Monthly Archive for May, 2008

I’m not going blind!

Published on May 22, 2008 in DailyGrind and ResidentHipster. 1 Comment

So last week, I went to the closest optometrist to my home to get my eyes checked. I hadn’t had an exam in about two years and I was well past due for new frames.

Everything was dandy until the end of the exam wherein he dilated my pupils. Apparently I have 1) a wee little mole in my left eye and 2) weird optic nerves.

The wee little mole is no problem, but the optic nerve thing is a warning sign for glaucoma. Apparently I have extra large optic nerves. Which I guess is just weird but OK. The problem is that the center of said optic nerves is also bigger than they should be.

My doctor, bless his heart, was like “lalala, you’re way too young to have glaucoma and besides it can be treated with eye drops. No problem!” I love doctors who treat dread illnesses like they’re no biggie. It actually makes me feel much better about the world.

In any case, I needed to come back in for further tests to find out if I actually had glaucoma or not. I went in this morning for them.

I really wasn’t worried at all about this. All the other routine checks they do for glaucoma reported that I’m in perfectly good health and I’m 30 years old so it’s highly unlikely that I need to worry about this for 10-20 years anyway. So I’ve been totally calm.

Until they sat me down for the field of vision test. That? Is when I started freaking out. I blame the machine they do they test on. It’s like some creepy thing out of a 60s sci-fi movie. They sit out down in front of this big white sphere and you have to sort of stick your head on this chin&forehead rest. And then they flash lights at you and you have to hit some buttons. And the whole time there’s the mechanical clicking going on from the light source moving around to flash as different points in the sphere. Click, whirl, click, click, click, whirl, click. It was disorienting. I started getting really worried that I actually couldn’t see anything. Or that I was incorrectly seeing lights that weren’t there or something.

And then when I’m done with the test I sit down on the waiting room couch and can only think to myself ‘I’m going bliiiiiinnnnnddd!’ for the 5 minutes it takes for them to print out the results and call me back into the exam room.

And I’m fine. I’m not going blind. My weird optic nerves are probably totally normal but I should get tested every 3-5 years just in case. No problem.

Whew.

getting ready to go

Published on May 22, 2008 in Apple Valley, Crafty, DailyGrind, England, ResidentHipster and Travel. 0 Comments

I finished my semester up last Saturday night. I was taking 3 classes this semester. They all ended in sort of a strange fashion. The last due dates for each class were spread out across three weeks. In two out of the three, I got perfect scores. In the third I have an 88%, which apparently is a B at this school. So, you know. I did ok.

I’m happy to being taking the summer off. I sort of wish that I was spending more time in CA this summer, though. I’m looking forward to seeing Les, but I’d rather he and Xena came to me, you know? In any case, I’m trying to mentally prepare myself for traveling. My flights are sooner than I feel comfortable with and as such, i feel really unprepared.

T was going around telling people that I was leaving her last night. Which is funny because it’s not like I’m moving away or anything. But still, I’ll be gone for nearly two months. It’s a long, long time to be gone. I don’t normally like to travel for more than about two weeks at a time. Much longer than that and I start getting tried and antsy. I like having a bit of a routine. I like knowing where things are and having a little routine. I don’t like being out of contact with people for so long, either.

Hopefully visiting Les will be more like being home than being in a hotel. I’m not totally sure what we’re doing while I’m there, either. I’m taking my folding bike and bike clothes, but we don’t have a trip planned out yet.

Part of getting ready to travel involves me sewing myself a piece of luggage for my folding bike. I have a thin rain cover for it right now that I’ve been using to check the bike on flights. It is woefully inadequate for such a job, frankly. I’m always worried that the bike is going to fall out of the bag during flight and get lost. So I’m making a much more heavy duty bag. The bag is made of two layers canvas with a layer of cotton batting between the two canvas layers. It zips open on three sides and has a big pocket on one side some handles.

I made Les one of these in February. When I made his, I really had no idea what I was doing. I ended up having to rip out seams a million times and think through every single choice I made about its construction. That bag took me over a week of work to put together and was still really poorly put together. This time through has been much easier. I’m about a third of the way done and I’ve only been working on it for a few hours. I’ll probably get the whole thing together tomorrow if I take the whole day to do it. In theory, anyway.

This bag is good practice for me. I still cannot sew in a straight line for some reason. This bag is nothing but yards of straight lines. Maybe I’ll manage to get the hang of it by the end of this project.

School’s out for summer

Published on May 12, 2008 in Apple Valley, DailyGrind, England, ResidentHipster and Travel. 0 Comments

So! My semester is nearly over. I have two big papers due tomorrow and then a final due on Sunday at noon. Then I’m done.

I decided to take the summer off from school and go visit Les in England. I’m visiting my family for a week before I go.

Here’s a little breakdown of my travle plans:

I’m in Apple Valley from May 28th to June 6th.
Then I’m back here for 2 whole days. I hear the LaGoys are visiting that weekend so I’m hoping that we’ll be able to get together.
Then I’m in England from June 8th until July 14th.

Those dates are all coming up sooner than I’d expected. Yikes. Les wants to do another bike trip while I’m in Europe. I’m totally out of shape. I should start trying to bike more over the next couple of weeks.

So that sucked.

Published on May 2, 2008 in DailyGrind and ResidentHipster. 0 Comments

I came home on Saturday night to find that my laptop up and froze on me. Freezing happens form time to time, but this crash was extra special because in addition to the computer being totally unresponsive, it was also making this loud grinding noise.

“Oh nos!” I thought to myself. “Maybe it’s just overheating? Yeah, that’s the ticket, it’s overheating and will stop making that horrible hard disk death sound if I just sit it in front of this here fan for a little while.”

No dice. I tried rebooting twice, both times involved the grinding sound of d00m and little more.

So I consult Les on where to take dead laptops, and he recommended a mail away company in Concord called Tech Restore. So I send my computer off on Monday. I get a call on Tuesday confirming that my hard drive is in fact dead. I have them install a new hard drive and get my laptop back on Wednesday morning.

Funny thing about new hard drives. It’s all the annoyance of getting a new computer but without all the fun of getting a new computer. I’m in the process of reinstalling all my applications and trying to find the backups of my old files. I was somewhat smart and had all my photos backed up onto an external drive. Although all the data associated with them (like comments about where and when they were taken) is gone. Most of my important documents are around, as are the final versions of most my papers for the semester. My bookmarks and whatnot are totally gone, though.

This is all more of an annoyance than a tragedy, but it’s really, really annoying.

Bah.