the passionate ailurophile

Nothing can lift my spirits and make me feel better than something like this…(click image for bigger)

2010 New Hampshire Fisher Cats Tickets!

Our Fisher Cats tickets came today!  And not just the mini-plan ones…I had bought tickets to a couple of other games when the individual game tickets went on sale a few weeks ago, and they sent those, too.  Normally, I have to print those out.  But I guess when they were processing all of the mini-plans and stuff, they just printed out real tickets for everything they had on file for the fans, and sent them ALL out!  Good, I like real tickets better, anyway, and that’s less paper and ink I have to use, printing them out.  Plus, I just LOVE having that envelope full of tickets for the upcoming season, just waiting to be used.  Every year, I take a picture of the tickets all fanned out like this, just because it makes me happy!

NyQuil is magical stuph.  Srsly.  I wasn’t having any cold symptoms, but I had Mike get me a big bottle of it (the cherry flavored, that green licorice stuph is NASTY).  The reason is that it seems to be the only thing that makes me go to sleep.  With all of the racket from the cats at night and the landladies being Screaming Mimi’s all day, sleep has been hard to come by, but much needed if I wanted to knock this thing out.  Well, it worked, because I took it Saturday night, and was groggy most of Sunday, as well.  That sucked, because I’d been hoping to be able to go out and take advantage of the nice weather.

So Mike went by himself to the store, and he also said he was going to get lunch somewhere.  I figured he’d be gone for maybe two hours.  He was gone for four.  Where did he go, I wondered, was he out looking for New York jobs or something?

You know why he took so long?  He drove all the way up to bloody Salem, NH, because he wanted to go and have breakfast at Denny’s.  Who the hell drives 40 minutes to go to a greasy dump like Denny’s?  And there ARE closer ones, the closest one to us is in Danvers, about 12 miles from here.  I checked.

But he wanted breakfast food, I was too sick to cook it, he can’t cook without nearly burning the house down or making food have odd odors that drive me to the barf bucket just from having to smell it.  Also, when we go out together, we almost never go out for breakfast, because I hate it.  Not the food necessarily, but because I can’t deal with sitting in a room full of families with screaming kids in the A.M., the ones who are always out on weekends.  They all go to Denny’s because it’s cheap.  Well, I don’t like it much in the P.M., either, but it’s worse in the morning.  If we’re staying at a hotel that has free breakfast, I go down, put it on a tray, and take it to the room where I can eat it in peace.

Anyway, I asked him what he would have done if I’d not been so groggy at the time he left, and came along?  Would he have made ME go to Denny’s, if he was hell-bent on having breakfast at 1PM?  That would have been wife-abuse, just trying to make me set foot in any Denny’s is bad enough.  But I’m getting over being sick, the last thing I wanted was some greasy crap upsetting my tummy.  Does Denny’s make ANYTHING that is not greasy?  I don’t think so.

Later I was feeling better, so I made him take me to TGI Friday’s, because I wanted a Sam Adams Noble Pils and some broccoli-cheese soup.  I also has a Give Me More Stripes coupon worth eight bucks that expires this coming Saturday, that I wanted to use.

But when we got there, we were told that the beer taps were broken, no Sam Adams anything except for Sam Light, in a bottle.  As light beers, go, Sam Light is okay.  But I hadn’t had a beer in a week, and I wasn’t about to settle for light beer.  Nothing else they had bottled met up to my exacting beer standards…as in, it all came from what I like to call The Big Three Piss Trough.  I do not quaff from The Big Three Piss Trough, if that’s all they have, I go without or go elsewhere.

I opted to leave…we hadn’t ordered any food yet, so it was okay.  I just would have  felt more and more resentful if we’d stayed and drank the Sam Light, when I’d been looking forward to Noble Pils.  I felt bad…it was a Sunday night, nothing they could do about the taps, no doubt they got someone to come out and fix them during regular business hours.  We’ll go back sometime before my coupon expires, surely the taps will be fixed by then.

We ended up going to the 99 up the road.  It would be a freak of nature if we walked in there, and their taps were broken, too…but no, they worked fine.  No broccoli-cheese soup there, so I got the fish chowder with a Caesar salad.

We sat at the bar at the 99.  While there, we overheard a server complaining to the bartender about a table who had a $100 check leaving a 31-cent tip.  The bill was probably $99.69, the jerk paid $100 and told the server to “keep the change”.  My, how generous!

If people are too cheap to tip properly, they should go to the drive-though, or eat at home.  Times are tough, I know, but servers only make $2.65 an hour, they rely on tips to make a living wage.  Most servers work hard to earn said tips, but some people are too cheap to give them.  If you are going to a full-service restaurant, you must budget for the tip as part of the cost of the meal, you can’t just omit it to save money.  If you need to save money, don’t eat out at all, or go to McDonald’s or some other place where you don’t have to tip.  Sheesh!

Anyhoo, let’s hope that this sickness is over and done with, and that I will get to enjoy all of those baseball tickets!

Srsly.  There is no way in HELL that I will EVER get that H1N1 shot again.  It’s flippin’ killing me, I wonder if I’ll ever feel better again.

I thought I was over it, and we did go to that beer dinner on Sunday night.  Everything was fine, no problem.  I was a bit tired the next day, so I took it easy.  But on Tuesday, all of this shit flared up again.  If I wasn’t throwing up, I was having stomach pains, or endless headaches.  The headaches especially are driving me insane, because half the time, I can’t take anything for the pain, because I gack it right back up.

Also, I have gotten almost NO sleep over the past two weeks.  I can’t sleep at night because that’s when the cats want to play horsecats on the bed.  If I close them out of the bedroom, they’ll just scratch on the door, which also drives me nuts.  And I can’t sleep in the daytime because my landladies are incapable of speaking in “indoor voices”.  Also, it sounds like they are operating a bowling alley up there.  Asking them to be quiet will do no good, they think they ARE being quiet.  Plus, I’m not in the mood to stir up any shit with them right now.

This morning was the worst.  I finally got some sleep, just a few hours.  When I woke up, the headache came back, but my stomach still hurt so I was afraid to take anything for it.  So I just laid there and tried to relax it away on its own, sometimes that works.  And it way…until one of the landladies suddenly went out into the back hallway and yelled at one of her dogs.  You’d think that said dog was clear on the other side of town, because you probably could have heard it that far away.  Anyhoo, my headache came blazing back, 100 times worse than it was before.  Sheesh, we don’t make all sorts of racket, why can’t we get the same courtesy in return?

I finally got back to sleep around noon.  I woke up about an hour later, awoken by a horrible stench, which turned out to be me.  I had broken out into a horrible sweat, and this disgusting sickly sweet smell was oozing out my pores.  I had been running a fever, and it felt sort of like I was under a heated blanket, but I wasn’t, just the sheet…it was actually pretty warm out today.  Anyhoo, the smell was so bad that I had to throw up from just smelling it.  Oddly enough, Mike said he didn’t smell anything.  Weird.

I wanted to take a shower, but I had no more clean pajama pants (I was going through them more quickly than usual due to repeated incidences of the sickly sweet stench thing).  I sent Mike downstairs to the laundry room to see if I’d left any down there, fortunately, there were three pairs, which he brought up for me.  I finally took a shower and felt a lot better.

Screw this, I’m sick of being sick.  Here I thought I was doing the right thing in getting the stupid vaccine, and all it’s caused me was hell.  I wish I had listened to the people who said NOT to get it.  Then, maybe I’d not be dealing with this crap now.

The weather is warming up, I have a lot of stuph coming up, and I will be mighty pissed if I have to miss any of it due to this shit.  We’re supposed to go to Old Sturbridge Village next weekend for the Hearthside Bounty thing.  Even if I’m feeling like shit, we’re still going.  Maybe I might have to skip the dinner thing and stay in the room while Mike goes.  But the point is that I WANT to be in a hotel room, jut for one night, with no cats dancing all over the bed all night, no noisy neighbors, just one night of peace and quiet.  Is that too freakin’ much to ask for?

I’m not calling the doctor yet because I don’t want to risk being trapped in the hospital for Opening Weekend of the Fisher Cats, something I’ve been looking forward to for many months.  Even if I still have these symptoms, I’m going, the room faces the ballpark, I can stay in there, watch the game, listen on the radio; at least I won’t completely miss it.  After that, then I’ll consider calling the doctor.  But not before they have the chance to make me miss Opening Day.  I figure that if I am dying from ill effects of the Hamthrax vaccine, I am entitled to my dying wish, right?

Hopefully, this crap won’t hang on that long.  I’m actually feeling well enough now, that I might want Mike to get me out of here for a few hours tomorrow, the weather is going to be nice again.  Maybe this last sweating episode will be it.  It had better be, because this is getting VERY old!

I swear, if in the future, some government bureaucrats decide that it is necessary to make it mandatory for everyone to get the Hamthrax shot, or else be quarantined or jailed (they have that power here in Massachusetts, scary, huh?)…someone’s gonna find that needle and syringe shoved firmly up their ass.  Because they will NOT be using it on me.  Not ever again.

I don’t think I’ll ever be getting the H1N1 vaccine again.  I’m convinced it has made me sicker than I would have been without it.  Although I seemed to be feeling better a few days ago, things got worse, and I’ve been out of it for what seems like forever.  I haven’t been up for much of anything, no work getting done, no fooling around on Facebook, no surfing the web to read stuph like murad reviews.

On Wednesday, I put the stuph in the slow cooker for the spaghetti sauce.  As it cooked, I felt more and more nauseous, because it smelled GROSS.  This is a recipe I make all the time, but I don’t think I will ever make it again now.  Mike came home, though, and said it smelled good.  I guess it was just me, but I will NEVER eat that stuph now.  Every time I even think about it, that horrible stench comes back to mind.  It felt like it was hanging in the air for days.

Hopefully, I’m really okay now, although for a while I felt like I’d be sick like this forever.  I hope we’ll still be able to go to that beer dinner tomorrow night.

If we can’t, I’m gonna be royally pissed.

I’ve been sick since Sunday, only starting to feel a little better now.  I guess this is going to happen a couple of weeks after I get a flu shot, this is the second time now.

The flu vaccine does inject a small does of the virus into the body.  It’s not normally supposed to make you actually get sick, but it does for me.  A couple of weeks later, and I’m not sure why.

This happened back in 2008.  I got a seasonal flu shot near the end of October, so I could be sure not to be sick for one of the premier events of the craft-brewing year, the Maine Brewers’ Festival.  And I was fine for the event.

The next day, on the way home, we stopped at Federal Jack’s Brewpub in Kennebunk for lunch, as we always do on the way home from Portland.  I was fine there, too.

So we got home about an hour and a half later.  As we approached the house, I had to ask Mike to stop and let me out near the front door.  He did, I unlocked the door, ran inside, nearly tripping over cats, went into the bathroom, lifted the toilet lid, and gacked.  If I’d had to walk from the parking space out back to the front door, I’d likely have gacked on the sidewalk.  That is, if I didn’t gack in the car first.

It wasn’t food poisoning from Federal Jack’s, it takes a lot longer than 90 minutes for that to take effect.  It was the flu, it was nasty as it always is…but it only lasted for a few days, not for weeks on end, as it did in my pre-flu shot days.

And that’s what happened this time, too.  We were out all day Saturday, I was fine.  At 5AM on Sunday, I got up and gacked.  I stayed in bed all day Sunday and then again all day Monday.  I gacked a couple of times on Monday, too.  But then I couldn’t sleep on Monday night, and ended up sleeping almost all day on Tuesday.

I had been watching TV in the bedroom, first Rachael Ray, which started with a segment I could have done without, all about colon stuff, colonoscopies, colon cleanse benefits, that sort of thing. It was kind of gross…if I wanted to see that on a talk show, I’d flip the channel over to Dr. Oz.  He shows gross stuff, such as pictures of actual colons and other innards, too…but it being a medical show, you expect that.  My tummy was a little too sensitive to deal with colons, yanno?

Martha Stewart came on at 10, and I watched that.  What that was over, I switched over to channel 4 for “The Price is Right”, because I didn’t feel like watching “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”  After TPIR, the local news and then the CBS soaps come on, but I fell asleep and missed them all.  I was planning to get up and throw the stuph for the spaghetti sauce into the slow-cooker, so that Mike wold have something to eat.  But I didn’t wake up until he came home, and it was too late.  He had to scrounge up something else to eat.

But my fever had broken, and I woke up all sweaty.  I decided I felt well enough to take my first shower since Saturday, and it did help make me feel better.

So now I’m behind on a lot of stuph, and am trying to see how long I can sit in this chair before I get tired again.  All that time in bed made my lower back seriously hurt.

But the worst has passed, and we should be able to go to that beer dinner up in Portsmouth on Sunday!

It’s all back the way it was now. Thank DOG for the widget thing in WP, otherwise, I’d have had to piece together all the sidebar crap back the way it was. As for the header crap, all I had to do was find the directory that housed the images, delete the ones that were there so they’d not show up in the rotation…after all, this blog is called “The Passionate Ailurophile“, and therefore MUST have cat pics in the header!  And then just find where on this computer I had the cat banners saved, re-upload them, and that was it.  The little kitty thing in the upper left was something I made and gave the same name as the green flower thing that was there before, so I just uploaded that and told it to overwrite the old one.

All is well.  So far.  If I log back in here later and see the*default* crap theme again, and I have to rename stuph, I’m gonna scream.  Because I KNOW I’ll forget I had to do this AGAIN, the next time this damned thing tries to demand that I upgrade.

At least it was easier than all the crap I’ve been dealing with over trying to set up wireless around here; I am convinced now that it will NEVER happen.  This damned modem/router thing that Verizon gave me when I first got DSL is a piece of junk.  Srsly.  Works fine as just a modem, but the router part never worked, no matter what I tried.  I gave up, until Mike’s boss started nagging his ass again about the need for him to be able to connect his stupid work computer to a network, for snow days and all.

“Buy a new router”, someone said.  Yeah, but it will fight with the old one, I said.  I finally figured out, with a lot of effort, how to turn of the router part of this piece of junk and make it just be a modem.  I bought a new router, hooked it up EXACTLY as instructed, and it says that there is something wrong with the modem.  That is why the little flashy modem light on the router means, so says the Belkin router manual.  Too bad said manual doesn’t tell you how to possibly fix it.

So I went and signed up for some forum that is supposed to provide tech support to DSL users.  Some of their posts have helped me in the past, so it was worth a shot to sign up and post my issue there, right?  I spent a good part of an hour writing a detailed post about my issue, telling them exactly what I wanted to do, what I have done that hasn’t worked, what equipment I have (complete with brand names and models), what operating systems are on the computers involved, how much of my hair I’ve torn out trying to get this crap to work, what kind of beer I drank when it didn’t work, how many times I had to get up and pee while in the middle of all if this…the whole floopin’ nine yards.  I honestly thought that if I gave that much detail (okay, not really about the parts about the hair, beer, peeing), someone would be able to help me.

But NOOOOO!  I got exactly two responses so far.  The first guy told me to call Verizon tech support.  Sheesh, if I thought for just one second that Verizon tech support would have been remotely useful, I’d have gone that route first.  I already know their tech support sucks.  A lot of people on that forum said that Verizon tech support sucks.  I thought that was why someone created that forum, because most ISP’s tech support sucks.

The second guy must have been either Beavis or Butt-head in real life, because his response made no sense, he clearly did NOT read my post well enough, and asked why I was doing what the instructions told me to do.  Floopin’ USELESS.

I had to disconnect the new router and reset the stupid Verizon Westell 327w Versalink piece o’ junk to factory defaults, just to get the thing to work properly enough so that I could stay online longer than five minutes.  The stupid Belkin router is sitting here, unplugged, doing nothing.  And flooping Staples now has $45 of my money for something I can’t get to work, and NO ONE IN THE WORLD can help me.  Either they tell me to do shit that I already tried a dozen times that didn’t work before, tell me to buy a new router, which I did, and I just told you how THAT went, or they send me to the Verizon website directions for network setting-upping.  Which also didn’t work, although I followed it to the letter.

I swear, I could probably find an easier way to how to reduce belly fat, while still drinking all the beer I want, before I get this damned wireless crap to work.  Oh, and before anyone says it, it is NOT either laptop that’s at fault here, not Mike’s work computer, and not my netbook.  Both of them have wireless cards that work in other places that have WiFi, such as hotels.

I give up.  If Mike’s boss is that insistent on having a home network here, let him send the damned IT guy over here to set it up for me.  The jerk obviously lives under the ASSumption that everyone knows how to make everything work just the way they want it to.  As it is, Mike HAS asked the IT guy for help, to at least tell him what needs to be done, but he won’t.  Jerk.

I should call Verizon and demand a new modem/router, for free, being that I’ve been a DSL customer of theirs for so long, and this old one is shit.  One reason I don’t want to call them is because they seem to be obsessed with trying to sell me a whole FiOS package…DO NOT WANT.  I supposed I could hint that if they don’t give me what I want, I’ll switch to Comcast…but what if they call my bluff?  I hate Comcast more than Verizon, but they are the only other game in town for high-speed internet.

Screw it.  I give up.  Anyone want to buy a barely used Belkin router?