Atropa Belladonna~ Raven (a.k.a. Nightshade)'s Weblog ~
These are the ARCHIVES of January 2004. For more archives, visit the Archives page. For the current Weblog entries, check the Main page.
Atropa Belladonna| Sat, Jan 31, 2004 (12:15pm) Star is a wonderful human being. I went over to her place yesterday (as an alternative to staying home with my children, several steak knives, and no witness) and she fed me french toast, and made me tea, and watched my kids... and when I went home at 1pm, she let me leave Kalen at her house. I went home, put Connor to bed, and had myself a nap. A nice, long, nap... without waking to wonder whether Kale was coloring the walls, or burying Connor in Lego. There was supposed to be gaming at our house Friday eve, and Star and Eric were going to bring Kalen home at that point - but due to road conditions, gaming night was cancelled. Rather than drive out here on terrible roads to return our child (or have us brave the roads to pick her up) they volunteered to keep her overnight. So, Shades and I had a quiet evening at home, with just one toddler who went to sleep at a reasonable hour. We even went to sleep at a reasonable time, too. It was good. This morning has been a little rough, tho - Star called at 8:30 am to let us know Kalen was wheezing a bit (something which we knew we were risking by letting Kalen sleep over at a house with a cat). By the time I was up (around 9am) Kalen's condition was worse, and I decided to bring the nebulizer over to Star's for an emergency treatment, and so I could assess her and decide whether I should bring her home, or go straight to ER. As things turned out, the treatment helped and I've decided to bring her home for further treatments... I think we can avoid the hospital this time around, as long as she continues to respond well to her medication.
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| Fri, Jan 30, 2004 (7:55pm) Ever have those moments when you walk into a room, and have no clue what you were about to do there? The kind where you stand around blankly, wondering "What on earth was I up to?" and you have to scan the environment for clues... "Ah! I'm a meter from the fridge, and there's an empty glass in my hand. I know! I was about to pour myself a Coke. Right!" Well, those moments happen more often when you're pregnant. Something to do with low blood-sugar levels, I think. I had one happen to me this afternoon, in a very surreal way. I found myself standing there like an idiot, knowing I'd been about to do something but unable to remember what. Looking around, I realized: "I'm in the middle of the bathroom, holding a razorblade. .... Wha - ?" And then it came back to me. "Oh, yeah - I was going to strip the excess caulking off the bathtub, from where Wally and I fixed it yesterday. Right! Better get on it, then." |
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| Fri, Jan 30, 2004 (10:05am) Didn't kill the kids yesterday. The jury is still out on whether this is a good thing. We'll have to see how today progresses. This is the part of pregnancy which I really despise. I'm used to having energy - at least enough to cope with the demands of the day - and when I don't, I feel... incompetent. Getting out of a chair in order to clean up spilled Cheerios is exhausting... especially 'cuz the durn things end up on the floor when they fall. The Floor! As if getting my butt up and out of the chair isn't bad enough (hefting an extra 20+ pounds around, without the use of those lovely abdominal muscles which one usually depends on for such activities) but then I have to lower myself down to that hard flat place near my feet (either placing extra strain on an already sore back, or aching calf muscles) and spend a few minutes on hands an knees - during which time I feel like a gravid horse, thank you! - picking up tiny crunchy circles of oaty goodness. And THEN I have to get up again. More stress on the back, the calves, the abdominal-muscles-which-have-gone-on-strike... and feeling lightheaded for half a minute once I get upright, 'cuz all the blood is still hovering around the level of my navel. And that's assuming I take the easy route, and pick up the Cheerios myself. Gods forfend, but should I make the kids clean up their own mess! - then I spend three times as long on hands and knees, struggling with recalcitrant toddlers instead of compliant circles of breakfast cereal, directing this hand over those Cheerios to pick them up and drop them back in that bowl (No!! DON'T upset the entire bowl and scatter them again!!) whilst listening to shrieks of protest at high volume, and higher pitch, scant millimetes away from my ears (and sound reverberates near the floor, too!). AaAAAAAUUUUUG!. But if I don't take the time and energy to do it the hard way, the kids end up thinking it's okay to dump food everywhere, 'cuz Mom will just clean it up for them. And then they'll turn into intractable 10 year olds, and impossible teenagers. And it'll all be my fault because I was a bad mother and put my own comfort ahead of my duties and responsibilities as a parent. All this goes through my mind as I sit in the chair, despair in my eyes, and wonder whether it might not be easier to just put up with Cheerios being ground into a fine oaty powder underfoot for the next couple of days. I'll deal with it sometime when I've got energy again. - - - In other, more pleasant news (since I said I didn't want my blog to turn into the rantings of a disillusioned madwoman), I am now typing on my recently-Panthered-iMac. Hmmm... Panther. The O/S doesn't seem to run any differently than Jaguar, or O/S X did... but the look is different. Everything has shiny 'stainless steel' accents to it, and the organization of folders and finder windows is... different. I'm not quite sold on this change, yet. I think I like the finder-window thing, with the left-hand column of frequently-used files/apps/shortcuts/etc. I definitely like the columns-style window for searching through directories. Other things are not where I expect them to be, or pop up in unexpected (but usually appropriate) places. And the Mail program looks slightly different, too. Hmmm. I think I can get used to it, with time. Probably even like it, once I get over the different-ness. But what bugs me the most, right now, is the stainless steel. I take one glance at the monitor and think, "Ack! The kids'll get fingerprints all over the new icons!"... and sticky toddler fingerprints are so hard to polish off of stainless steel, ya know. (sigh)
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| Thurs, Jan 29, 2004 (10:15am) Long day yesterday. Today looks like it may be even longer. On my 'to do' list for today:
If I accomplish even half of that, I'll consider the day well spent.
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| Wed, Jan 28, 2004 (3:50pm) Played Catan last night w/ Lazarus and BlueRevolutionist. That was fun. I even won a game. Read some chapters in a good book afterwards, 'til Shades got home. Went to bed around 2am (my usual bedtime, to be honest) and then couldn't sleep. Woke several times in the night. Woke a little after 7 am and couldn't get to sleep... so I got up at 8am. Bleah. Tired today.
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| Tues, Jan 27, 2004 (9:40pm) This just in... Other has this Public comment: |
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| Tues, Jan 27, 2004 (8:15pm) Quick update on the fire thing: Other says his appartment survived the blaze. He's not sure when he'll be able to move back into the complex (there's still the question of whether the fire has been completely extinguished, and whether the gas main is on or off) but at least he's got a home to come back to. His main concern right now is his car, which seems to be covered in an inch-thick sheet of ice. With this cold snap we're having, it's unlikely to thaw... unless he can tow it to a parent's garage. He's looking into possibilities, and will provide updates if people are interested. |
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| Tues, Jan 27, 2004 (12:15pm) Our gaming was cut short last night by a call from a friend. His condo complex was on fire, and he'd been evacuated, and he was wondering if one of us gamers could please come pick him up (it was below -30 outside, though he was able to take shelter in a nearby theater lobby). His unit wasn't on fire yet, but the fighfighters were having a tough time fighting it, and weren't sure if it would spread. I haven't heard back from him since. I hope things were brough under control. This Edmonton Journal article has the story as reported by our local paper.
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| Mon, Jan 26, 2004 (11:55am) Ack. Stayed up way too late last night playing Sims. That's what I get for letting the nephews play it on my computer, and helping them build some houses: I started playing it again. I really shouldn't do that. It sucks time like a... a... computer game. (Hm.... I wonder why?) Anyway, the weekend was extremely enjoyable, but has left me feeling somewhat exhausted. I went to Star's Capoeira fundraiser/demo on Saturday night and listened to good music, and saw some of the martial arts demo, and touched base with a couple people I haven't seen in a while. T'was cool. I also did a lot of people-watching that evening, which led me to a couple of surprising realizations. 1) I am very out of touch with fashion trends. The teen-to-twenties crowd (which made up the bulk of the attendees at the Salsa/Samba/Funk fest) wears some interesting things. I approve of the sleeveless shirts I saw all over the place (some of them taking a unique approach to sleevelessness... like having sleeves, but with snaps running from shoulder to wrist so you could unsnap them (like tear-away pants) and let the cloth of the sleeves dangle instead). I'm glad to know that red, white, and black haven't gone out of style as solid shirt colors... but I'm not sure about the proliferation of stripes everywhere. Mm - and the "fabric shortage" look seems to be back in. Shirts missing shoulders, or having holes in the sides, or partially backless, or with revealing slashes, or just plain too short so that they expose the navel. Generally I liked the look, but ya know... there are some midriffs which shouldn't be exposed in such a manner. Not that I advise everyone to dress in baggy "pregnant" clothes, but if ya ain't pregnant and your belly is bigger around than mine, WEAR SOMETHING THAT FITS! 2) Another interesting revelation (as I watched all the skinny-waisted, flat-bellied females) was that I am not actually suffering from sexy-belly-envy. Yes, I want my belly back down to a reasonable size - but it's not so much the size which bugs me, as the fact that I look undeniably pregnant. I realized this while looking around and saw one figure which struck me as pretty decent: someone wearing a loose black T-shirt over an ample (but not pregnant) belly, with tight(ish) black jeans. It was one of the sound techies, and he probably had a good 5 - 10 years on me (There was a decent amount of grey in his 'geek' pony-tail). But oddly, I found his figure more to be admired than the sexy-skinny-babes. (sigh). This shouldn't surprise me, I guess. I've always had a more 'male' self-image than 'female'. What I miss about my waistline is not that I don't have a sexy feminine figure. It's that I can't be mistaken for a guy. Not by a long shot. Sigh.
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| Sun, Jan 25, 2004 (11:50pm) Mmmm... a Catan-filled day. Played with the nephews after lunch... played with family & inlaws after Sunday supper... played with friends this evening. I think my addiction has been sated for at least a little while. And now that everyone has gone home, it's nice and quiet and relaxed, here. I might even do some email... I've been slipping lately. Number of emails currently sitting in my inbox: 161. (That's after I had it down to 141)
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Sat, Jan 24, 2004 (12:05pm)
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| Sat, Jan 24, 2004 (2:20am) We have the nephews over for the weekend. A pair of 13 yr old identical twins (and they're red-heads, too.) Some people would breathe a long-suffering sigh, or offer condolences, or wonder what we had done to deserve more children inflicted on our house. But these people probably haven't had to deal with our nephews. Those two are among the most well-behaved kids I've ever come across. They're polite, well-adjusted (as much as any teenagers can be expected to be), and have had it drilled into them by their parents that they must offer to help out when they are staying at someone else's house. So they play with our kids, help clear the dishes after dinner, say please and thankyou... and if they're given permission to get pop from the cold room, will politely ask if you want them to bring up anything for you, while they're down there. Very cool kids. Best yet: I taught them how to play Settlers of Catan tonight. And they like it. This looks to be an enjoyable weekend. |
| Fri, Jan 23, 2004 (12:55pm) No Settlers of Catan last night, alas. But Wally came over and we played with a digital camera which I'm planning to buy from Harvey: A Sony Cyber-shot (DSC-P1). Wally's got a Cyber-shot as well (though a slightly different model) and he knew the ins & outs of the camera pretty well. It kicks butt over my old Sony Mavica. Not that I don't still like the Mavica, but it's several years old... and toy digital cameras marketed to children nowadays have better resolution than it does. Sigh. (I'm a geek. I suffer techno-envy. I get to drool and say things like, "3.3 Mega pixels? Wow - I could upgrade my website with some higher resolution jpegs...").
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| Thurs, Jan 22, 2004 (10:45am) Jeanne-Marie: Raven! I saw the most bizarre thing! There's a bear in the alley behind the apartment building, over there. Raven: Oh. That sucks. Jeanne: Huh? Why? Raven: 'Cuz we needed to cut thru that alley if we want to get away from the spies chasing us in that red Chevy Nova over there. Now we'll have to cross the school ground instead. Jeanne: Chevy Nova... You mean that red car following us??? THAT'S not a Nova! It's the size of a van, and has tail-fins, and there's chrome-plated missiles built into the headlights. How could that have been a Nova, even in a former life? Raven: Well, what do you expect? They're spies, I told you! C'mon - duck through here.. I think we can make it. Oh - and watch out for the carnivorous potted plants. Jeanne: Raven - this is weird. I think I see hyenas up ahead. Raven: Probably from the zoo, like the bear and pack of purple-spotted jackals. Here... I'll grab one of the potted plants - that'll make the hyenas steer clear of us. Just gotta hold it carefully, at the base. Jeanne: Exactly where are we going? Raven: Open the second side door in that building up there... the tall white one. Okay - hold it for me a sec.. this plant doesn't want to seem to go in.. its tentacles are grabbing the door frame. Ah.. got it. Wow........ it's very bright in here. Kinda like the inside of a spaceship. We must be in the right place, then. All we have to do is find the long circlular hallway. Oh, and don't open any of the side-doors as we go by... that's cryogenics. Nothing but frozen bodies in there. Jeanne: Okay, Woah - Time Out. This is Too Weird. Raven: Weird? How so? Jeanne: Uh.. Wild animals? Spies? Carniverous plants? Spaceships? Raven: That's not odd. No odder than the dream where you were a famous Capoeira-Ninja-Assassin! Jeanne: But that was a dream. Oh, no..... This isn't some pregnant hormone-induced dream of yours, is it? Raven (looking carefully through the frosted glass of a cryogenics unit while dodging the snapping head of a venus-flytrap-like plant): Hmmm.. well, it does seem a bit surreal, now that you mention it. Jeanne: A BIT surreal? Raven: Yeah.. um. Just a quick test here, but could I borrow your Flame Thrower? Jeanne (taking a flame-thrower unit off her back): Okay, fine. But don't use up all the fuel. Star needs it at her Demo on Saturday. Raven: I have a Flame Thrower! Cool. Um.... this is definitely a dream. Okay... where's the nearest secret underground evil superspy lair? I've always wanted to blow one of those up. They fill their duck-ponds with Kerosene, did you know that? I read it in a game, once. But where would they be?.... Ah! I know, I'll go find that Chevy Nova again, and follow.... Jeanne: I Quit! Cast someone else in your bizarre fantasies next time, kay? You make NO sense, and I have a showing of Oliver in less than an hour. ----- Anyway... back to reality. I managed to trip and fall in my livingroom yestereve. Didn't land on the belly, but I bashed my hip and shoulder and arm pretty hard. Stupid hormones making the body's joints too loose, and me not compensating properly for a shifted center of gravity. Grrrr. I feel so incompetent. (Not that I didn't ocassionally fall before I was pregnant, but I didn't feel like such a complete idiot for doing it, then) And the sore shoulder and neck kept me from sleeping comfortably, until I finally passed out from exhaustion, and had the most bizarre dreams. At least, I think they were bizarre, now. They seemed to make perfect sense at the time.
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| Wed, Jan 21, 2004 (2:30pm) Ahhh. It's a wonder what a good night of sleep can do for a person's outlook on life. By 'good' sleep, I mean 'bordering on normal'... Last night I got nearly 7 hours of rest, most of which was actual sleep rather than lying awake and trying to think restful thoughts while my internal organs are used as a jungle-gym. And this morning, I went to Star's for a delicious breakfast of French Toast, and excellent company. Adult company. Mmmmmmm. I feel almost human. I shall treasure this feeling. It comes seldom enough during the last month of pregnancy, and even more rarely during the first month with a new baby in the house.
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| Tues, Jan 20, 2004 (12:30pm) Wow, last night sucked. Seventh Sea gaming was good - it ended around 1am - and then I tried to go to sleep. Couldn't get comfortable. Kept waking up, tossing, turning, trying to settle back to sleep. Dozing off and on, and then waking again. After 4 hours of this, the parasite started getting into high gear. Ya know, they say that after the 32nd week or so, pregnant women will feel the baby move around less... because it begins to run out of room and can't manoever as well. Apparently, my kids have never read those pregnancy books - they react to the decrease in elbow room by growing pointier elbows. And then they fight back! The little critter was jabbing me in the kidneys, kicking my floating ribs, stabbing my spleen, rasping its head along my spine, bouncing on my bladder, and poking my abdominal wall until I thought it was trying to tear its way out. Now I understand what those poor guys on Aliens felt like, plastered to the wall in uncomfortable positions, with nasty entities preparing to burst through their bellies. I don't think I'll ever view that movie the same way, again. So I got up and wandered around the house from 6am til a bit after 7am. The baby settled down a little after a full hour of extreme arobics, and I managed to get back to sleep (hastened on my way by sheer exhaustion) around 7:30. And - praises to the powers that be - I got a decent 2 hours of sleep between then and 9:30 am, when Kalen got up. Bah - pregnancy sucks. Why did I want to do this again?
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| Sun, Jan 18, 2004 (1:20pm) Mmm. Catan on Thursday eve, and Catan on Saturday eve. Didn't win any games, but it was still good. Saw the most amusing win I have yet witnessed, tho: Cam had a high-producing Wood hex completely surrounded by cities and settlements. That number rolled 3 times in the next loop around the table, giving Cam enough wood in his hand to nearly deplete the bank's stock of it. On his turn (no 7's rolled prior, thankfully) he used 'Monopoly: Clay' to give himself a huge hand of clay (almost as many as he had wood, I believe. Have you ever seen a 30-card hand?), and built a road running from nearly one side of the continent to the other - giving him longest road by a long shot. That, and his settlements and a couple Victory Point cards got him the win. He woulda won without the road, truth be told, but ya gotta give him points for style! On other fronts: I am SICK AND TIRED of being pregnant. But that's better than being depressed about it, because the frustration gives me a bit of an energy boost. Oh, well - we're into the final month. My Due Date is February 17. Today is Jan 18th. Only ONE MONTH to go 'til the due date! The end IS in sight! (Of course, the due date is just an estimate. A person could go up to two weeks overdue. I was 10 days late with Connor, in fact. But my Doctor says that, because of problems with Connor's delivery, he doesn't want me to go overdue this time. If I hit my due date with no baby yet, they'll probably induce me shortly thereafter.) Hm... what else to post? Number of emails currently sitting in my inbox: 229 Not bad, eh? Unfortunately, I'm now mostly down to emails which deserve replies, and can't just delete 20 here and 30 there. But, speaking of email which can be deleted, I thought I'd share one of those messages with you... just so you know what kind of stuff ends up in my inbox from time to time: From: TheHulk1023@aol.com Now, obviously the email is slightly mis-sent. Damask is a friend of mine, and I've no clue how this individual managed to get her name attatched to my email addy. Neither of us make any claims about being a vampire, either (that I am aware of). Nor do I have any idea why someone who can't even spell would expect to become one of the elite undead. But hey - the 'Net is full of such gibberish.... and a lot of it ends up in my mailbox. S'all for now. |
| Thurs, Jan 15, 2004 (11:40am) I ran my Tierel game last night, for the first time in a couple months. It went well. That makes me happy. Also happy-making is the fact that today is Thursday and that means BP's tonight (Yay for grown-up company... and possibly dragging people home to play Catan). And it's the 15th which is Shades' payday... a very important date, since I no longer get paycheques. Bah. MUST fill out the government paperwork soon. Like today, maybe. Number of emails currently sitting in my inbox: 995 Well, we're down under 1000, at least. Maybe there's hope? Still, I've mostly been deleting old and irrelevant email, and haven't gotten around to replying to the hundred+ which deserve actual thought-out replies. |
| Wed, Jan 14, 2004 (11:30am) I didn't play Settlers of Catan last night. That makes it the first night in a week without my Settlers fix! (Wow - I actually managed to play Settlers every night for a week - even around LRPS and Sunday dinner with the family, and Monday night gaming. Cool.) I haven't gone into withdrawal yet.... but I suspect I'll want to play it again soon. Maybe not every night in a row this week, but at least a couple of them. Thurs and Sat are looking good, at the moment. Despite much Catan-ing, I've been getting to bed sort-of on time most nights. Several nights have seen me making contact with the sheets before 12:30am, and only one night kept me up past my usual 2 am bedtime. I'm so bloody lucky that the kids don't usually get me up before 9am (we don't usually put them down for bed before 8 or 9pm, tho, so we do pay a price for our relaxed mornings). However, even with getting to bed on time, and sometimes catching a nap in the day, my sleep has pretty much sucked. It's bloody tough to get a good night's sleep when you're entering your 9th month of pregnancy. I won't rant about it too much, but let's say that a constant regimen of lower back pain, inability to find a comfortable sleeping position, need to use the bathroom 2-4 times nightly, calf cramps, heartburn, and getting kicked in the ribs/belly/bladder/back/kidneys by a squirmy parasite who does calesthenics at 2am, 4am, 6am, and 8 am.. is, well, NOT RESTFUL. And it ain't gonna get better in the forseeable future. Number of emails currently sitting in my inbox: 1126 Hrm. I haven't made good progress on that, have I? I did clear out a little over 100 messages the other day, but sitting at the computer just exacerbates the lower back pain right now. That's part of why I haven't been blogging much (both the pain and the desire to clear the mailbox) but the real reason is that there just hasn't been much to blog. Life sucks. I'm borderline depressed most days. The housework would be piling up around me if it weren't for Shades pitching in like the Saint he is. I'm bitchy and sore and tired. This is all completely related to the pregnancy, of course, and therefore there is an end in sight - but it's over a month away! I really am doing my best not to grumble about it too much, 'cuz after all, I DID ask for it. I knew from past experience that it'd be like this at the end. I decided that I wanted to be pregnant again anyways. I will grin an bear it. And maybe play Settlers of Catan to take my mind off it from time to time. A list of happy thoughts, to keep me going 'til then: - I deal with pregancy well, over all. Some women are this grumpy throughout the entire 9 months. - We got postcards from Anna yesterday! Yay! - Wally gives good backrubs. - I remembered to post a link to Phil's Blog (I Never Claimed I was Normal). - I have an invitation to Star's place for brunch today, and she's making me French Toast. She rocks. |
| Thurs, Jan 8, 2004 (11:20am) Settlers of Catan last night was lovely. Wally and Myrna came over to play with us. We played 3 games straight - Myrna won the first one, and Shades the other two. Wally was mean and spiteful and vindictive, and terribly fun to play with (grin). Anyway... one of my astute readers, having perused yesterday's entry and taken pity on me and my dull ife, suggested I might use my "free" time to actually answer my email, if I wasn't using it to post to my weblog. My email. yeah. I've got some atrocious email habits. I think it comes from my corvid nature: I like to stash shiny things in my nest. I will read emails, and re-read them, and mean to get around to replying, but then I get distracted. So the emails sit in my inbox, unanswered. And they pile up. And up. Fun Fact! - Number of emails currently sitting in my inbox: 1213 Those aren't junk mail, either. My current filter skims approximately 150-200 junkmails per day into a 'junk' folder. A few do slip past the filter (I still get maybe 5 or 10 junkmails per day) but I delete those manually whenever I check mail. The bulk of my inbox is full of gaming-related email, queries from people about Ravens and Crows (because I maintain the 'Aviary' webpage), quick notes from Shades, public and private comments from my weblog readers, Lego-related news, letters from friends which I keep meaning to write up proper replies for, and a few odd bits which I simply can't bring myself to delete. I have in the past (on three different occasions, in fact) made New Year's pseudo-resolutions to clear out my inbox and stay on top of my email. Once I even cleaned over 2000 emails down to less than 100! But I haven't had a completely empty mailbox in over 7 years. So, I think that might just be my pseudo-resolution for this year. I'll try to clear out my inbox, and then stay sort-of on top of things. I really don't know how well I'll do, but I'll post my progress in my weblog, and maybe that'll help keep me on track. Maybe. |
| Wed, Jan 7, 2004 (1:55pm) Hmm. Way back when I started this weblog, I told myself I wasn't gonna let it become the diary of yet another harried Mom droning on about her kids constantly, nor talking about her "feelings", or giving the daily rundown of "I did this, and then this, and then that. Tommorrow looks like it'll be more of the same boring routine, with the highlight of the week being when I go to BP's on Thursday." (Okay, okay - I do blather about my kids from time to time, but only when I think it's actually blog-worthy: like spending NewYearsEve in ER, or regaling my readers with tales of trauma such that you may shake your head at me and laugh.) But since I've recovered from that last crisis, and I don't have any gory work-related stories since I'm on Mat. Leave, things have been rather... dull. I can't think of what to write about. Then again... dull can be good. Perhaps I shall revel in the fact that I have nothing newsworthy going on in my life at present. Yay boredom! Anyone up for a game of Settlers of Catan this evening? |
| Mon, Jan 5, 2004 (3:55pm) Yay! I'm on Maternity Leave! Now I have to remember to fill out the government paperwork so they'll actually pay me while I'm on leave. Yeah... that'd be good. I'm in an excellent mood today. Kalen is doing well, Connor is being as sweet as you can expect a 2-yr old to be, I won my second game of Settlers of Catan last night, I received an excellent backrub, and our house is NOT freezing like it was over the weekend. That, by the way, was an interesting episode in our weekend: Sometime shortly after the Wake, we realized the furnace wasn't coming on. At first, this made sense, because all the bodies which were over for the party had caused the ambient temperature in the house to rise beyond the point of requiring any heat out of the furnace. It took a while for the house to drop below 19 degrees Celcius. Saturday saw us living in a rather chilly house. I figured that the furnace was simply having trouble bringing the house back up to temp, after it hadn't been running for the last 16 hours. Then, Sunday morning, we realized the furnace hadn't properly kicked in all night. By mid-day the house was sitting around 16 degree Celcius. That's chilly, even for me. Shades did some investigating. He also vacuumed the furnace filters. That seemed to help for a bit... the furnace managed to bring the house temp back up to 19 degrees, for all of about 4 hours. Then it cut out again. It would try to turn on, but would fail three times in a row, produce an error code, and give up for 3 hours. Then it would try again, fail, and give up again. (Lacerate, rince, repeat.) By Sunday evening, we were wearing sweaters and slippers in the house. I had the kids dressed in double-layer pants, long sleeved shirts over T-shirts, and I put Connor to bed wearing his hat. We admitted the problem was out of our hands, and called in the experts. Wally came over around 8pm. He poked and prodded and turned the system off and on, and read error codes, and rebooted the system again, and tried something different, and rebooted it again. Eventually he determined that water from the built-in humidifier was dripping down into the furnace innards and had managed to make a circuit damp, preventing it from turning on the furnace properly. He drained the humidifier, and dried the faulty connection with a blow-drier. The furnace is working fine, now. Yay Wally! |
| Sat, Jan 3, 2004 (11:35am) Home again, home again, Jiggety Jig! Kalen is back from the hospital today - discharged at 10:30 this morning. She was almost dischraged last night, but the doctor on duty wanted her to stay one more night to monitor how she was doing on a new (lower) level of medication. He said that as long as she didn't relapse, she could go this morning. This morning, she was running laps - literally! - around the hospital unit when the doctor came to check on her. When he told her he'd come to see how she was, she ran into her room & leapt onto her bed & had her shirt pulled up so he could listen to her chest, all before he'd managed to get his stethescope out. He asked her if she was ready to go home now, and her response was, "No! I want to just play some more in the play room, and take the toy dinosaur for a walk, and hug the big stuffed Santa, and push the toy trains, and..." The doctor gave me a look. "I'd say she's ready to go home, yup." So here we are again. I'm armed with a fistfull of prescriptions to fill and give to her in order to keep the asthma under control until she gets her follow-up visit to her family doctor in a week. Many, many, many thanks to everyone who offered help, or called/emailed to see how she was doing, and most especially to Star & Scritch who helped with childcare and Wake preparations while we juggled our lives around this minor crisis. On that note, The Wake went quite well. We had some 35 people over, and although I had to crash around 1am due to sheer fatigue, I hear that people stayed late, and enjoyed themselves. You're all invited again next year. |
| Thurs, Jan 1, 2004 (9:35am) Well. I can now, from personal experience, say that there are many places I'd rather spend New Year's Eve than in a hospital Emergency ward. Kalen was admitted to hospital early this morning, after an over-nighter in ER. She's doing better now than when I first brought her in, but currently needs to be on O2 in order to keep her blood-oxygen levels up to a comfortable percentage. While we were able to give her ventolin and other medications by nebulizer at home, we don't have the capacity to give (or monitor) oxygen... and her medications were not able to pull her out of status asthmaticus once she got into it. The hospital has put her on stronger (and more frequent) dosages, and has decided that she'll need to be monitored for a while before she can be released. There's no pneumonia or bronchitis showing up on X-rays to complicate the matter, so I'm hoping her stay will be a short one. In the meantime... YES, The Wake is STILL ON tonight. I simply reserve the right to be distracted throughout it, and will gladly accept any assistance offered to finish up the prep which I wasn't able to do last night, do to being in Emerg. Further updates as events warrant. |