My week in brief. (Only not.)

Yes I switched to briefs from boxers. No, not really.

Anywho, I finally gave up the ghost and went to the doctor about my never ending sinus infection. Shockingly, she diagnosed it as a sinus infection. Egads, the shock. I’m back on my usual horse pill antibiotics three times a day for it. The fun of this round is that apparently along with this sinus infection it needed to go pay a conjugal visit to my right ear and give me the first (middle) ear infection I’ve had since I was about six. (I probably shouldn’t have called upon the evil that is banana phone earlier this week, I brought this upon myself. ) The downside of said ear infection is anything heavy on bass, or apparently anything with a fan in it, makes my head throb like mad. I was supposed to be at a Nine Inch Nails concert tonight, right now as a matter of fact, but seeing as how they’re NiN and all, not so much without my head exploding. Which really makes me unpleased because I had been looking forward to it for a while. Sigh.

I also got to do another sleep study this week courtesy of my neurologist thinking it might tell her why I’ve been having metric butt-tons (it’s a real measurement, look it up) of headaches. I was oh so gung-ho about it, because the first one was tons of fun, not, but whatever. Now, if you’ve never done one of these, they hook probably around thirty, yes THREE ZERO 3-0, wires to you to do these measurements and plug them into a box that looks like so.

Isn’t it great? That sits next to your head all night. One moment… Photoshop interlude. (Interlude music.)

This is from my cell phone with my trying to juggle that box at the same time, so my apologies for the “quality” here, but the arrows indicate where all the wires are. The one pointing to the top of my head actually has two up there, there are ones behind both of my ears, and a temperature sensor under my nose looped behind my ears, ergo my glasses at a fun angle. I should’ve worn my contacts. I had a band around my boobs as you can see, and another around my stomach and one sensor on each leg as well. There were more sensors on the back of my head too but they’re obfuscated by my wall’o'hair. Oh hey oops I missed two more on the top of my head here.

The red crap they used to mark up on my head where to put the sensors surprisingly took only three scrubbings to get off. Yay. How they expect any human being to get any sleep with this many wires attached to them is beyond me. Let us not forget the in room cameras and the intercom. Those were fun too. I got woken up at 5am and sent home, and as soon as I got here I went back to sleep because I didn’t really get much while I was there. Dopey me should’ve set an alarm clock because next time I woke up it was 11:30. I fail. However, losing a bunch of weight since the last sleep study apparently eliminated my mild sleep apnea that I’d had so huzzah for that I guess.

My downstairs neighbor is crazy.

No. Seriously.

The first thing she complained about was that when we had people over we were somehow “blocking her in” in the driveway and she couldn’t get out. OK, whatever. If she ever left her apartment, which she never does, she could just knock on the door and ask us to move. No big deal. Let’s not talk about the scrape on the side of my car from the maneuver I had to perform once to get around her van parked in the place she insists is not a parking spot, ok?

Then came the insistence that my leaving trash bags outside of my back door for 20 or 30 minutes while cleaning so I could take them down at the same time was making her kitchen stink. Really. Hrm. Why are you wandering up the stairs to my door?  (Yesterday to be a smart ass I put one of those little stand air freshener things outside the door.  My roommate suggested I put a “please do not steal” sign on it.  I probably should have.  Read the next part.)

While I’m asking questions, why do you keep stealing the light bulbs out of the basement? Seriously. Who steals light bulbs? That’s just nuts. I’m assuming you need to see as well while you’re down there. Why would you take them?

Then there’s the passive aggressive notes insisting that we’re randomly running “machinery” late at night causing noise that makes humming that’s keeping her awake. Instead of coming up and telling us when it’s keeping her awake, she writes notes many days after the fact. Clearly that’s the best solution. The notes also insist that we’re playing video games at all hours, which during the week my roommate and I are both asleep by 1 am usually. We also apparently randomly hammer on walls all the time, and run around at all hours. I really want to know who she thinks is up here, because they’re clearly having way more fun than I am.

Apparently my loudly suggesting she actually come upstairs when this crap happens penetrated her thick skull, so she started doing so. Last night as a matter of fact. I was in the living room watching TV and my roommate was in the dining room working. I hear a “WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM” which is crazy downstairs neighbor for “I’m too lazy to come upstairs and complain that something’s making me crazier than normal.” Seeing how we weren’t doing anything, I ignored it. Fifteen minutes later, she gets off her ass and rings our doorbell. My poor roommate went to go deal with her.

“Something is making my whole room vibrate.” (I really don’t care mind you, but seriously, how could anything we’re doing upstairs cause that?)

“OK….”

“Are you running the washing machine?!”

“No.”

“The dishwasher?!”

“No.”

“I don’t understand! There’s something making my whole room vibrate! You can come into my apartment and see if you want!” I don’t blame my roommate for not wanting to go into that pit of doom and despair to witness this, because damn. Instead he suggested she come up here to try to determine exactly what the hell is making the vibration since neither of us were even on that side of the house.

In her infinite wisdom, apparently the humidifier was causing her problems and putting it on a book was going to make her whole life better.   Apparently she can’t deal with this “stuff” going on any more and that’s why she’s moving out.  It can’t be because she was served with an eviction notice or anything.  Naaaah.

Tangental thoughts #1351-#1353

1351.) If you are yelling at your children in the grocery store to NOT run around because they might run into people, perhaps you might want to pay more attention when you yourself are backing out of a parking space in the parking lot.  You might run into people with your truck.  Just a thought.

1352.) These are not helpful suggestions to someone who needs to give a reference to someone:

“Yes.  He smells like cheese.  I didn’t really want to try licking him to see if he tasted like cheese, however, because that seemed not appropriate for a non-hostile work environment.  The rampant profanity and calling him a cock-burglar seemed like a good idea at the time though.”

1353.) If you’re looking at two packages and one looks like it contains a lot more items than the other one, you might want to actually look at the weight on the package.  Wow, look at that genius, they’re two different weights.  Way to fail.

Chocojebus has forsaken me.

Something the crazy doctor people have put me on is making everything have a funky taste to me. In particular, a metallic taste. Generally, it’s not a very big deal because I don’t really notice it. Unfortunately I am noticing it with the one thing I tend to consume on a daily basis in mass quantity. Soda now tastes ickybad to me. Not in an “ew it’s flat” or “ew the seltzer is gross” sense but in an “ew this is the nastiest thing I have ever had the misfortune of tasting” sense. I’ve tried Coke Zero, Diet Dr. Pepper, Barqs and Canada Dry. They’ve all been terrifyingly bad, except the Canada Dry, which was only mildly perverted by the medications taste altering properties.

Orange juice seems unaffected by the taste change, as does coffee and tea, so I’m ok with caffeine and won’t get a raging caffeine withdrawal headache at least. The next experiment will be with flavored seltzer water, and if that’s equally craptastic, my poor roommate will end up drinking all of that too.

(Obrandom: Chocojebus is very real. Sacreligious and tasty! For more details check out  http://www.slashfood.com/2007/10/19/my-sweet-lord-chocolate-jesus-returns-to-nyc/ )

Ugh. My brain hurts.

So the neurologist had nothing particularly good to say to me.   I have been taking the edge off the worst of my headaches with ibuprofen, which may in fact, be exacerbating the problem.  (Oh yeah, I’m tired, look at that big SAT word.)  Being the genius I am, I stopped cold turkey.  Usually I can just ignore … tolerate… I dunno somehow deal with pain, but right now it’s not working so good.   I apologize in advance if I’m a royal pain in the ass, my brain hurts.

She added to the alphabet soup of medications I seem to be taking to try to make this crap stop, and is going to add a MRV too my MR* list.  I doubt it’ll find anything useful since nothing else did, but whatever at this point.  She is however doctor three on the list, which means if this is like anything else that’s ever wrong with me, it’ll magically go away any time now.  (Please?  That’d be nice.)

But I repeat myself…

To save myself some time and effort because I’m lazy.

Last Monday I had an MRI done to attempt to find out why I’d had a headache for over 20 days. Now, before you go “holy crap!” I sometimes have them as long as 2 weeks, so that’s not really anything new. This one was just bugging me more than normal. During the MRI they found an enlarged artery in the lower left portion of my brain. My doctor thinks it’s probably nothing, but to be certain that it’s not a brain aneurysm they’re sending me in (today as a matter of fact) to get a MRA done. So in a few days I’ll know if I need to have surgery or something to get it fixed.

There ya go.

Post MRA Edit:  I got there and received the “You should be done in 10 minutes!” speech, which of course means it’s going to take at least 4 times that if not longer.  I get changed to be metal free, go into the tube, listen to the loudest banging ever for 10 minutes, and then am “all done” and can go put normal clothes back on.  Yay.  Except after I complete this, the technician comes out and asks me to wait a few.   Ten minutes later, he tells me the images he took had some mess up and would I mind doing this again.  Not really feeling like having to make another appointment, I agree, and spend another 15 minutes in the MRI machine.  Afterwards, he gets me out of the machine to call the radiologist again to make sure the images don’t have the same mess up.  And I get to sit on the MRI tray thing while he does it.  For the record, not a comfy bed.  Whatever, it ’s done now.  Whee.

I love cake!

Especially cakes with heartfelt messages written on them:

It’s sooooo sweeeeeeet! <3

It might be a bad thing when…

…the nurse taking your blood pressure freaks out at how low your blood pressure is.  Maybe.  I dunno.  Aren’t they always ragging on people to have low blood pressure?  102/50 isn’t THAT bad right?  Have no worries, I self medicated, I have McFries.  We’re good.

Bored now.

I listen to my ipod quite a bit while I’m working. OK, I pretty much listen to it constantly. But I digress. It’s gotten to the point where I am sadly utterly and completely bored out of my mind with the music on it. Part of my problem may be that I keep listening to the same set of songs repeatedly. I can’t help it! They keep getting stuck in my head. For example…

• Collective Soul “Heavy” - I really enjoy the guitar part in this one.
• Big and Rich “Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy (Dance Remix)” - Yeah I can’t explain this one, just listen to it.  Trust me.  You’ll understand.
• Maroon 5 “Harder to Breathe” - It’s a great breakup song.  I rather enjoy that it seems completely disjoint from Maroon 5’s normal style.
• Ozomatli “After Party” - Great and laid back style, which usually boggles people’s minds as to why I listen to it.
• Muse “Supermassive Black Hole” - The bass line to it gets stuck in my brain.  Not sure why.
• Junkie XL “Today” and “More” - These two songs couldn’t be more completely different, but they’re both equally awesome.
• Breaking Benjamin “Sooner or Later” - There’s one line in this song that just gets stuck in my head for some odd reason.
• Trace Adkins “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” - Courtesy of my friend Kara, this song is hilarious.
• David Draiman “Forsaken” - it’s the lead singer of Disturbed with Korn, which is a strangely cool sound.  From the Queen of the Damned soundtrack, relatively obscure song but it gets requested a lot.

I’m sure there’s more but that’s a smattering.  I really need to find new stuff to listen to though.  You’d think with as much music as I have I’d never get bored.  I fail.

Savant? Nah.

There comes a time in every young girl’s life when….. oh wait, no, hang on.  *scribbles that out*

OK so yeah, I had a “moment” today where I looked a code bug I had somehow made pop up and went “Oh yeah the problem is here” and just fixed it.   Unfortunately I then realized I had to prove that was the actual problem, and pulled the original code back out to do so.  It totally ruined my perl-zen moment.  But I was right and it’s now fixed.  Woot!