My kingdom for a blog post!

For some reason I was writing this on FB, and then I was like, "Why the fuck am I doing this? I have a blog." 

Last week sucked. Here's what happened.

1. On Saturday I had the most painful ultrasound possible. It was "internal". I put that in quotes for extra emphasis. The ultrasound technician (that doesn't look like the right spelling) didn't seem to understand that internal things hurt too when pressed upon/poked.

2. Later that day they called and said I have Polycycstic Ovary Syndrome. Fine. I was upset and cried, but it didn't seem that bad.

3. On Sunday, I went to Target and when I came back 1 hour later there was 2 inches of water in my apartment.

4. I had a comedy fall in the kitchen while inspecting water damage. Later, a giant bruise and swell appeared on my knee.

5. On Wednesday I had to get up really early and go to the doctor. There they prescribed hormone pills which I have to take forever.

6. On Thursday I had to pay an $800 bill to Fairview.

7. On Friday I got a letter that says I have diabetes.

8. Also all week I was worthless at work because I am so worried. My boss is starting to get annoyed.

I am freaking out about this diabetes thing. The PCOS is basically ok, because for now it's just a pill, but diabetes scares me. I always assumed I would get it, since it runs in both sides of my family, but I didn't think it would be when I was 27. The doctor said that PCOS people are at very high risk for diabetes, so that's why I had a test. That combined with family history = blood sugar disorder!

It's really strange what things like this do to your mind. I am in shock. I don't really know what to think or do or talk about at the moment which is why I am just not really talking about it to people. I am just really mixed up. I miss the roommates because they are my best friends. I miss Nate because he makes me feel safe. I miss my parents because they always know what to do. I miss my sisters because they understand me.

It's just really weird and in a matter of days I have a completely different view of the world. Well, I guess it happens. At least I still have a job, even if I am crap at it at the moment and can't stand half the people, and I have a comfortable home with a good kitty.

If you seek (Elizabeth) Amy

I'm around. Just haven't blogged lately. One reason: the word blog will forever be stupid. Another reason: I just haven't been in the mood to write a blog entry.

Sincerely,

Person who is otherwise just watching TV

Papa

Papa is doing ok. They said he has anywhere from 3-15 years to live. Everyone was happy, but my mom was like "Um, he still has metastatic stage 4 prostate cancer". So, he has that cancer and it also spread to his bones and spine. He has lesions on his bones. He is lucky to live in Rochester, and as Laura thought might happen, he gets to be in some prostate cancer drug studies from Mayo Clinic that not everyone has access to. They are going to give him some bone strengthening drugs as well. He went home tonight. It is good news, but still serious. It was a huge wake-up call for everyone. 

I called about my lab tests and they said I had to wait longer. Whatever. I worked from home today and slept 14 hours total in the last day.

I guess that's it - just thought I'd update.

I'm really scared

For one thing my grandpa, for another thing something is seriously wrong with me. Maybe I should call the clinic to ask about my blood work. I should probably work from home today but I don't even know iff I can do that.

I feel horrible

I feel horrible about what I wrote yesterday. It was really selfish of me to say anything like that. I kind of was just saying random thoughts in my mind and I wanted to make it clear that I didn't mean to make light of anything or be so brazenly selfish and unsympathetic and horrible.

Anyway, my mom called today and said that my grandpa has late stage prostate and bone cancer, so our whole family is a little destroyed at the moment.

Anyway...not like it seems important at all now, but my appointment went fine. They didn't really say anything to me except they'll look at the blood work.

I feel like the most insensitive and stupid person in the world. I guess it's different when you're talking about yourself, but that's the thing about thinking about your own mortality. My grandpa is also not bothered at all. I think most people can think about their own deaths much more easily than the deaths of loved ones.

P.S.

Our proxy is about as fast as I am today. ba dum dummm

Deoxygenated blood

I've been really tired/lethargic lately as I think I wrote before, and some people have been asking me to go to the doctor for a couple weeks. I'm going tomorrow morning. I thought that it may be an iron deficiency so I've been taking some iron pills, but I kind of morbidly want to see how bad it will get. I have this fascination with stuff like this. I wonder what it says about me. Should I be mentioning this? I think that in a lot of ways I'd really like to have a terminal illness. Imagine what you could do. You could just do whatever the hell you want for x amount of time, you wouldn't have to work or worry about bills, you wouldn't have to exercise or eat right, or worry about anything with regards to your future, and everyone would pay attention to you. I thought about this a lot the other day while watching CSI Miami where some lady was dying of radiation poisoning. Another thing is that I could be very open with people, and they would understand. I would do that now, but most people don't really have an everyday mindset where they can hear things like that.

 

For similar reasons I would love to have an apocalypse. Imagine - you wouldn't have to worry about anything if the world ended, because let's face it, nothing is as bad as the world having just ended. Then afterwards you could do whatever you want. Sure, it would take some work, but to me it seems a lot, lot more carefree. I just don't understand today's world. (I would have a great problem living without the internet though).

 

Back to the problem at hand. This week I haven't really been able to move that much. Saturday and Sunday I slept pretty much all day. Monday was ok but I didn't do a whole lot. Yesterday I could hardly get home before I collapsed and then I felt really ill. This morning I still felt ill and I'm really weak now. Somehow I went to Cub at lunch, but I don't know how. I was thinking I'd go back after work because I forgot something, but there's no way in hell.

 

I am still pretty sure it's a blood thing, but it's funny what happens. I just sit there and cannot move any part of my body, even my neurons to think. I'm glad lungs and blood circulation go involuntarily. Frequently I'm sitting here at my computer and can't move the mouse, much less go to the keyboard. It's a little much typing this. It would be interesting to know why that happens. I read something about oxygen depletion in blood. Another funny one was last night I fell on the futon facing away from the tv but I wanted to see what was on, and it took me at least 20 minutes to turn myself over. The most noticeable problem though is the fact that I have been getting to work later and later. My start time should be 9, but today I got here around 10:45. Etc.

 

Anyway, going to the doctor tomorrow, even though I would enjoy seeing how bad it gets since it's not painful at all, just weird. Will apprise then about what happens.

Facebook

In the overreacting to social situations category...

I had the weirdest conversation ever today at work. It was about Facebook. For those who didn't see it, I posted this note which was an annoying rant about how I don't like Facebook quizzes. I usually put a photo with my notes. So, for that one I just found this random screen shot I made of a warning pop-up that was funny to me (It was a pop-up that didn't say anything but wanted you to choose Yes or No). Then I wrote "Sorry if you have to see this error message 37 times" as a joke about the news feed and how it haphazardly shows things multiple times. I'm FB friends with a lot of people from work, so one of them came up to me and here is the conversation that ensued.

Person: I received your error message twice this weekend.

Elizabeth: What error message? [At this point I'm thinking I did something that sent off error emails, which I do sometimes]

P: Your facebook error message. But I only got it twice, not 37 times. [Totally serious]

E: What? [Right now I'm still totally confused and turning bright red]

P: You know how you wrote that note and then added an apology for the error message? I just wanted to mention that I saw the error twice.

E: Oh, it was a joke.......

P: Oh, well...I agree with you.

It was the most awkward and confusing conversation I think I've ever had. That's a lie, but it was pretty bad. For one thing, I felt horrible about writing that note then. I didn't think anyone actually looked at them. And the way the person was talking was like I had done something wrong. It was awful. Plus, I still have no idea why this person made the effort to walk over to my cube and vocalize this to me. To me that sort of meant that I was in trouble for it, because usually when people walk over to talk to me, it's not really great news. At least, when it comes to that person it never is.

Anyway, next time I write one of those notes, I'm not going to put in a picture that actually looks like something that could be in a window, and I am going to write about something that likely won't come back and bite me in the ass. 

In other news, I'm getting pretty far on my website. I've been trying to program every night and it is going super, super well. I'm really proud and excited. I only have maybe 2 more pages to code, and then I have to clean a little bit of data, but if everything goes well it should be done this weekend. Yay!

Guess what!

Claire Zulkey, who sometimes writes things for AVC, is friends with me on Twitter.  She even mentioned me in her American Idol writeup on Tuesday (though she didn't say my name). I like her a lot and I am shocked about how successful a writer she is and she's only 29. Anyway, she does freelance for a bunch of different places, so today she sent a survey that's for Glamour, and I did it and apparently my name might get put in too if they choose my answers! w00t. It was about cheating. I'll let peeps know when it comes out.

M.I.A. post

I hid the post for now, I just don't want it there at the moment. Good night

Check-in

Hello. Today I went to lunch with my 2 coworkers to an Indian restaurant. It was pretty good food and it was fun. It lifted my spirits a lot because I had such a weird week and was in a bad mood this morning. They are so funny. I really could just listen to the two of them talk and would be entertained.

I don't know if I got screwed up by DST or what. On Monday I was 2 hours late and the rest of the days I was 1 hour late. Then on Wednesday night I went to bed early. Thursday I fell asleep all day at work, and when I got home I fell on the futon and couldn't move. I fell asleep for 2 hours and then woke up and was still really tired. It was then that I realized I might have an issue. Something isn't really right. So I'm going to try to improve a few things myself (like taking iron) and see how that goes. Sometimes when I can't move it's because I'm low on iron. It's really weird and would be cool if it wasn't kind of scary. It was happening at work too. I'd be like, "Ok, just move your mouse to that link" and I couldn't even do that one time. Pathetic.

Tomorrow I am going to Rochester to Roch the Watchmen with Emily. I'm pretty proud of that saying; hence my saying it all over the place. "Who will Roch the Watchmen?" Emily and I.

GOOD EVENING

The day has come

Hell has frozen over.

 

I was listening to the radio yesterday and heard a song I really liked. This, in itself, is not a problem.

 

What will come next is sure to frighten and appall you for weeks and months to come.

 

The aforementioned song completed and Greg James said the following words that will haunt me until my dying day..........................."KATY PERRY."

This is incredible!

I'm in the process of redoing my website, and I wanted to find a captcha to put on it so that I can safely forward my email to a gmail account. So I found this website: http://recaptcha.net/

Insanely, this particular one uses captchas to help digitize books. Since I used to work at a place that did that, I was intrigued. And Emily, you might be as well. Somebody did a calculatioin and noticed that a huge number of hours was spent every day typing in words on websites. So they thought about how they could put that to use, and decided that they could use words that OCR can't recognize. Great, huh? However, if you're like me, then you might wonder how the website can verify that you put in the right words, if the computer doesn't know them. Answer: they use one control word and one unknown word! Genius!!! I am so impressed. I am for sure using this one. Even better, they have a PHP library that I can install for easy integration to my website. Perfect. This makes me so happy.

If any of y'all want to see the new website, I have it on staging but it doesn't work that well at the mo. This page works the best: http://staging.easytoplease.net/tour2.php?page=all I took off a lot of stuff because I'm just tired of maintaining a lot of stuff that is outdated and not really that useful anymore and way more trouble to have than not.

Hehe

It just struck me as really funny that my cat is probably only like 6 inches tall.

Not sure what to do

There are a couple of people at work who are really bothering me lately. By this I mean talking quite a bit about non-work issues, loudly enough where I can hear it. I get extremely irritated by it to the point where I can't work because I'm so pissed off. I don't know whether or not I'm being irrational though. Should this bother me? It's not like I need total silence when I work, but the fact that it's not about work and it's sooooo often is really getting to me. I feel like they are not actually doing any real work. Hey, I'm all for having a fun and comfortable workplace, but do they realize they actually have to do work when they're here?

 

There are also a few other people who take way too many personal calls for way too long where I can hear everything. That bothers me too.

 

I've been trying to figure out for a few weeks what to do about it. I don't really want to go to my manager, because I am worried I'll look like a high-maintenance person. After all, I had to take 3 half days a week for 3 months. Nowadays I don't even like to take a sick day. I don't really want to be like "Hey, it bothers me that people are loud." She has already had to deal enough with my crap. And it seems like something is always bothering me here.

 

I thought maybe I could ask to move to a different area, but I don't know how well that would go over either, or if I would feel comfortable doing that. It all goes back to whether or not I am justified in being really annoyed. Sheena thinks it's reasonable but also agrees that it's a tough call on what to do.

 

While I've been writing this, one guy has taken 2 loud cell phone calls.

 

I mean, I wear my headphones a lot, but I get even more annoyed that I have to wear headphones to work comfortably. Why should I have to adjust? One could argue that I should adjust because I'm the uncomfortable one, I guess. Still though, if people were having a marching band concert every day I don't think it would be a question of which party should adjust their behavior.

 

Oh, I almost forgot the worst part. Joel told me this morning about an incident with the same group of people. This morning he was nearby talking to someone else and they started to say bad stuff about him and he heard it all (because they don't have indoor voices). Then he showed me this email about the same issue that was extremely rude. The email itself was really unprofessional, but the saying bad stuff about Joel was over the line. I think he needs to talk to his boss about it, but for some reason, for the first time in history he's letting it go. That sucks. A similar incident caused a girl to quit about 4 months ago (conflict with the same people also involving an inappropriate email) and I don't want that to happen again. I kind of wish we had one of those anonymous comment card boxes like on The Office. These people act like they're in middle school.

 

Ugh. I really like my actual job but I hate the environment. Weird how 6 months can change something...after all, 6 months ago I hated both of them with a passion. :) I guess I should look on the bright side.

 

Is it hypocritical that I'm writing this while I'm at work? Whatever...I was too POed to do anything.

 

I got to come in late today because I worked last night on my first code push. It was exciting and boring at the same time. The best part was sleeping in.

By crikey

On my radio show, they do the news every half hour, and today they had this clip of some guy talking. He had a really thick accent and nobody could understand it because he was going too fast. So they slowed down the clip until you could understand it, and at the beginning the guy says "By crikey!" So throughout the whole show they have been inserting in super slowed down "By crikey!" It is hilarious.

 

They were also talking about some kids' show that's about a pig, and in one episode the pigs were driving in a car and hip-hop music was on. The radio people were like "I don't understand why hip-hop was on." And one guy goes "It was Notorious P.I.G.!" Hahaha

On our intranet

On our intranet I just saw this: "On May 11 the price for a 1-ounce First-Class Mail stamp will increase from 42¢ to 44¢." Is our country going to explode and have the dollar devalue to like 0.0001 what it was last year? Remember when stamps were 29 cents for like 10 years? Sigh. I'm glad they thought of the Forever stamp, but why do they need to keep increasing it? I guess because nobody has any money. I feel like it will almost even out because less people will buy a book of stamps. Maybe not though...$10.50 vs. $11 - not that huge a difference. Whatever.

In spite of who I am

I was watching the news tonight and there was a story about some kind of kids' program. The gist is that they have mirrors on a wall and saying about how the person in the mirror could be anything, even the President. Anyway they had some lady talking about it and she goes "The idea is that the kids will see that they can be anything, in spite of who they are." I thought it was funny. I can be anything, even though I'm my lowly self. Semantics, but still funny.

Scary internet

Sarah's recent comment reminded me that I wanted to talk about something else scary about the internet. I already told L&M this. It is about my RSS feed. So, as you know, the other day I made an RSS feed. I originally put in 3 test entries but then I noticed that the time was all weird (and still is sort of, but only because it's in PST because that's where the server is - before it was saying May 15, 2009). So after I fixed the time I deleted 2 or 3 entries from my database. Completely deleted them - no record of them exists anymore. Or so I thought...I entered the feed into a few different readers over the past few days and the deleted entries are still there!!! How is this possible?! I'm mystified...Part of me wonders if somehow my computer cached it, but my computer at work didn't cache anything, and it showed all of them. All I can think of is that maybe there is some omnipotent RSS spider that immediately obtains all updates from all feeds everywhere. But that's impossible...even Google takes 6 months to crawl everything. So anyway, the internet is scary.

P.S. S, did that sound as technical as my other entry about viruses? :)

AVC Comment

There is an AVC comment that has been bothering me all day about how my skin in my picture looks like a Simpson. This is because I mentioned that I had a Simpson and said I couldn't get the skin light enough (aka paper white) and right now it just matches my hair. I do admit that my skin looks yellow in the picture, but is it not obvious it's the lighting? Or does it really look like my skin color? It seems to me that it would be ridiculous to think my skin was that yellow. Below is a link to the picture in question.

 

http://www.avclub.com/accounts/easytoplease,3140/

 

Sincerely,

A person who has thought way too much about this today.

 

P.S. I just realized that I should simply Photoshop the skin on the Simpson. It's not as if it would be in any way difficult. Paint bucket, done. Meanwhile, I should really Photoshop the other picture too. Because on AVC it looks pretty weird all tiny. I should just put another one on there because apparently it's weird to have your actual photo. I think I will use the newly paint-bucketed Simpson.