If you leave work, go to the bank, go to your other bank, pick up lunch, get gas (while eating lunch), go back to your first bank, and go back to work, does that mean you're a grown-up?

I just lost about 4 minutes worth of stepchart.

But I don't think I want to.

Conveniently it's a holiday.

Is purportedly what the temperature of my office was before I arrived in it this morning.

It's still fairly hot; I'd wager it's about 80-85 in here right now.

This is a drastic change from the frigidness I've been experiencing for the last four months or so.

First guests have arrived!

If you need an address, I have my cell phone on me.

I had a flash of insight today; an inkling about how to explain ADD to people that are unaware of what it really means.

I was in my car, driving back from lunch.  A coworker was in my passenger seat, and Eric was in my back seat on the driver's side.  We're pulling up to the Goddard front gate and I press my window button.  Eric does the same.  I flash my badge, and when the guard tells me we're good to go, I drive onto the campus.

Eric says this:  "I guess that's a safety feature?"

I have no idea what he could possibly be referring to, and I'm guessing you don't either.  It's not that I don't know that my windows only go down halfway, it's that without a specific trigger, I have no reason to think about it.

That specific situation is a pretty apt description of the entirety of the life of someone with untreated severe ADD.  Without specific triggers, there is no remembering of anything.  It's not that you don't know, it's not that you don't care -- you want to remember dammit! -- it's that it's impossible.

I will be considering medication for this, believe me.  I've talked to Karen about it, I've talked to a couple other friends about it, and I'm going to talk to my parents about it in the near future.  (I have a written note.  It's the only way.)

!!! http://rickwoods.livejournal.com/112333.html !!!

A little more than a week away!  There is a Google Calendar event courtesy of Dan, so if you want to be on that and you aren't, let me know and I'll have him add you.  Either way, see you on Halloween :-)

I'll just cut to the chase from the start:  Karen and I broke up last night.

This relationship has taught me quite a bit about myself, Karen has been invaluable in helping me learn those things.  I have issues maintaining connections between various things in my mind, and those issues make a serious relationship quite impossible for me.  I need to find the tools to resolve those issues.  This will take time and a lot of hard work...  But I don't yet know the nature of that hard work.

Karen and I will still stay connected (I won't use the word "friend" because I hate that word right now), and she is, quite selflessly, concerned about me and how I'll get this sorted out.

Swift, you've said many times that Karen "is awesome".  You really have no idea how right you are.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXStPqhLmIk

We really do live in an amazing world these days, and watching people bitch about it will never cease to amuse me.

Congrats to Justin and Jessica!

(and thanks to Karen for most of the title)

http://news.livejournal.com/117957.html

I have never embedded any video in my posts (because I don't know how).  So if you see an embedded video in one of my posts... don't play it.

Right now, there is a worker outside the door smoothing dried paint.  It's a soft swishing sound, and it's possibly the most annoying sound I've heard in the last month.

I am going to explode.

Having gone to bed at 2 am last night probably doesn't help.

Come one, come all, to Rick's second annual Halloween party, brought to you this year from a house I actually own!!!

Who:  YOU!
What:  PARTY!
When:  October 31, 4:00 pm till when you leave that night or the next morning/afternoon
Where:  Rick and Dan's house.  Email/PM/AIM me if you don't know where this is (not my parent's house!).
Why:  ... um, do you need a reason?  :-P

We will have a huge vat of chili, and you are encouraged to bring something.  If we run out of food, we will order pizza from Vocelli (it seemed to be popular at the housewarming -- "I might be drunk, but this is the best damn pizza I've ever had.")  Alcohol is of course as appreciated as it was last year, although be aware that we have tons of it.Speaking of the neighboorhood being tightly packed -- carpooling is heavily recommended.  We do not have a lot of parking space.  Those who were there last year may remember that I had a pool next door where people could park.  Not so this year.  Please put as many party guests in your car as you can comfortably carry.

Staying the night is encouraged.  If you are at all tipsy, you will not be driving.  If you are at all drunk as the party begins to wind down, you will be sleeping here.  Any help cleaning up the following morning is of course greatly appreciated.

All in all, be there or be square :-P and have some fun!  See you this Halloween!

EDIT:  Jillian has asked me to pass on that she can drive people who are coming from the Beltsville area.  LiveJournal pm her (name is down there in the comments section) if you want to carpool with her and Justin.

"What are you drawing?"
"I don't know.  I'm only half done."
====
and one where the punchline was:
"Oh yeah?  What are you sewing this time, a cockroach costume?"
:-3  [ hi kage ]

Eric: "Hey, are you guys doing something on dev13?"

Me: "No, why?"

Eric: "I just got kicked off of my remote session."

[I look at the monitor attached to that computer]
Me: "Well, I see it's restarting...  Wait, did you just heat something up with the microwave?"

Eric: "Yeah... Wait, no.  No way."
[Eric starts the microwave again, and the machine loses power, gets it back, and restarts]

We have a total of three more system tests to run.  Each one takes an hour.

Given that we're more than three hours into the day, one would reasonably assume that we'd be done by now.

Instead, we're stuck in software prerequisite hell.  The non-technical folks may replace "software prerequisite" by "the ninth circle of" without altering the spirit of that sentence.

So to make the worst bout of system testing in this project's history even worse:

I come into work today to try to get some system tests run, and the three primary middleware servers are turned off.  I go to turn them on, and their UPSs start emitting an array of high-pitched tones at various intervals.

I'd switch them to other UPSs, except they're all turned off for much the same reason.

Fucking perfect!

In other news, my doctor's appointment went swimmingly.  I'm allowed to do things that cause me to sweat again (OH HAI THAR ROCK BAND AND ITG) as long as the next thing I do is take a shower to keep the wound clean.

I will be posting a note about the Halloween party sometime in the next five minutes to five days.  It suffices to say: I will be trying for a party just as epic as last year's.  Be there or be mundane.

So, uh, I can't access Gmail right now.  It's been this way for about an hour.

Randall *really* needs to be a guest of honor at Anthrocon sometime soon...

... And mildly embarassing, but I feel the need to tell it in case others are suffering the same.

Let's go back to a couple months ago.  Karen and I were at a get-together in Deep Creek with Katie and company.  We're sitting on the couch, watching too much TV, and I'm idly scratching an itch while trying to hide that I'm idly scratching an itch.  It's on a spot right above my gluteus.

An hour or so (or three, I really can't remember) passes, and I get up to go to the bathroom.  Karen hurriedly follows me with a look of concern on her face.

There's a spot of blood on my khaki's.  Right where I was scratching.  There's a lump on my skin about half the size of a golf ball there.

The next business hour was 8:00 AM on Monday and I scheduled a physical, because, well, I wanted to know what the hell this was, and I hadn't had a physical since high school besides.  (BTW, blood work says my cholestorol is "a bit" on the high side.  Slap me if you see me eating fast food and I can't come up with a really, really good excuse.)  The doctor diagnoses me as having a pilonidal cyst.

Go look that up.  There's more information than you'd ever want to know.

I'm referred to a surgeon who's (at the time) in the same building as my primary care provider.  During the consultation he informs me that my particular doctor is "rarely wrong" (oh joy) and that I have three options.  Deal with it for the rest of my life, letting it get infected and drain every couple of months or so.  Have it surgically removed and have the resulting wound closed by stitches -- sounds really appealing except that the recurrence rate on that one is ridiculously high.  Have it surgically removed and leave the wound open to heal on its own, with a very low chance of recurrence.

Take a guess which one I chose.

It's Friday, August 21, and I'm at St. Agnes hospital ready to get a lump taken out of my ass.  I'm sedated, wake up trying to remember some blackjack playing indices, and there's three inch thick bandaging covering my butt.  I'm instructed to leave on said bandaging for two days, then after that wash the wound with a showerhead and re-pad it twice daily.  (This post was originally going to be something humorous about my preference of padding and Karen was going to write up a little diddy on Kotex vs. Always for me to revise and make my own.  I've since decided against that.)  (... I'm using Kotex, for those that care.)

I have a filled prescription for Oxycodone -- AKA Percocet -- that I haven't taken any of to date; Ibuprofen has been sufficient to numb the pain.  I'm told I'll need a week off work.  I have a follow-up checkup scheduled for Monday, August 31.  The astute will notice that this date is in the future, yet there is more story to tell.

It's Wednesday, August 26, and I'm at home, having just taken a shower.  The wound is no longer the nice meaty red that it was the first couple of days.  It's white and goopy.  This has me worried.  What has me more worried is that it smells.  Being worried and stupid, I go online.  Cue thoughts of ohgoditsinfectedwereallgoingtodiewhatamigoingtodoshitshitshitmotherfuckerdammitetc.  These aren't helped by the fact that I'm drowsy.

The next morning (the astute will notice that's "this morning") I call and get an appointment scheduled with my surgeon.  In Catonsville.  Yay, I get to drive.  I arrive in the waiting room at 1:00 for my 1:30 appointment which starts at 1:45.  The appointment lasts all of 90 seconds and goes about like this:

Doc: "So what seems to be the problem?"
Me: "Well the color of the wound changed; there's this goopy white stuff in it now instead of it being red like before.  And it smells.  I'm worried it might be infected."
Doc: "Alright, lay down on this table and let me take a look at it."  He's reaching for a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and some Q-tips as he says this.  Uh-oh.  Cue mild pain... OK, that wasn't so bad.
Doc: "I'm going to cauterize it with a little silver nitrate."
Me: "...Will that hurt?"

The answer he actually gave me was a flat "no".

The answer he *should* have given me was something along the lines of "This will be one of the most excruciating things you've ever felt."

He then tells me that the white stuff and the smell are fairly normal, and that "it will get a little infected before it heals" as though that's par for the course with these things.

===

Long story short, if you have a lump on your butt right at your tailbone, and it drains fluid every once in a while, it's probably a pilonidal cyst.  You should get that shit checked out.

Also long story short, if you notice I'm a lot less physically active than usual and I'm sitting on a funnily shaped pillow, this is why.