Richard Brook

SHERLOCK TODAY!

That is all.


No, that is not all. Actually. I wish to complain about New Year's. It's horrible. It woke me up and then wouldn't let me go back to sleep for all the banging and shouting going on outside. Woo! We made it another year without being eaten by a tiger! Oh, fuck off and go back to bed, the lot of you.

I also find it hilarious how the eve is not a bank holiday, but the day is. Because someone out there realises that most of the workforce is going to be hungover to all hell today, I suppose.


Uhm. I'll have a pattern for the Watson scarf up in about a day or two. I'd already written it up last night, and then my computer did that glorious thing where it restarted before I could save. Fucker. So I'll write it up again, I guess.

Also, my sliced-off finger is feeling much better. I can never tell if it's a high pain threshold or a quick healing thing, but either way, it doesn't even bug me anymore. There is a massive bit still missing though. It's a good thing I'm not really doing table magic anymore, because it is so very not attractive. But really, that it doesn't bug me anymore, after just what? a week? just goes to show how much that horrible dentist fucked up my mouth in June that IT still bugs me from time to time.


BUT SHERLOCK TODAY! I haven't been this excited for something since I was squeeing about Doctor Who a few months ago. :DDDDDDD

And and update on the builders.

They're now right above us. Ryan woke up about 15 minutes ago from it, which now means that I get to spend the next five hours being grumped at, because he refuses to go stay with a mate until they're done.

Now he's even grumping at me for posting to my blog.


It gets better, though. I went up to ask how long it's all going to last, and the one dude up in that unit doesn't speak English. So, I've no idea how long they're going to be up there. I think I'm going to go talk to the office about that, and possibly moving into a larger unit.

At this moment, I have 185 gigabytes worth of assorted data to back-up. I have 30 DVDs remaining, which have been failing at a rate of about 1/3, so I realistically have probably closer to 20 DVDs. I really hate having to pick and choose what I want to save. And even without such a huge fail rate, I'd still need about ten more than I have.

As of this typing, I have been working at backing stuff up for about 13 hours. Maintaining the rate I've been going today, I can probably finish sometime around probably 2:00-3:00 tomorrow afternoon. And then I get to completely to a full system reformat, which hopefully does not just catastrophically fail.

I want my email back. I want my sound back. I want to get out of fucking safe mode and away from 800x600 resolution. I want this thing to stop shitting all over itself every time I ask it to do anything beyond opening Firefox (which is, apparently, even occasionally too much to ask).

I need to go to bed.

Recently, our apartment building was bought out. When we moved in, it was extremely low-rent (which had been the appeal of moving here in the first place). It's the sort of apartment building that's really common in this area of town, in that it started off life, long ago, as a hotel, and had been later converted to a more full-time living space. I've lived in buildings like this before, and while they don't always work properly, there's a certain sort of odd charm to them.

The new management isn't going to change the fact that this building used to be a hotel, but they do seem to be trying to change the fact that it doesn't always work. They've just finished up a massive landscaping project outside, redoing a lot of the masonry bits in the car park and replacing the dirt with grass (fake grass, granted. This is Las Vegas, after all. But it's very nice-looking fake grass, and was probably very expensive). After that, they started fixing up the corridors outside. They've fixed all the busted lights, have been patching up the ceiling bits, and are supposedly about to start working on fixing the floors, since they act like they're about to crumble away into oblivion.

Now they're working on renovating every single unit in the building. Intelligently, they're starting with the units that are currently empty, and will eventually move on to the units that are occupied. Don't ask me how they plan on doing that. I have no idea. But I've poked my head into some of the units that they're currently working on. All new kitchen appliances, new cabinets, new flooring throughout, new AC units, and fresh paint on the walls. This is shaping up to be an expensive damn project, and it leaves me wondering where they're going next.

But THIS IS A GOOD THING. And I have to keep telling myself this.

Anyone who's known me for a while probably knows that I'm jumpy, nervous, panicky, and generally hate anything that moves or makes noise suddenly. I have got builders right above me, and have for the last week. Before that, they were in the unit next door. Any time I hear any sort of noise, now, I want to jump out of my skin. For reasons I can't properly explain, I'm starting to feel rather frightened to just be sitting here in my own front room. All the pounding and rattling going on has rattled something loose in my brain, or something. Someone knocked on my door yesterday, and I nearly had a heart attack.


And people wonder why I don't drink caffeine.

Remember the episode where they all stayed up all night? Ya know, the one where Phoebe's smoke alarm kept going off and she flipped her shit over it?

I'm up in my room at my mum's, and there's a smoke alarm somewhere in here that's going off. Or at least, it's trying to. Only the battery is near dead, so it's making the final death throes noise, where it sounds more like an angry Geiger counter trying to shout down a crowded pub. And I've no idea where it is! D:

In other news, the first day of my trip has gone fairly okay. Once I got away from PDX, things started working. The airport experience? Not so much. First, I nearly missed my bus because it was 15 minutes early. Then, I didn't have my conformation number, and got to the check-in counter just behind a very large group of Asian tourists who didn't speak English, so check-in took about an hour. On top of that, my carry-on bag was too big for carry-on, so I had to do some creative shuffling. Only, no matter how much I tried to shuffle, I wound up with THREE items, which meant I STILL had to check my damn bag, which cost me $20.

After that, my plane was late to Vegas, which made us late taking off. Flying over Crater Lake made up for that, though.

Then, when I got to PDX, to get out of the terminal, you have to sort of go back through security (not really through it. There's a small walk way where you can go through that's just to the side of security), and SOMETHING happened. No one knows what, but all the staff were running around yelling at everybody nearby to STOP. It was seriously weird, and we had to just all stand in the same place for about 15 minutes.


The rest of the day was pretty cool, though. I watched The Book of Eli with mum, and then went to go meet Mary at PSU. What normally took me two hours to do on the 72 took me 45 minutes to do on the new Green Line. Score one for the MAX. Mary and I wandered around down town for a few hours before finally going to the damnportlanders meet up, which was a lot of fun. We shared YouTube videos on our iPhones, and I wowed everybody with a few card tricks. The Penn & Teller one went over especially well, even after it screwed up somehow.

Now I am home. And tired. And wishing that stupid smoke alarm would JUST SHUT UP AND DIE, ALREADY.

- I've updated FireFox, finally. It kept having really bad lag issues, so I gave in. I've always been hesitant to update it, because LJLogin has never worked with the newest version. But, it seems as though LJLogin has finally been updated as well, so I have a shiny new browser with all my favourite add-ons.

- I've had to explain seasons and airfare to my husband, who is planning on going up to Oregon next month. During the time when most colleges have their Spring Breaks. Which needs him to fly both out of and into Las Vegas. On about a month's notice. As of typing this entry, there are exactly six non-stop flights between a total of two airlines flying out of McCarran on the day he wants to leave. Naturally, he's pissed off about this. But, whatever. So, it's either going to be about $320 for non-stop, or $250 for a flight with a layover somewhere in California.

- While talking about the Portland thing, I said that IF I go (which I probably won't, because of the confusing way he wants to get the tickets), I'd have to be back for Conan's show on the 1st of May. And now he's saying that he never gave me permission to buy my ticket, and to wait until it's closer to the time to decide. Only 1, I already bought it when he said I could go if I wanted to, and 2, it sold out (or so I've heard) the day after I bought the ticket.

- I'm not feeling too terribly well today. I woke up feeling like ick, and two episodes of Heroes later, I still feel like ick. ICK.

- Ryan's out shopping right now. Apparently we need cat food. And tuna. And a few other things.

I once again found myself in hospital this week. And it was possibly the least pleasant hospital experience I've ever had.

Wednesday, I started feeling really nasty, but didn't think much of it, so I went to bed like normal. When I woke up around 9pm that night, I felt like I was gonna die. I tried putting an ice pack on my stomach, and that didn't help. I tried drinking some Sprite, and was barely able to keep that down, tried a warm bath, and that just made me want to be sick. I even tried distraction therapy, in the form of watching Casualty, but by midnight, things had gotten so bad that Ryan finally called an ambulance for me.

The nice medics came round in a matter of minutes and even put my drip needle further up my arm for me, rather than in my elbow (because that's the worst, imo), and they took me up to Sunrise, which is about four blocks away from here.

In hospital was a totally different matter. I spent three hours on a trolley, in a corridor outside of triage, in front of a door to the ambulance bay, so I wound up so damn cold that the shivers had made me nearly sick several times.

Eventually, I did finally did get moved to a cubicle, where I sat for long enough to get some pain meds, and then was moved to a very noisy corridor where I lay ignored until nearly noon. The only time anybody really paid any attention to me was when I sicked up all over the floor, and even then, it took them several minutes to realise what had happened. When they finally remembered that I needed a CT scan, they came round, took me over for that and then just put me right back in the same spot where I was ignored for another two hours. By 2:00, I was so annoyed by everything that I told one of the nurses to either get me moved like they said they were going to eight hours before, or I was just gonna discharge myself. That seemed to do the trick, because they finally called up to have me moved, and by 3:00, I finally got brought out of ER and into a ward.

Up in the ward, it was a bit hard to get attention still, but most of that was owed to my room mate, a 97 year old woman with dementia. I felt bad for it, but she did make me laugh more than a few times -- particularly when she took off all her clothes and pulled out her IV.

Around 6pm, they took me down for an ultrasound, and after they brought me back up, they let me have a bit of Jello, which was the first thing I'd eaten since Wednesday afternoon. They also let me up to walk around a bit, which was nice, because after lying on that trolley for so long, my back had been killing me. And apparently my hip had gone, but I hadn't noticed before because I hadn't been allowed on my feet yet.

They gave me something different than morphine this time (I can't remember what it was), and between whatever it was and being stuck in bed constantly, I couldn't keep my eyes open longer than twenty minutes at a time. I'd be watching something on tv, and the next thing I knew, something else would be on, suddenly.

glam_jam was there for most of the time, and round 2:00am, Ryan showed back up (he'd left just before they moved me, to go get some sleep). He came with comics, which only made it marginally easier to stay awake, but I found that the more I got up and moved around (mainly because they kept pumping saline into me, so I had to constantly pee), I got a bit more energy back.

Round about 8-ish, they gave me breakfast, of Jello, tea, and chicken broth. Because they still hadn't figured out wtf was wrong with me, after taking bloods thrice, urine twice, and all the the other scans. Around 10:30, I finally saw a doctor, and she said that everything came back negative, which is just another way of saying they had no idea what was wrong with me, and so they were just going to send me home. Even that didn't happen until noon, though (that was yesterday).

So, I came home, and still feeling the pain meds they had given me, I thought I was feeling better, but apparently, I'm not. I still feel like I'm going to sick all over my own socks, and have one hell of a headache, probably from still passing out randomly and sleeping forever. I've managed to eat a bit more today, though. Bit of cereal, some soup, and even got daring with a slice of pizza. I'm keeping a tupperware on close hand, though. Just in case.