All hail the glorious coffee bean.
Headache Experimentation for Fun and Profit.
I'm prone to headaches. Of course I don't get them as often as I did in Michigan, where a combination of living with smokers and constantly changing weather got to me, but I still do get headaches. Mostly they can be squashed with a dose of Tylenol, rarely that doesn't work, and I go for the Sudafed instead, because they tend to be sinus headaches. Sudafed does not always work. My backup at that point is usually 800mg of Motrin, if I have it, or Vicodin, if passing out isn't going to cause a disruption in my day.
In case you're wondering, yes, I've been to the doctor about these headaches. I used to go to ear/nose/throat doctors all the time for my stuffy nose, and two years ago I got an MRI to make sure I didn't have anything physically wrong with my head that would be causing this. No doctor has ever found anything seriously wrong with my head other than the errant sinus infection.
Anyway, when I'm at work, I only have the options I've managed to bring along with me for the day, completely ruling out Vicodin, because falling asleep on my keyboard would not be considered "professional" at work. Since I haven't been smart enough to bring along Motrin or any other ibuprofen, that leaves me with Sudafed and Tylenol.
On Tuesday I got a killer headache. I'm talking "close the shades" "turn the monitor brightness to 10" and "hold a cold water bottle to your forehead" type of headaches. Tylenol didn't dent it, and it laughed derisively at Sudafed, leaving me in a lot of pain with nothing to do.
I talk to Rachel online and tell her about said killer headache, and in a stroke of genius she reminds me that sometimes caffeine can get rid of headaches. She's even nice enough to ask me if I would like her to bring me some coffee from Starbucks so I can test out the miracle cure. I normally stay away from caffeine, I used to be addicted to it and it's a painful detox. Even when I go to Starbucks now, I get half/caf or decaf coffee. But I'm at the point where being jittery would be a great improvement over throbbing pain between my eyes, so I tell her to go ahead and bring me a fully caffeinated latte.
Inexplicably, it works. It works well enough that I can even turn the brightness back up on my PC and listen to some music.
So all hail the great and powerful coffee bean! Slayer of migraines!
When I'm biting you that means I want you to stop.
We saw the kitties last night, highlight of my week as always. But I don't know how I manage to go once a week, see these lonely, wonderful kitties, and leave them there again when I go home. Of course we live in a one bedroom apartment with two cats already and one roommate with a mild allergy.
But there are three kitties that I'm just in love with right now.
This is Captain Jack Sparrow. I'm not sure who gave him that name, but it's awesome. I love a cat with a title. He's frisky, friendly, and likes to watch tv. When he showed up to the center, he had just been through surgery to remove an abscess the size of a deck of cards on his neck. This little guy is a survivor! You can see by the notches in his ears that he's been a fighter in the past.
He likes to be pet, but mostly on his neck and shoulders. However I can never help myself and try to pet that fat belly of his. This unsettles him just a little, so he grabs my hand with his paw, and bites it. This has not yet dissuaded me from petting his belly every time I see it hanging out.
I'm full of bite marks.
This handsome fellow is Ollie. I've dubbed him "Professor Oliver Reginald the Fourth", because all cats could use a title and a suffix. He was a feral colony cat for most of his life, and when he showed up in the center he started hiding in any hole he could find, hissing at whoever came by. Because of this I didn't really give him much attention. Who would want to pet a hissing kitty anyway?
Finally they blocked up all the hidey-holes in his condo, and I learned something surprising. Ollie loves to be pet. He's still nervous about the whole "human" thing, and hissed at me multiple times before I actually touched him, but once the hand had met the fur, he was a purring, kneading, drooling puddle of happy kitty. Now that he has realized that humans are a source of much petting, he no longer hisses at me when I walk into his condo. Instead he gives me this little meow, and sort of looks a me expectantly. I love orange kitties, so I spent plenty of time petting him and watching his little paws knead when he gets happy.
The last kitty, whom I don't have a picture of, is a very sweet and tiny Russian Blue. Her story is just heartbreaking. Apparently she was one of three Russian Blues that a family owned, and when they moved, they only took two of the kitties with them, leaving poor shy Sylvia behind. It just breaks my heart to think that anyone could just pick a cat to abandon, while taking others with them. To make it even more sad, Sylvia is an incredibly sweet kitty. She must weigh no more than 6 pounds, and at 3 years old she still looks like a kitten. She adores people so much. The minute you come into her condo she's bumping your hands with her forehead, waiting for you to scratch under her chin, rub her back, or pet her fat little belly.
If I had a huge house, the money, and the means, I would adopt all three of these kitties without hesitation. They are all wonderful cats and deserve wonderful homes.
Drama on the Telephone Line.
Since we live in an apartment, there's very little we were able to do about our crappy broadband service. It's not the ISP, since every technician I've talked to says that the outside lines need changing, but since we live in an apartment, they won't change the lines for us unless the manager calls and contracts it out.
Finally, after over a year of a connection that was only up 50-60% of the time, I made the decision to have us switch to DSL. Not only was DSL cheaper, but since it uses the phone lines instead of the cable lines, it should work much better for us. A tad slower, but better nonetheless.
We get the "Gateway" in the mail yesterday. The "Gateway" is a DSL modem and wireless router all in one. The brand is 2Wire, which the other roomie, Jer, immediately recognized as a problem-causing device. But it's what we have, so we set it up, and for 5 glorious minutes we have incredibly high speed DSL (8mb?! They said it would be UP TO 6MB. We cracked it! We have super-net!)
Then Jer plugs it into our wireless router and manages to break the damn thing.
He fiddles with it for a good 20 minutes, including the prerequisite "unplug for 30 seconds to power cycle" step, wherein we realize the 2wire modem has an INCREDIBLY long power cycle.
We realize that we can USE the modem, but the wireless function seems to be borked. So I call AT&T for tech support on their shitty modem.
Long story short, I hand the phone off to Jer after 30 minutes of fail, because I'm falling asleep on the line. Jer talks to the tech for an ASTOUNDING 60 minutes, before AT&T tech suggests putting the modem through a "hard reset" by pressing the reset button in the back for 30 seconds.
Which works. Nearly 90 minutes wasted on the phone when all we had to do was press a button.
If nothing else, we have DSL now, and my ping in Guild Wars is down from an average of 300-400ms to 31ms.
Yay.
