Has anything of interest happened to you recently?

I'm sick. Head cold. Even with the Sudafed I'm still dealing with a runny nose, and the postnasal drip has given me a really bad sore throat. Whine whine whine.

Update on my dad: After we got home and to bed, the hospital called. My mom is not tech-savvy and being half asleep she couldn't work the mobile phone. She called me with that distinctive twang of urgency in her voice that got me awake in less than a second. It was good news though: They'd moved him to the ICU and he was stable. We visited him this morning and he's doing OK all things considering. The biggest issue is the oxygen saturation which is still not brilliant, but gradually improving and he's in good spirit. I didn't get much sleep the rest of the night though so I'm back home to rest up.

PS: The get well mails are awesome! I can't get them to him till he's out of ICU anyway so there's still time if others want to join in. They are very, very much appreciated.

Contact details

Sorry it took so long to respond; I fell asleep as soon as I got home, haha.

I work in Food Service at a theme park. :T I don't know why they do it, but they do.

My mom's boyfriend gave my daughter some light reading for her 4th birthday.




Yes, let's read about Sherman's march to the sea before bed!

I think I read those books when I was a kid, they were AWESOME.

I flipped through a few and they are awesome, and kinda hilarious. We'll see if the kiddo is interested in them when she gets older.

THE STORY OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION

If I'd read these as a kid, I'm pretty sure I would have ended up fifty thousand times cooler than I am right now.
Ma'am, are you prepared to handle a child that full of amazing?

It sounds like your mom's boyfriend is totally awesome, or at least has totally awesome taste in gift-giving.

He's a nice guy, and I do think it's very sweet of him to think of the kiddo and give her so many books.

This morning we woke up to a 59 degree house. We called the furnace guys, who confirmed that the heat exchanger in our 15 year old furnace is completely shot, and we can either replace it for $1800 and buy ourselves a couple more years until something else goes, or we can replace the thing entirely.

It's annoying to have to drop a couple thousand on a furnace before Christmas, but I guess it'd be a lot worse to suddenly have to do it right AFTER Christmas. At least now we can budget for the holidays with that in mind.

Fortunately, we have a separate heating zone with separate furnace on the third floor, so the kids are bedded down in our room tonight. The 3 year old has decided that this is a sleepover and is therefore the most awesome thing EVER.

On the plus side, having the furnace dude pull off the DO NOT REMOVE UNLESS YOU ARE A TRAINED TECHNICIAN panel of the furnace to show us the flames SHOOTING OUT of the heat exchanger where they really ought not to be shooting out was kinda cool.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

59 degrees!? Holy-

Oh, Fahrenheit.

Yes, we are savages here down south of the Great Lakes.

Well, the part where it stayed that cold or colder all day wasn't so awesome. Also the baby isn't really into it. Apparently crawling on a cold floor sucks or something. I think. It's kind of hard to understand a ten month old.

I thought my plumbing disaster from a couple pages back would soon be behind me. I was expecting the cleanup company to come retrieve the last of their fans and such tomorrow.

Apparently that's not going to come to pass.

I was doing dishes tonight and smelled stinky stuff from the basement and went and checked and sure enough, sewage backup up from the basement drain again. Called the plumber back and they'll be out tomorrow.

No idea what this will mean for increased costs. Insurance already cut me a check for damage/restoration so no idea if I'll be able to revisit that.

My first reaction as well.

Did you know that only the U.S, the Cayman Islands, and Belize actually use Fahrenheit anymore?

I did not know that!

U.S, why do you always have to be different? Sigh.

0 is cold, 100 is hot. 'Murica!

You can pry my Fahrenheit from my cold dead hands.

59 degrees cold?

The US is the hipster country.

Let me present another theory:

I am being head hunted by a rival investor relations firm. It is surprisingly stressful!

Even better, the only other senior guy in our firm with my speciality just quite yesterday. So the current employer should be suitably desperate to keep me!

The only temperature scale this isn't true of from the perspective of human beings is Kelvin.

Except that from the perspective of a human being 100°C = Dead.

So every few months our Wellness Committee sends out little surveys regarding health and wellness, and if you participate, you basically get a "premium holiday" where your portion of health insurance premiums are waived for a month. Usually it's a standard "fill out this health questionnaire" or "sign up to get your cholesterol checked". In October it was "Zombie preparedness - indicate which five co-workers you would want to have with you in the event of a zombie apocalypse."

Not only did I get my premium holiday for filling out the questionnaire, HR just brought me a $50 gift certificate for being the employee named by the most people as a necessary part of a zombie survival group. To the tune of nearly 80% of everyone who participated. Let them laugh at my zombie plan now, fools!

Is that the opposite of the Heisenberg principle? Regardless of whether you are alive or dead to observe it, 100C is still hot.

I'm starting to hate the complex that we live in. It's a townhouse community with private roads, so it's mostly self contained and all residential. People have taken to speeding terribly on our road. I just found out that my wife took our dog for a walk this morning and almost got run over. It was terrible enough that the dog was scared enough to go hid underneath her car. These fucking assholes.

That is friggin' awsome.

Are you sure they don't want to just throw you to the zombies to slow them down?

That was actually my zombie plan, selecting co-workers based on a) who has the car with the longest potential range, and b) who can I most easily overpower and throw to the zombies as distraction bait?

I just checked the time the subway train should leave from the end station online. Which of course is only interesting because I'm the one who's supposed to drive it.
Okay, still not that interesting.

Somebody sprayed bear mace in the school cafeteria and we had to evacuate the second floor today. I'm glad I don't eat there.

And then you'd balloon to safety, right? Knowing you could always collect more helium.

Helium? Real men use hydrogen. None of this pansy squeaky-voiced lady-gas!

You drive a subway train? That's mightily interesting.

BigLaw bonus season kicked off today. Commence wailing and gnashing of teeth.