Domestic Geek

One of my goals of 2010 was to purge the house of unnecessary stuff. Well, it occurred to me (while I was sick with Pneumonia) that more than my house is cluttered. I need to start purging my whole life.

One reason I don't blog very much anymore is I've got too much on my mind and no clear outlet to get it out of there and into writing. I currently have 8 blogs set up at the moment (for various purposes). I rarely write on any of them. When I do have something I want to post, where do I put it? Sometimes I want to share to more than one audience, but I don't want the hassle of writing it more than once. More often than not, I'd just decide to throw a quick blurb out on Twitter or Facebook or not to bother writing at all. The problem with this scenario is that my blog is no longer a chronicle of my life. Many times I've referenced this place to pin down a date when some life event occurred. Lately, I've been finding that I never wrote about many important things. Have you tried going back through a Twitter or Facebook account to find specific information? Big old pain in the butt!

Most of the blogs are using Wordpress as the CMS and I'm truly finding it to be a pain. It's like the Microsoft of the blog publishing world. So many people use it that it is the target for hackers and evil-doers. A couple of my oldest blogs had been infiltrated by spammers. I try to keep the software up to date on my personal improvement and craft blogs, but it gets to be so tiresome to have to update all the freakin' time. Then I'd have to keep working with the themes because sometimes the updates broke my theme's functionality. Then I found out from Marcus that my Wordpress blogs put strain on our webserver. One time he even took all of my WP blogs offline because some errant code in a theme was crashing the server. All of these problems aren't really worth being able to use some of the cool plug-ins that drew me to using Wordpress in the first place.

I decided a couple of days ago that I'm over having all these useless blogs. I started researching how to get the content I wanted to save from these WP blogs into this one (which has always been using EE). These are the best instructions I found for importing from Wordpress to Expression Engine. Last night I decided to go for it. I edited the final text files to fix image links and delete extra crap or duplicate posts that I didn't want to import. Except for a little wonkiness with the categories, everything seemed to come over just fine. I do have one blog left still using Wordpress (my 101 in 1001 blog) and I'm hoping that after my days off next week, that one will be migrated over, too. Now I can concentrate on this blog. Without being mentally overwhelmed, I can concentrate on fixing this design and begin posting on a regular basis. Maybe I'll even get some of my coding skills back. When Marcus gets home, I'm going to ask him to delete some database tables. A couple of domains will be let go when they come up for renewal.

The purging has begun.

I was finally starting to feel well again, then...

Wham!

My weakened immune system couldn't fight off the cesspool of germs floating around my workplace. I am sick yet again. *sigh*

I'm not exactly sure what it is this time. I'm guessing stomach flu. I started getting stomach pains around 10am, threw up my breakfast at work and then had the runs all day. Fever was 102°F by the time I got home from work last night and I slept most of the time between 5pm and 10am this morning. My fever broke sometime last night. I remember waking up at one point soaked in sweat. Gross. My stomach is still queasy now, so I'm hesitant to eat. I'm a bit dehydrated, so I'm trying to keep some water down. I know it wasn't regular flu because I never felt weak and sore like regular flu makes me.

It's amazing how many people at work are sick and still come to work. I wish our supervisors would send these people home. Instead, they are worried about work not getting done. I wish they'd realize that by making that one person stay away, there would be more work accomplished in the long run instead of having the whole staff under the weather and not being as productive.

Anyway, hoping I'll feel better soon. I'm way behind on my Ravelympics* scarf. I had hoped to be at least halfway done by now, but I'm only about a third. Between coughing making me drop stitches and having to go back and fix them to just not having the energy to even knit, I'll be lucky if I pull this off. Also, I've got housework piling up and lots of things I need to take care of. Please send me good health vibes! I need all I can get.

If any of you follow me on Twitter, you may recall this tweet two weeks ago:


I got progressively worse all day. Despite having a fever, I went to work Thursday morning. I was miserable all day, though. I had no energy and had to get people carry heavy stuff for me. Finally, about 5:30pm, I begged my supervisor to let me go home early. On the way home, I knew I was in bad shape as I fogged up the windows in the car from the fever. I pulled out a thermometer as soon as I got home and saw this:


I uploaded the pic to Flickr (which posts to my Facebook page). Several of my friends first thought I had posted a pregnancy test. Uh, no...that would be way worse!

When my alarm went off the next morning, I knew there was no way I'd be going to work that day. I called in sick and went back to bed. In fact, I ended up calling in on Saturday, too. All I did for two days straight was shiver from fever and sleep. On Sunday, I started coughing like crazy. My chest started feeling heavy. I couldn't even sleep due to the crud coming out of my lungs. As soon as I could Monday morning, I drove myself to urgent care. The doctor listened to my breathing and immediately put me on a nebulizer to help me breathe. Then I got sent in for x-rays.


I knew at that moment that things were not good. Sure enough, the x-rays confirmed that I had Pneumonia in my lower right lung. That was a new one—I've never managed to contact Pneumonia before. I was also told that I had a severe bronchial infection. I was given an antibiotic shot in my bum, sent home with more antibiotics, an Advair inhaler and some cough syrup with codeine. I was also instructed not to return to work the rest of the week.

Things were going Ok after that except for the weird hallucinations that anything with codeine gives me. I slept here and there sitting up in my recliner. Tuesday night, though, I couldn't sleep at all. I was so tired, but I just couldn't sleep. By Wednesday afternoon, I was crying from frustration at not being able to sleep. I knew I'd never get well if my body didn't get some sleep. I called the clinic back to see if one of my medicines was causing it. They claimed the cough syrup should be knocking me out. I did some of my own research on Google and found that, in some people, codeine actually causes insomnia. I decided to experiment and see what would happen if I stopped taking the codeine cough syrup and I slept! After that, I only used the codeine stuff during the day and switched back to my generic NyQuil in the evenings.

Today was the first day that I ventured out to run some errands. I did Ok as far as coughing, but I was so exhausted by the time I got home. I'm back to work tomorrow. Hopefully, it will go well. It's going to take some time before I completely recover, though. I'm told it could take a month or better before I really feel better. Man, I realy hope I never contract this ever again. Nasty stuff.

Links to this post creep up every now and again on Twitter, Ravelry or other forums. I wanted to link it myself for future reference. This woman's MIL has more yarn than a lot of yarn shops - The World's Biggest Stash.

I personally would not want that much yarn. I already feel a little overwhelmed by the small stash that I have. But hey...if it makes her happy and she's not hurting her family's finances by it, more power to her.

I just found out on Facebook that soon you will be able to stream Netflix instant content to the Wii. From the press release on the Netflix site:

Jan. 13, 2010 ?V Nintendo of America Inc. and Netflix, Inc. [Nasdaq: NFLX] today announced an agreement that will allow Netflix members who are also owners of Nintendo??s Wii™ home console to instantly watch thousands of movies and TV episodes streamed from Netflix directly to their TVs. Netflix is scheduled to go live on the Wii console this spring in the United States at no additional cost to Netflix members who have a plan starting at $8.99 a month, a Wii console and a broadband Internet connection.

This makes me happy on so many levels. Marcus got me a PS3 to be able to do this, but it's hard to do when he is playing Tiger Woods Wii golf (it's better to play that on the big TV). Since we have a 2nd Wii, I can just stream on that one. I know you can watch on your computer (and I used to), but it's just not practical if you're also surfing on it.

I've already ordered my disk. It will ship just as soon as it is available. Very cool!