like I was going to help her up after that…) and she grabbed a big plastic bowl that she said she didn’t like anyway.  I looked at her with what I hope was my incredulous look and then stuck the bowl over my butt to see if it would fit.  Mostly it did and then that sent Muse laughing again and she made me leave the kitchen before I tried the bowl out for the main event.

I armed myself in the best way I thought I could in this unfamiliar situation.  I got a big plastic bag to put the soon-to-be-soiled big plastic bowl in after ‘the collection’ as well as a dog poop bag in case I needed to pick up and stray bits.  I found that the big plastic bowl fit into the toilet lid just right with enough lip to keep it from slipping in.  I was fairly certain that I couldn’t just sit on it like normal though and besides, my dangly bits would have been touching the bowl and that’s just not right.  So I decided to try hovering.

Now mind you I’m about the farthest thing from a woman that you can get in most regards, so I am not what you would call a veteran of the art of toilet hovering.  Men just never really have to use that particular skill.  Sure we know the gist of the idea and assume that we could pull it off if we ever had to but I think most of us are pretty unused to the action.  I found it impossible to hover and read a magazine at the same time so I had to adjust a few times and do without the reading.  I can assure you that hovering and pooping is certainly much more difficult than just plain pooping.  There’s a certain leverage which is lost as well as a portion of zen and dignity.

When I finally got the first nugget out, I hopped up to have a look.  The first mistake was in my long standing belief that my shit doesn’t stink.  Oh contraire mon frere.  It does.  So that was a bit of a shock. Then I was a little worried because I had told the doc that my poop had been diarrhea and that it hadn’t been black.  This nugget o’ stinky poop made me a liar on many levels in that it was extremely solid and quite black, with green bits of ooze and some bits of white.  (I imagine those bits of white are what they will be looking for at the lab)  So not wanting to seem like a liar, and not wanting to try and hack apart this rock hard nugget with the tiny shovel on a wand, I put the bowl back down and had another go at the hovering.

I missed it before but this time I’m fairly certain I saw ‘Hovering (3)’ pass in front of my eyes while I was straining and concentrating on squeezing off a smaller and less black bit for the doc.  Once it had passed I knew I had been successful on the smaller portion but I jumped up to take a look at the color.  Dammit… same.  Now by this time I was quite done with the whole ordeal and I noticed that this particular chunk would actually fit inside the tube without any slicing or dicing.  It’s not what the doc asked for, but you know I don’t really care.  It’s a poop sample so just do what you need to with it OK?  So I used the tiny shovel wand to scoop up the small bit and guide it ever so carefully into the tube.

Then I put the lid on.  Then I tried to put the lid on.  The damn chunk of poop was blocking the shovel wand bit attached to the lid and wouldn’t let me close it!  So there was a reason for their weird demands.  Not to be outdone though, I slid the shovel bit in at an angle and got the threads of the lid and tube to match up.  But then you know what happens when you turn the cap to tighten it right?  Yeah, that flat shovel head spins too.  That slimy chunk o’ poop got smeared all around inside that clear tube as I tightened the cap.  Oh… that was pleasant.

So then I tossed the unused chunk in the toilet and flushed the evidence, dumped the soiled bowl into the bag to be thrown out and washed up.  I got a zip-lock baggy to put the sample vial into and then stuck that baggy in the fridge with all our food… because the sample can’t be turned int till morning.  You just have to love modern medicine.

So there you have it.  I played with my poop last night and now you know all about it.  If you actually read this whole post, I have serious concerns for your mental well-being and/or your coping skills.  Either way, you’re welcome.

A couple walks into a doctor’s office…

Muse accompanied me to the doctor’s office this afternoon to see if they would agree about the creatures that may be living in my bowels.  This has been a kind of on-going thing since coming back from Kuala Lumpur so we told the doc-of-the-day (you get a new doc each time you go) that this was a follow-up to my last visit at the end of February.  The doc pulled up my records and said “You mean in December?” because that was the last record he had in the computer for me.  Huh?

We visited with the doc for about 15 minutes in his office.  Ten of those minutes was spent by him trying 86 different ways of pulling up my last visit that seems to have disappeared from their system.  We even had to make sure he understood that, no my name is not Hendryk Wagner and I’m not 42 years old so that can’t be me under a different name.  Grrr….

So basically it boils down to the fact that he can’t tell us anything until he gets to play with my poop.  Well, he’s the doctor, so he probably has someone else play with the poop and then just kind of give him the general summary of the poop and the playtime.  Doctor’s are just like that.

So he pulls out this tiny clear vial with a blue stopper that has the cutest little shovel tip attached on a wand dangling from said blue stopper.  He said the poop went in there.  I wanted to tell him that I was American and that I’m a big guy and everything about me is big: including my poop.  There was no way that my poop was going to be worked over by a tiny spade smaller than most bubble-blower-wands and it certainly wasn’t going to fit in that little clear tube.  That’s what I wanted to say, but the Chinese don’t tend to have the same sense of humor as me and I thought it would probably just confuse the issue and send him into searching his database for my lost records one more time.  Which he did anyway.

However, he must have seen the expression of surpressed humor on my face and told me that he only needed enough poop to cover the little blue scoop.  So now, not only do I have to go bobbing for poop in our toilet, but I have to dissect it into a small enough piece to fit this vial.  Those of you who know me in real life know that being in a bathroom for longer than necessary after I drop the kids off at the pool know that this is generally regarded as a biohazard situation.  Add to this that I’ll probably end up puking as I play play-doh fun factory in the toilet and this does not sound like a good path to recovery.

I am sick

I was up most of the night last night and have been sick all day.  I’ve had diarrhea, nausea, no sleep and a fever.  Up till about 2 hours ago I’ve spent most of the day either in bed or in the bathroom.  What a crappy Sunday.  I won’t be going to work tomorrow.  I need to go to the doctor and see if they can fix me.

Yesterday we went with some friends to Ocean Park.  We had fun and it was a good day.  Everything since then has sucked though.

I need to rest.

Friday update

It’s Friday (barely) and I made it through a full day at work without having to go to the toilet once.  Not too bad.  However, my intestines are still a general war zone it would seem.  The pizza I ate seems to be losing and another battle is just around the bend so to speak.

We’re supposed to go on a hike tomorrow in Clearwater Bay which is on the eastern edge of Hong Kong.  I’m hoping that we still have some Immodium left tomorrow morning to get me through a 6.5 kilometer hike without toilets.  Hopefully it will be at least a bit clear out so we can get some decent photos.

I didn’t get any pictures in Kuala Lumpur except of my hotel room and that was just because they had upgraded me to a suite.  Which was pretty nice.

I’m starting to think I should never go to Malaysia again….

Sick day today

I’m back from Kuala Lumpur but I had to take a sick day today.  It seems I ate or drank something that has turned my intestines into a juice factory.  I had water at one or two restaurants and by the time I was supposed to be leaving for the airport, I was still worrying about where the next bathroom would be on the way out.  I wasn’t late for my flight, but I was a little worried about half way to the airport that I might have to ask the taxi driver to stop at the next brightly colored mosque so I could pay tribute, so to speak.

Before dinner, I started playing Overlord on the XBox 360.  I hadn’t intended to get it but the Broadway electronics store had a bunch of 360 games on sale for only $159 HKD (about $20 USD) which is dirt cheap.  I haven’t gotten very far in it yet, but I think I’ll like it.  I’m not sure it’s going to be as good as the classic Dungeon Keeper and Dungeon Keeper 2, but for current games that allow you to play as the bad guy, this is about all the choice you get.

Sickness and sadness

Did I mention that I also seem to have gotten a cold during the flight from LA to Hong Kong?  At least that’s when the symptoms started.  And it continues even now.  My head and nose are stuffed up and I have the occasional sneezing or coughing fit.  It’s fun.

Even worse is that Guinness is sick too.  Yesterday he cried for me to let him out and once we got outside he wanted to run.  They need the exercise so I ran with them on their leashes.  Then when we got to his favorite hillside I noticed he was absolutely frantic to find a place to poop.  And once he started pooping he didn’t stop till he was cleaned out of what looked like butterscotch pudding coming from his butt.

He woke up before my alarm today frantic to go outside again and the same thing happened.  We came back in and I started preparing their breakfast and I stepped in something wet on the throw rug.  Sure enough, there were two large brown puddles on the carpet as he must have made sure that he only went on that and not the floor.  Breakfast was postponed while I used the spare shower to wash off my sock, pants leg and the rug.  Oh it smells lovely in the kitchen.

He’s been scared all morning because he was afraid I’d be mad at him.  I talked to him and let him know it’s not his fault and that it was OK.  I think he’s calmed down about it now.  He only ate half his breakfast and I’m going to feed him some Pepto once I finish my cereal.  I think I need to get him some rice on my way back from work today.

I feel so bad for him.  I know he’s upset and he feels really bad.  He would have never done anything in the house if he couldn’t help it.  I’m really sad because of all this too.  Sad for him and, somewhat selfishly, sad for myself as well.  It’s been a bad couple of days and I really miss Muse being here to help me with everything.  I know I can handle this all on my own with some degree of success but I don’t want to.

I wish she was here.