I’m posting some stuff that has been languishing in my “drafts” file for a while. A more typical update should come sometime this weekend.

There was a bit of a glitch in my web hosting this morning. Things are back to normal, though. Sorry for the delay!

OK, so yes, I am posting more on my ongoing dental saga. It’s a notable situation in my life at the moment, though, so tough cookies.

Last night was the initial wave of treatment on #12. After a very bitter topical anesthetic and some injected lidocaine the dentist and his assistant got to work scouring out infected portions of tooth. (Even though I couldn’t feel a thing, I could hear every scrape through bone conduction; this was rather unpleasant.) Because the infection has reached the pulp as well, a simple filling is inappropriate, so I have an appointment on Super Duper Fat Tuesday to get started with the root canal.

There is a temporary filling in there now to protect the exposed tissues. It feels a bit weird, mostly because I had just gotten used to the minor gap left when the original tooth broke. It looks natural at first glance, though further examination reminds me of the germ at the center of a kernel of corn.

More on this later, as things develop further.

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I have created a monster…

We’ve been looking at houses lately, thanks in part to the price cuts that result from poor sales and in part to a super-sweet benefit of the ol’ employer (forgivable loans for down payments!). Sadly, though, just when we find a neat place in our price range in a qualifying neighborhood, it gets sold FAST. (Aside: we should so market this. “Find a buyer! Just pay us $X; we’ll feign an interest in your place and somebody else will snatch it up!”)

In discussing our situation the other day, we considered that maybe it just isn’t time for us to buy just yet. I attempted to be facetious and sent Fred a link to the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, saying “let’s just buy some cheap land and get one of these”.

I didn’t expect him to fall completely in love with the idea.

Granted, those are brilliantly efficient designs, especially on the mobile-sized plans that don’t waste a single cubic inch. They don’t cost very much, their energy efficiency is just sick — one woman averages $5 PER MONTH for all of her cooking and heating fuel needs — and they can theoretically go just about anyplace. I would love to have one of these (the Weebee!) as a vacation home or as a little writing studio or something, but I don’t know that I could stand to live in one full-time.

Fred’s coming around. We’re still thinking small — it’ll save us heating, cooling, and electrical costs, plus it’ll be easier and faster to clean and it will prompt us to ditch a bunch of stuff we don’t actually use — but he’s no longer talking about chucking all our furniture and moving into a hundred square feet.

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Yeah, writing studio. What of it?

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New server is running pretty well as long as I remember not to emerge world very often. (After all, it IS only a 333MHz processor.) I’m still kinda sorta maybe thinking of installing distcc and having my work box do the heavy lifting on behalf of the home server.

That said, I see that Apple’s Time Capsule — you know, the OTHER bit of hardware Stevie introduced the other day — would consolidate storage and all network infrastructure into one pretty pretty package that maxes out at only 30W (less than either the drive enclosure or the laptop). I just don’t think I’m ready to drop $300 or $500 on it, though.

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Time to go; have to eat my very soft lunch.

Messing with tags and such. Historically I haven’t really used tags, and when I upgraded to the current version of Wordpress I sorta migrated all my categories to tags. As a result, some tags are over-represented, and some useful tags are not present at all. As I have time I’ll be fixing that.

Also: this blog is currently #1 in the Google results for “grab the fire extinguisher”. w00t.

Spent much of the past work-week buried in documentation. As it turns out, there are a lot of routine-to-me tasks that my co-workers haven’t performed in a long time, if ever. I’ll probably be spending my last week at the old job madly scribbling notes on how things should work.

Surprisingly, there has been no official internal announcement of my departure. (Granted, it’s budget season, so my boss has been busy haranguing people about allocating enough money for I.T.) Instead, the rumor mill has fired up. So far the rumors aren’t very far-fetched (dammit), but they do lack lots of important details like when I’m leaving and where I’m going to be working instead.

Allegedly, there’s a happy hour or something in the works. Yeah, fine. I can never argue free beer at the Tap Room, especially this time of year, but the whole “happy hour” thing might be a bit much. Honestly, lots of my users dislike me because I don’t allow them to e-mail that cute 17MB video of the babies in costume to all 400 of their closest friends. (I know, only an insensitive asshole wants to keep the network infrastructure available for actual work.) Also, I’m not a big fan of cheesy schwag, and I probably won’t have a place to put all of it at the new job.

Finally on that front, it looks like they may be hiring two new people in the department to handle my job. Ha! I did the work of TWO PEOPLE for years and years!

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Had finals in my philosophy class and programming logic class. Both were easier than I had expected, though the philosophy final was a bit compressed by a server outage. (Final started 17:30; server died at 16:55. ack!)

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Went to my first rugby practice on Thursday night after the second final! The coaching staff was a bit pre-occupied by preparing for a weekend match, but the players themselves were extraordinarily helpful and friendly, even while attempting to run plays.

Started off running a pick-up touch game, then followed it up with stretchy sort-of-calisthenics and a running/passing drill. The major problem I had in the running/passing drill is that the guy I was paired with was blazing fast — I am not blazing fast — and that I’d rarely get to the ball in time to, y’know, catch it. I’d like to think I did pretty well when I did catch it, though.

Afterwards they split into forwards and backs. I got sent along with the backs and received basic backfield wisdom from a lanky young wing with the Ur-scruff and a cloud of coachly disfavor (since he had done something foolish in their last match). Ran a bit more, then ran some more, then ran some more. And ran.

Eventually the A-side and B-side scrummaged against each other. I hung out on the sidelines so that the different squads could practice together, and in the process chatted with a few subs, newbies, and veterans. Passed the ball around a bit, too.

By this point it was getting pretty late, so the coach invited everyone to a bar nearby for a glass of water “or something, haha”. I begged off — between a long day at work and a final and a small lunch and no dinner I was wiped — and came home.

Fiercely sore on Friday, especially in the adductors, hamstrings, and mid-section. That has mostly resolved itself, though.

I cannot wait until I can attend another practice, perhaps this coming Thursday…

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Adding a couple new categories: Work, School, and Rugby. Over the next day or so I’ll be perusing archives and adding posts to the relevant new categories.

I’m also kindasorta thinking of upgrading to the new version of WordPress, though I think I’ll hold off for a couple days there.