In spite of last week seeing me hurt myself and our house being without electricity for 3 full days, this week has been shit.

Our work weeks are Friday thru Thursday (don't even ask me why accounting switched to that, I have no fucking insight into the rationale). For Friday thru Thursday? I have ~52 hours. That's 12 hours' OT, all worked Monday thru yesterday, with last night being a 12 hour day. Yes, I get paid. Yes, I will enjoy the extra on the paycheck. No, I did not like working it at all. It's amazing how overtired a person can get in such a short time, even without physical labor. Most of it has been cleaning up someone else's code so that it'll actually work the way it's supposed to, fixing errors in logic I couldn't even begin to see where the ideas could've come from. I'm finally done with that for now, thankfully. Also had to spend about two hours this week taking four training classes they told us at the start of the month that needed to be done by the end of the month. On top of that we also had to install file encryption, get it used, then fill out a questionnaire saying we took all our training and installed encryption, yadda yadda. Hadn't found time for it 'cause of getting shit done for Monday's release so I had to squeeze that in.

On top of that, we're still supposed to release Monday. I'm not going to hold my breath believing I won't have to do any work this weekend to go with that. All I can do is hope that it's OK for me to do it at home rather than coming in to the office. I also am going to press for not having to start until, oh I dunno, after lunch I guess? I could live with starting at 10am, maybe even 9am. I'm not starting before that, whether at home or going in. No fuckin' way.

Between Sunday night and Tueday night I averaged 5 hours' sleep. One of which was due to trying to finish upgrading my MovableType installation with shitacular WS_FTP liking not to inform you when it decided not to overwrite a file rather than asking you. Oh yeah, and I haven't had time to rant about that either; I assure you I still have enough spite towards that awful program that I still will get to that. Then Wednesday night I got to sleep at a semi-reasonable hour, around 10:30, but not early. So yesterday I was still tired, but at least the eye strain and brain fatigue didn't set in until about 5:30 or so. I was actually in a good mood at lunch. Then, since I didn't get home till 8pm or so, ugh, I heated up my leftover pork steak for dinner (it was yummy at least), read all that day's comics, piddled a bit on the comp, then went to bed. Read for about a half hour, tried to sleep. Twice between then and 11 I woke up to Pele coming up on the bed being sweet kitty (I have the red marks on my shoulder still from her slightly-too-sharp claws making bread in my hair, heh). The second time I really had a hard time falling back asleep, but I finally after J came to bed.

So I'm quite tired today. No way I'm getting up really early tomorrow, screw that shit. I haven't played WoW all week except for about 45 minutes early Monday evening (after which I worked 2 hours' OT on the laptop in bed). I probably won't play tonight either, from being too tired. Even I can only take so many hours staring at a computer screen. Sure, I can handle longer if it's all play than if a lot of it is work, but I have my limits. I was thinking at the end of Tuesday I'd probably end up getting plowed tonight, but I think I'm just too exhausted to even care. Probably just relax when I get home, maybe jump in the pool since it's hot again and we haven't gotten a chance to use it, go to bed at a reasonable hour, etc.

I haven't even made my exercise class this week. Monday I got home late enough (5:30) that when we got back from getting something to eat it was 6:30. I refuse to show up 10-15 minutes late, probably from my college profs that said "if you're going to be late, don't come". And pride. Anywho, I did do a shortened version of the workout at home. Didn't do the warmup stuff, didn't do quite as many exercises. However, I did use the weight machine for the machine-equivalent of pushups, and spent 20 minutes on the treadmill. That's it for exercising this week. Wednesday I didn't even leave work till... 5:30? 6? Something like that.

J's cousin is coming in town for a week's vacation, with the family float trip next Friday, and his flight arrives this afternoon. He'll be staying with us a couple days then staying with various other family I think. I'll have to apologize as soon as I see him (he might be at our house before I am; flight's at 4 which is when I'll be leaving work if I'm not working late at all) for the fact that I'll probably not be much fun this evening.

Oh yeah. My hand still hurts. Left wrist is fine, right one has subsided though I wouldn't do pushups on it. Right hand, however, between my first and second knuckles (not counting thumb) hurts rather a lot when I try to grip. I mean, anything light enough to hold loosely between thumb and fingers is no problem. Anything I have to apply any real grip to though, particularly when it hangs weight from my hands and it isn't hanging from my palm itself but rather across the base of my fingers, has been problematic for the last, oh, 3 weeks. Palm aches from time to time as well, but not too often. I need to get in to see a doc about it, since it's not getting better (it varies from day to day but isn't fading over time), but I'll be damned if I drive west on I-70 in rush hour fucking traffic with all the other folks going home that way, to see my current doc. So I need to trade over to another one. I have the one I know I want to switch to, and I have a piece of paper for records transfer partially filled out, but I need to find out the rest. I was gonna do that Monday... here it is Friday and I still haven't called. I think I'll do that after I post this though. I even have the form in my bag. I need to find out if I can schedule an appointment before I get the paper in, so long as I get it in at least X amount before the appointment, if I have to do that first, if I need to pay for paper records transfer or if they can do it electronically -- both are in the SSM system -- and all that shit. Besides the fact that my doc I've had for years now seems like he's over rushed and doesn't listen as closely, I mostly just want a doc who's a lot closer to where I live and work. I just keep putting it off out of laziness, no other reason. But, I want to make the transfer before my last Zyrtec refill runs out so I don't have to go all the way out there just to have him ask me how I'm doing and renew my scrip. So fucking stupid, it isn't heart meds, it's antihistamines ferchrissakes.

Besides the fact that for a while I had nothing to say, and our power was out for 3 full days, there were real tech reasons for me not updating. First, I seem to have had some file corruption of some MySQL drivers MovableType needs. Second, after that got squared away I also upgraded to the latest version (3.2 to 3.31), but was thwarted by shitty FTP not updating all my files. Took untl last night to fix that.

The upside of this upgrade is that tags are now built in. So I can have main categories, but I can also tag stuff. I'll have to figure out how to make good use of that (add stuff to my templates to support it, yadda yadda). The downside, is that even though I found a fresh version of the CustomFields plugin specifically for 3.31, which is where my "current music" and "mood" come from, I no longer see my custom entry fields on my entry page. The guy who maintains that, and other, plugins has a forum but it's down. There's almost zilch in the MT support forums about it at all, and everyone who had trouble getting the fields to show up was running 3.2 or less.

Anyway, I did make two three posts to LJ while I couldn't here, which will appear here as older entries, and after that I'll also be discussing FTP and why I will never, ever use WS_FTP again. It will be uninstalled from my computer by the end of the week.

We got power back at 8:10pm Saturday night. We had to throw away most of our meat and cheese, and our milk. We were cooking up a bunch of pork steaks to get 'em eaten, with J having called a few friends to come partake, when it came back on. So, the two pork steaks we had that didn't get eaten had a place to go until we reheat 'em.

Some people are still without power. This morning I overheard a woman who was dropping off her husband at work say, "I'll let you know if we have water." Someone pointed out anyone with no power and well water won't have water. Ugh. According to this stltoday.com page there were still over 200K people without power as of 6am today.

I'm glad we have power and water. The house is a normal temp again, the cats are happy again. We need to go grocery shopping (though I wonder if we should wait... the power blinked this morning while I was in the shower. O.o).

J called me at 10am to tell me we had power. Then at 11 we were IMing, a storm came through (got really, really dark out, started blowing, then poured) and at 11am he IMed me and said the power was out and he had to go. He called me a little bit ago to tell me it's still out and he's going to see if my parents have power (no clue) and if they do we're gonna schlep perishables over and hang out at their house. If not, James (who asked me why we didn't call last night, hehe, silly us not taking him up on his offer) told me the offer still stands. We'll figure something out. At least the air in the house cooled down several degrees for the hour the air was on, right?

Oh, funny anecdote about the AC coming on today: J said both cats went to the floor vent in the livingroom and were "praying to it". They were right next to each other, both with their faces completely over the vent with the air blowing their face fur back. Before J could get to the camera they'd stopped, so no pics when we get power, but it's a great mental image. (I just am amused they both headed for that one, which is crowded in between the window and one of our gliders, neither one visiting the very spacious vent in the kitchen.)

This has not been a good week. Last week was fine, even if I never got around to writing a damn thing. I had stuff to say, but either I didn't have the time or the energy to say it.

This week:

1. Monday I burned my hand on a pot making dinner.
2. Tuesday I bit my lip hard enough to make it bleed, then later bent my thumb nail back while making the bed.
3. Wednesday night a storm popped up out of fucking nowhere, with shit moving southwest, which is generally a rare freakish weather pattern here, and we lost power.
4. Thursday, we had no power, house got up to 86°F.
5. Today, we still fucking don't have fucking power.

That's right, no power for a day and a half. Started off I kept hurting myself, and we've not had power from 7pm Wednesday till *looks at clock* 8am Friday morning and counting. We had to sleep on our couches in the basement 'cause at least down there it was pleasant. In fact we spent most of the evening down there. It was only 81 when we left the house at 2-something to find food (went to Growler's, got quesadillas 'cause they'd be OK not reheated and they're big enough to make 2 full meals from); came back around 4pm after an unsuccessful attempt to find somewhere that had power that we could buy a cooler or two and ice from and it was up to 84. Sat around downstairs reading books by candlelight, ate our leftovers, didn't go upstairs till 10 or so. Blew out candles at midnight, laid in bed for 5 minutes, then said fuckit and went downstairs to sleep. Slept like shit.

Ugh. And of course they're predicting more severe weather this afternoon and evening. What do you want to bed, they'll get our power up around, oh I dunno, 4 or 5pm, then it'll be fucked again by 7 or 8 with more storms.

We shoulda called up James & Steph (James = coworker + friend, Steph is his wife) and taken them up on the offer they extended us Wed. night to hang at their place. They're out in St. Charles and didn't lose power, and they said we could keep the cats in a room in the basement (they have a doggie; she might want to be buddies with our cats, dunno, but our cats would flip out on her and there would be bad shenanigans). They have a spare room we coulda crashed on last night.

One tiny upside: our OMGbeefy UPS can power a DSL modem and wireless router for gobs and gobs of time. Was able to at least find out about the boil order (water pumping station lost power, pressure dropped below 20psi) by firing up the laptop and trying to see if work was affected by the outage (apparently not, but I stayed home yesterday anyway). Fired it up last night to see if it'd been rescinded, or if I could get Ameren's online "my power outage" thing to tell me anything, which it didn't. I used up half the laptop's battery yesterday, but not much at all of the UPS. We so need a weather radio though, so we can at least get some news when the power's out.

Gonna be a long one. I'll try not to be too disjointed, but make no promises.

The short of it: the pool is now clean, the kitchen and livingroom look better than they ever have, and the home gym we bought is now fully operational.

The long of it:

Saturday was spent being lazy and levelling in WoW. Got to 48, knocked out Tanaris except Zul Farrak, did some Searing Gorge. Sunday was much more productive and much busier. My mom had the suggestion a ways back that they could come over to our house, and while the guys put together the gym in all its pulley weighty goodness, my mom and I could visit, shoot the shit, play games, whatever. So last Wednesday I suggested that weekend. Of course, we didn't clean at all Saturday, which meant insane cleaning extravaganza Sunday. J tackled the kitchen. It turned out fabulously. Let's just say, we both had avoided it because it was a daunting task: mail (junk, magazines, etc.) covering up the counter island, all manner of things completely covering our table so we hadn't even been able to eat at it for over a year, a despicably dirty floor... you get the picture.

J did a wonderful job. Many mad props. Even the floor, which turned the bucket water not dark brown but black. In the meantime, I cleaned the main bathroom (all but the actual toilet bowl, tub, and mirror). The medicine cabinet in both bathrooms got reorganized, things got put away, and I washed the shower walls and curtain while taking my shower, after having done the sink. We also have a little bit of floorspace that isn't in the hallway in front of the bathroom door, which I also decided to wash. Ga-rosss.Then came time to talk food with my mom and take the recycling to the place by the park. My mom and I decided to meet at the Schnucks closest them since she had to get a scrip from the Walgreens across the lot from it. I got all the recycling loaded (some of it was old boxes from the kitchen that we hadn't gotten rid of yet), and spent about 40 minutes dumping stuff. Then at the store my mom and I ended up pulling into spaces across from each other within less than a minute of each other.

We got burgers, corn on the cob, bag o' salad + prechopped red onion to go with it, some sliced mushrooms to saute with a few held back for the guys' salads, a tomato for the guys' burgers and salads, and some strawberries to slice up & sugar for later. (Also picked up a few new types of Kashi granola bars to try that Shop 'n' Save hadn't yet carried, and noted for later that they also carry larger boxes of Kashi cereal.) We parted ways so my mom could get my dad.

Came back home, J was done with the kitchen and was just getting ready to start dusting and sweeping the livingroom. He'd already straightened up in there. As he put it, he'd ask me to do it but I'd probably end up in a sneezing fit with itching that'd last me hours. My parents arrived after this was done, right after I'd started de-leafing the strawberries, and my dad and J got started downstairs while my mom and I talked while I finished rinsing and slicing the strawberries. I showed her the flowers out back. We then played Boggle. I used to be able to beat my mom rather soundly, but I'm sorely out of practice. We played two sets of five games each, and she beat me almost every single game, definitely by a lot for each set score. I think I won one game and that was it. I need to get back in the swing of things if I want to have a decent rematch, hehe.

So about 6:30 or 7pm, my mom and I are done with our two sets and decide we're awfully damn hungry: time to check on the guy's progress and see if they might be at a stopping point at least. We get down there... and they're putting tools away! Yay! The only catch is that the hung ceiling is about 2" too low for the tallest part of the machine, so that tile is pushed up and out of the way some in order to make room. According to J, since they only had schematic diagrams for all the instructions, no example photos, my dad deserves major kudos for figuring out the pulleys. They had 'em up once, then had to take 'em down to fix 'em. O.O Figured that'd be the hardest part. But, they got it all together and working, so yay!

We then made dinner, ate and enjoyed dinner, and shot the shit for a while. Watched the cats be cute, and Zephyr be moochie while dinner was cooking. It ended up being 8 or so when we sat down to eat, so after about a half hour of talking afterwards my parents headed home.

After that was more (way too much, in fact; it was quite late) WoW playing. J helped me finish up Searing Gorge except Obsidion, and I reached level 49.

Took more pictures of the cats all weekend, which I should probably upload. There are a few cute ones of Zephyr trying to sleep and be comfy on top of the kitty condo.

Yesterday J finished vacuuming the pool, and it looks great again. Just in time for it to rain, even if we do desperately need the rain.

So the Florissant planning and zoning commission approved Hooters' bid to move into an old Mexican restaurant. They only look at things like parking, whether the building's safe, whether it'll fuck up traffic, etc. Some Florissant residents are all in a tizzy because the restaurant's next to a middle school. Shit people, middle schoolers even in my day probably saw more boobie flesh on TV than you do in Hooters. The shirts are tight but you don't have everything-but-nips sticking out. Lots of handwaving and "OMG think of the children" and "that's not a family restaraunt!!111" from 'em. It's not a go yet, the city council still has to approve it, but last time this came around (3-5 years or so ago) they approved it then. For one reason or another they never ended up setting up shop, so of course now they have to gain approval all over again (probably a different building or whatever).

I live in Florissant, which is why I find this so amusing. I couldn't give two shits if you stuck a Hooters in Florissant, and since they're not pornographic I don't give a shit that they'd be by a middle school. (It'd be nice if there was a market for the complement restaurant: Hot Buns or something, with nicely built guys in form fitting t-shirts and jeans, with really really, really good buns free to every table. But, that's neither here nor there.) I'm just amused that there are still people living here (thought most of 'em had bailed westward in the state) who actually get heart burn from even thinking about Hooters' existance.

We opened it when I got home, then played with it a bit before we had to grab a little food and go work out. Then we played with it some more.

So far, it's taken wonderful pictures of Pele, and better pictures of Zephyr. To get really good ones of him, I suspect it will take much reading of the manual and adjusting of settings. However, these are already a significant improvement over past pictures. I got some really stellar ones of Pele, she's just so incredibly photogenic.

J even tested the movie capability, and it isn't bad. Obviously not long home movie material, but I very much don't care. It works. So I guess I'll probably upload a YouTube video or two whenever we get the cats doing something amusing enough to film.

Our Dazzle 6-in-1 reader that is probably 4-5 years old can read our SD card. Also, it came with USB capabilities so if I feel like installing the right drivers we can use that as well.

I also ended up signing up for a Flickr account. I know I know, I have my own website with copious amounts of space. But, I just haven't gotten around to writing my own photo album code, nor have I gone to the trouble of grabbing a prewritten PHP one to customize the hell out of in order to style it and make it fit my layout 100%. So for now I've just said "hell with it". Maybe eventually I'll use MovableType to create me a photo blog, but this will do for now.

The best image? Pele, of course.

A few more choice pictures...

They delivered our camera at about noon today! I can't wait to get home and play with it eeeeeee!

I saw it was loaded onto a truck at 5:30 this morning, but that doesn't 100% guarantee delivery that day, since drivers don't always have time for everything put on their truck. But, it made it! And, J didn't mention the box looking all messed up, so it shouldn't be broken.

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In other news... Brennh is now level 47 in WoW. It's amazing what a four day weekend will do for you (took a vacation day Monday). Got lots and lots of sleep, played lots and lots of WoW. Parents had us over with my grandfather and a friend of my mom's for dinner Tuesday night. Mmmmm, filet mignon from the local meat market. Good stuff.