2013-12-26:

Got the wands done. Here's a question- why do I suck? I mean, take a look at these two pictures. You'll be able to immediately see which are mine, and which are not.

[[image file="2013-12/isuck.png" alt="wands some good some bad" ]]

I mean the person made them out of freaking hot glue. How do you get hot glue to be that smooth? Every time I use hot glue it gets everywhere, makes little strings all over the place. I used clay, thinking that would produce a superior result. Nope. Oh, and the tutorial was like, "Yeah, 8 wands in an hour." Mine took me a whole day, between letting the clay dry and the paint try and repainting them because the brown made them look like turds on a stick, not a wand. Especially that twisted one. As soon as I finished painting it I was like- turd. Repaint.

Even their picture looks better, and I tried my best to copy the angle and positioning of the wands and everything.

So that little project is probably a bust. Maybe I'll see if others have done something similar and further refine the technique.

After all, those could be the 50th wands made, not the first.

Right?

Sat:
Had a rough night. I've had a sort of sore throat, cough, nose blowing thing going off and on the last few days. I felt fine, if a little tired from all the mucus production my body was doing. Last night though- First I was hot, then cold. Went to bed at 9:30 and don't think I got a full hour of sleep until after 3:00 when I took the second shot of medicine. Then I finally slept until about 10:00. Woke up feeling fine again. Runny nose has backed way off, slight cough, voice is really weak though.

Weird. Mom got it much worse, she's still in bad shape. Get better soon, mom.

Supposed to get ice storm conditions tonight, so we canceled the game. Sigh. I had gotten a few calls but I really didn't want to go anywhere, just sit, relax, and make sure I don't relapse in whatever this illness is. So I did some writing.

I did get my lamp out, the one that burns actual oil, and make sure I could still light it and get it going. I can! I'll probably shut everything off tonight, depending on the weather. I'd rather not be woken up to the beep-beep-beep of my UPS systems telling me power has been lost. It's still raining pretty hard, and the temperature as I type this at 3:40 is 38 degrees. Five more and we're in trouble.

Another ice storm right before christmas would be super great! Hey, that reminds me, it's the official first day of winter today. Yup, all that snow and such and it wasn't even winter yet. Take that, Autumn.

It is supposed to be above freezing temperatures the next two days, so that would help melt any ice we got tonight. At least it's happening on the 21st going into a Sunday rather then the 24th.

Sun:
Dodged ice! Whew.
Sat and watched James Bond movies. Still a bit of a runny nose, and the cough is still hanging around.

It wasn't too bad until I went over to see Mom for her birthday. Can moving around aggravate something like that? Heather was coughing too,

Mon:
Still coughing! Aarg. Went into CVS to get cough medicine and realized my wallet was still sitting on the floor in my room. Usually I put it on the table so I remember to pick it up on Monday but with dropping into bed Sunday night I did not do this. Nor did I pick it up on the way past later.

Sigh.

So I went home, got it, and finally got my cough medicine. It seems to help. I still cough, but when it's about the four hour mark I can tell because the cough picks up.

Anyway, got groceries, candy making stuff, and went home.

Two setups today, the first two. They went pretty smoothly, though apparently I missed something on the second guy's machine so I have to go back after christmas. Weird, never missed anything before.

Then the guy who "couldn't get on the internet" but in reality "IE was crashing when launched." Tracked it down to some weird file I didn't recognize that was running. Once I killed it, IE started up fine. Firefox was busted too, it never even launched. Weird. So that wasn't too long.

Then at 6:00 (arg) a place I hadn't been since 2011. Ancient Dell machine with two problems. Only 512MB of RAM, and Frontier Security by F-Secure. So I took care of both of them and finally came home. Ate dinner. Made some phone calls, tomorrow is totally booked up. (Admittedly I'm stopping early to go to my parent's house but I bought a lunch to take rather then coming home so it works out to the be the same) 4 places to go.

Got a call from the pretty, almost blind girl that her internet wasn't working. (at 9:07) I hated to make her wait a couple of days so I had her do a few things. Turns out her internet was working fine, windows was just flipping out about her DNS server. I tried various things and finally disabled the adapter and had her re-enable it. That finally kicked it in the head so it worked.

I was making candy before that, so who knows when I'll finish it now. It shouldn't take long, maybe when I get back from Eve or get up a little early on The Day.

I took my medicine at 10:00, which was starting to run out again, and now at 10:30 I'm going to bed.

You have no idea how weird it is (for me) to go to bed at 10:30, to get up at 8:30, and hope for a decent amount of sleep. It just doesn't happen with me. I'm usually more apt to do something at 10:30-11:00 then be thinking about bedtime yet.

It just isn't right, I tell you.

Tues:
Eve! Did a bunch of work, though not in the order I thought I was going to. First up was a cleanout. His Panda wasn't working so I reloaded that. Nothing too tough there. In fact I was so ahead of schedule and nearby to what I thought I was going to do third that I went and did that second. The mortgage place. She had some weird printer selected as her default, so we switched it back to the real one, which seemed to help. Also peaked in to see the print shop guy who "lives" in the back, got him straight too.

Got to my now third one a little early, another cleanout. He had already run mbam so I ran just combofix. Also installed some RAM to boost him from 512. Ugh, these ancient machines!

Went home for lunch, noticed that ebay automatically started a non-payment dispute on my behalf for the gun. That's nice of them.

Out at 3:30 for the last job, and yes, it was another cleanout. Felt eye was weird.

Went to my parent's house and she immediately looked at me and said "looks like you've got pink eye." Huh, no wonder it felt funny. Used to get it all the time as a kid.

So it's making with the crusty excretions, and the cough continues. Seems like it's going to be a fun ride.

Had a good eve, looked at christmas lights, even if my eye was bugging out a little.

Went home, tried to get some sleep.

Wed:
Mostly succeeded. There does seem to be a trend of getting more sleep every night. Seemed to be much better this morning, didn't even feel I needed to take the cough medicine.

Went over to my parent's for Christmas Day, and had a coughing I mean a wonderful time. At least my nose isn't running like it was, and my eye, while still pink, feels better.

Set up dad's new computer, and got many fine gifts from everyone, so thanks to all.

Had a great day and came home to put everything away. Had a few bouts of coughing but it's calmed down again now. Going to see if not using medicine to sleep tonight is possible. I've used almost the whole bottle of stuff I bought.

Got paid for the gun, so I'll ship that tomorrow.

And that's that. In just a week it's a new year. I'll be changing my price structure, sending in my estimated tax, and waving goodbye to 2013. You ended in a way I won't forget, let me tell you.

"Remember that year we went to Florida and got sick when we got home?"

Yup, we'll be saying that in 10 years…

Thurs:
Not much went on today, but somehow I still didn't get much accomplished.

Getting better though, didn't take cough medicine today either and this time, didn't regret it. I am still coughing, but I fell like it's doing something so I let it go on. Tonight while I'm trying to sleep? Well, we'll see I guess. Still stuffy and my voice is still weird but I'm not running at the nose very much.

Looked into the PS3. Apparently you can't install games onto he HD like you can with the 360 so the drive problem will be a problem. The sequel to the game I want to play can be bought from the online store, for $9.99 even. Pity I want the first one.

Sadly, all that is on offer at the moment on ebay are used drives. Do I want to take a chance on a used drive? After all, they will be as old as this one. I've tried to limit my use of the optical drive on the 360 by installing whatever game I'm playing. Can't do that here! I'm going to keep looking around to see if you can still get new parts, then just pony up the $50 for a used one. Sigh.

Why don't they make the one game I want downloadable?

First job was at 11:00, the mortgage place again. Spent 20 minutes waiting for him to reproduce the problem, and it was just a checkbox "print to file" that was checked in acrobat reader. (Sorry, "adobe" reader) Great. He also has a machine he wants reloaded "which he should have brought" yeah, you should have.

Went to kmart. Got two rolls of shiny paper for the price of one, and some paper I know mom will love for next year. Even got her a gift again, 11 months, 3 weeks and 1 day early. Or is it two weeks and 6 days next year? Wait, it's the 26th, so take four days off… you know what I mean!

Came back for lunch, called the panic woman and moved our appointment from Monday to today at 3:30.

Got the Dr Who Christmas special.

Generally waited around for 3:20 when I left. Got them all straightened out. I had somehow missed a folder transferring their stuff. Got cookies!

Came back, posted my chapters for the day, read a bunch of chapters of the Harry Potter story again because it was a good place and dang, I write a good piece of text sometimes.

Made some calls, have three for tomorrow, and then over to my parent's house to see if mom can cut my hair. It's really getting out of hand. One of them is that pretty girl I spoke of above. Apparently now her machine is BSODing and her internet is really, really slow. So I'm going over there tomorrow, as it may be virused up. Because it's not her internet connection, that was fast enough to let me do the remote thing. So something weird is going on.

Then two for saturday, and hopefully the game we didn't do last week.

Oh yeah, filled in the form to see about getting the authenticator taken off my blizzard account, now that I don't have the iPad anymore. Tried to order one, but the blizzard page is just a 404, not found. Huh? That's professional, Blizzard. Without that I can't play Starcraft II. I guess I could if I signed up for a new account and burned the old one. I guess we'll see what they say. Sigh, why hasn't that iPad ever been online or anything? I'd love to know its last known location.

Only a couple more days until 2014 starts. Everyone made their reservations I mean revolutions I mean revelations I mean resolutions for next year? Me? I'm just gonna try being a little less awesome. Leave some for the other folks, you know?

I figured out that's why we got sick and my father didn't. See, everything in the universe has to be balanced, right? Well, to counter all the fun we had down there, we had to get ill enough to cancel it out. But my father's enjoyment wasn't as high as ours because we went on more rides then he did. Plus he drove the whole way back, which couldn't have been fun, further balancing the scales. (Especially in that weather we had on the second day) There you have it!

So yeah, looks like I'll be posting from a new year next time, so I'll see you all then. Have a good rest of 2013!