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xoxo
Karona

Work is a challenge today. I feel severe muscle fatigue all over, like I just finished a workout. Tired of this! AARGH! *shakes fist*

Went to the casino last night (15 mins from my house) to use my $15 freeplay and came home with $40. I could get used to that. :)

It's a cruel, cruel world. I am again without internet. I am composing this post entirely via smartphone. Not being infected with a stupid virus, the phone is indeed smarter.

The msb.exe trojan is more than meets the eye. I am wifi-stumped. I see it works, it knows there are networks out there, but the twain shall never meet. I am currently prepping for the dreaded hard drive wipe.

In other news, I am doing what I normally do, all is status quo. The deck is in the process of being made bare again for the winter. The wind has won out and whipped everything around for the last time this year.

The grass is getting a thorough cuttng as well, in the hopes that it will be the last one for '09. I celebrate the beginning of One Less Chore! Yay!

In the meantime, back to the laptop...

BUNCH OF FUCKING RETARDED DISASTERS! If I call your office, as I was instructed by an INTELLIGENT person, and all you can do is blubber and stammer and repeat the same sentence over and over about what you CAN'T do, but it's not your fault and everyone should know that, you are USELESS to me! Stop talking at this point. I will call someone else. ZOMG, how do these people get jobs? No wonder folks can't get the kind of answers they need. No wonder the system is so fucked up. They have people at their front desks with THUMBS UP THEIR ASSES.

FUCKTARDS.

Fortunately, I am not one to be so easily stumped.

Advice for anyone who gets stuck in situations like this: NEVER listen to ANYONE who tells you you "CAN'T". There are ALWAYS ways you can. Keep calling people. Keep asking questions.

(I kept the details of the situation neutral because the above rant pertains to any number of service providers.)

[EDITED TO ADD: Five minutes after posting this, the person I spoke to AFTER being told no has already fixed the problem AND gotten me through a bunch of red tape. This result IS typical.]

Wow. Been online since '97 and Norton-free since '04, and just got my first major virus: msb.exe? I'm impressed. And also dead in the water.

Thank you, boutell, for the in-depth review. I just sent in my request for a Google Wave invite! (I am such an early-adopter junkie.)

...and they're all dropping to the floor.

Last Saturday, I went to the PA Renn Faire with my darling BFF, imladris77. I am on the left.

I knew it! Thank you fourgates! New York Times article:

Virus Is Found in Many With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
By DENISE GRADY
Published: October 8, 2009

Many people with chronic fatigue syndrome are infected with a little known virus that may cause or at least contribute to their illness, researchers are reporting.

The syndrome, which causes prolonged and severe fatigue, body aches and other symptoms, has long been a mystery ailment, and patients have sometimes been suspected of malingering or having psychiatric problems rather than genuine physical ones. Worldwide, 17 million people have the syndrome, including at least one million Americans.

An article published online Thursday in the journal Science reports that 68 of 101 patients with the syndrome, or 67 percent, were infected with an infectious virus, xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus, or XMRV. By contrast, only 3.7 percent of 218 healthy people were infected. Continuing work after the paper was published has found the virus in nearly 98 percent of about 300 patients with the syndrome, said Dr. Judy A. Mikovits, the lead author of the paper.

XMRV is a retrovirus, a member of the same family of viruses as the AIDS virus. These viruses carry their genetic information in RNA rather than DNA, and they insert themselves into their hosts’ genetic material and stay for life.

( read more )

I invented my own match question, in the style of OkCupid. What is Karen's correct answer?


How do you microwave last night's beef stew?

A) With the lid on tight.
B) With no lid on.
C) With tin foil on top.
D) With plastic wrap on top.

I created a Flowchart to My Heart at OkCupid. Click if you'd like to see what it looks like!

(p.s. - If you have an OkCupid ID, lemme know. I'm having fun with the compatibility thinger.)

Alyssa's heart is enlarged from prednizone use. She is also anemic again. She cannot have surgery. Unfortunately the tumor is deep and has spread. At this point it is a race to see which gives first: cancer, heart, or anemia. The vet says six months to a year.

Intermission. Sucking down a drink since I don't have to drive. Can't wait to go backstage to see Doc Severensin and the gang again!

Doc and the gang left to get ready for the show. Gilberto Gutierrez (lead guitarist) is a very very cool. Will be watching from a box seat!

I am having dinner with Doc Severensin in Harrisburg and several of his crew. No lie. I'm trying hard not to spill anything on me!

by Ani DiFranco

Thirty-three years go by and not once do you come home to find a man sitting in your bedroom. That is, a man you don't know, who came a long way to deliver one very specific message: "Lock your back door, you idiot. However invincible you imagine yourself to be, you are wrong."

Thirty-three years go by and you loosen the momentum of teenage nightmares. Your breasts hang like a woman's and you don't jump at shadows anymore. Instead, you may simply pause to admire those that move with the grace of trees, dancing past streetlights. And you walk through your house without turning on lamps. Sure of the angle from door to table, from table to staircase. Sure of the number of steps: seven to the landing, two to turn right, then seven more. Sure you will stroll serenely on the moving walkway of memory, across your bedroom and collapse, with a sigh, onto your bed, shoes falling, thunk thunk, onto the floor. And there will be no strange man suddenly all that time sitting there. Sitting there on what must be the prize chair in your collection of uncomfortable chairs, with a wild look in his eyes and hands that you cannot see. Holding what? You do not know.

So sure are you of the endless drumming rhythm of your isolation that you are painfully slow to adjust, if only because yours is not that genre of story. Still and again, life cannot muster the stuff of movies. No bullets shattering glass. Instead, fear sits patiently. Fear almost smiles when you finally see him, though you have kept him waiting for thirty-three years. And now he has let himself in and he has brought you fistfuls of teenage nightmares, though you think you see, in your naivete, that he is empty handed. And this brings you great relief. At the time.

New as you are, really, to the idea that, even after you've long since gotten used to the parameters, they can all change. While you're out one night having a drink with a friend, some big hand may be turning a big dial, switching channels on your dreams, until you find yourself lost in them and watching your daily life with the sound off. And of course, having cautiously turned down the flame under your eyes, there are more shadows around everything. Your vision a dim flashlight that you have to shake all the way to the outhouse. Your solitude elevating itself like the spirit of the dead presiding over your supposed repose. Not really asleep at all, just a sleeping position and a series of suspicious sounds: a clanking pipe, a creaking branch, the footfalls of a cat. All of this, and maybe, the swish of the soft leather of your intruder's coat as you walk him, step by step, back to the door, having talked him down off the ledge of a very bad idea. Soft leather, big feet, almond eyes -- the kinds of details the police officer would ask for later, with his clipboard and his pistol, in your hallway.


- Ani DiFranco (listen here)

I am getting the Sun East FCU phishing texts on my phone (PA area folks only). How the hell did I get on THAT mailing list?

I'm slowly moving my work schedule back to three days a week. Three long days mind you. The Great Schedule Expansion of '08 has come to an end. I do better with a short batch of longer days, it would seem. In a few weeks, Thursdays will be my last day of the work week, and thank god. I can barely function today.

p.s. - This is my first real post typed by my thumbs. I less than three technology.

...makes the whole world blind. -- Ghandi

In a freak occurrence, I poked myself in the eye pretty bad last Saturday while weeding in my garden. I was just finishing up and picking up debris when I bent down and got attacked direct dead center to my right cornea by the evil and dangerous daylily's spiky leaf. Having poked myself in the eye here and there before, I gave it a few moments to tear up and make the stabbity feeling go away, and then went back to work.

By the next morning I was in a blind panic (see what I did there?). I could not open my eye and when I tried to the pain was unreal. There was tearing so bad I had to carry tissues. My brain finally caught up to what my body was trying to tell me (with a little kick in the ass from my mom) and I took myself to the local emergicenter.

Turns out I had a central corneal abrasion (lucky me, I got a bullseye!) in a triangular shape roughly half the size of my pupil. It looked sorta like this:

It was deep. My vision in that eye was bad (pretty much the fourth line down on this test gave me a struggle). Because of the strain on the other eye, that one was bad as well. I was unable to read road signs in the distance and nighttime lighting was full of halos in the weirdest shapes. It was like looking through a blurry kaleidescope. But even with all that, it was the pain that had my full attention. And I am no wuss, dealing with chronic pain every day. They gave me Darvocet. When that did nothing, they gave me Vicodin. That coupled with four ibuprofen just about made it tolerable.

Thankfully, by the fourth day, it was gone. Completely. What stabbity thing? There is no stabbity thing here. My vision is now 20/25 in that eye, with hopes that it will return completely. The cornea swells with the trauma, changing the vision, but there is also a scar dead center to my vision that will take time to go away. I will be back to have a recheck in a few weeks.

The daylilies will be ripped out. They are obviously a vicious evil plant. I will be wearing sunglasses the entire time.