Holy Sodium, Batman … and other tales of woe and whimsy…

Sodium / High Blood Pressure / Doctor’s Visit Update
Last night I went to the grocery store, spent a whole lotta dough on lots of stuff that I can, for the most part, cook myself in an attempt to eat healthier, and I still can’t believe how much sodium is in just about everything!!! When I started to factor in that I normally take in double portions of even healthy stuff like orange juice and canned corn, I honestly don’t see how anybody can stay within the recommended limit of 2000mg per day! I’m sad to say that I’ll likely be cutting out my beloved Campbell’s Chunky soup from the easy to take to work in a hurry menu because a single can was hitting me with nearly 1800mg alone, but even a similar can ranked in at nearly half of that. I’m still gonna do my best to try and limit my intake, but damn…

So anyways, my follow-up appt. with the doc is tomorrow morning and I’ve got a feeling I already know what he’s going to say. I need to cut down on my calories, lose some more weight, watch my sodium intake, and continue to keep an eye on my blood pressure in the meantime to make sure that it doesn’t get any worse. I’m still fairly confident that if I can get down under 200 pounds, that will have a fairly significant impact on everything, and as of earlier today, that goal was only 11.8 pounds away, so at least progress is getting made. 🙂

Computer Woes
Two of ’em this weekend, although there’s not really a whole lot I can do for either of them right now. The major one is that my server PC doesn’t want to stay ON for more than five minutes in a run, which is a bit of a problem because all of My Documents is actually on a drive inside that box. I’ve got a feeling that it’s either a ventilation issue or the power supply is just done – it sits in a closet that doesn’t have any circulation anyways and above all, it was a free PC that I got from work probably five or six years ago, so it’s certainly done its time. I’ve been pricing things out online to see how cheaply I could put something together from newegg.com, if I can borrow a few hundred bucks from my bonus check, but until I finish my taxes (next weekend…ugh), I don’t dare place that order!

My cable modem has also been on the fritz again this weekend, which makes me a little angry because the technician came out last weekend and said that everything was “fine.” Line speed tested at ~6.4mbps down / 480 kbps up, which was good enough for me (I pay for 6000/512). Now I’m lucky if I can break 2.5mbps down, even after receiving a courtesy letter in the mail from Brighthouse stating that they were increasing line speeds in my area to 7mbps free of charge! I know they’re just going to want to send out another technician, which I don’t have time to work around during the week, but this needs to get fixed.

Computer Woas
I finally installed iTunes this weekend because I got tired of having to manually download all of the various podcasts that I listen to each week – man, what a difference! It’s still giving me a few problems because as long as my server is dead, it can’t save things where it wants to, but overall, not too shaby. I can’t see myself actually buying anything from the iTunes Music Store until I can figure out how to get it in the format that I want, but I really didn’t plan to use that feature anyways…

Movies, Movies, Movies…
Didn’t end up watching nearly as much as last weekend, but given the copious amount of nothing that I got done, that probably isn’t such a bad thing! One that did manage to stand out, though, was Constantine, which was apparently a comic book-based action movie that I just completely missed when it was in theaters last year. Good flick, actually, and probably one of the better Keanu Reeves movies that I’ve seen since the original Matrix. I did watch some others, but apparently they weren’t actually good enough for me to remember for the purpose of them being written about right here, right now…

That was a great Van Halen song though, don’t you think?

this is just sad and horrible.

Mother dies after 911 call is treated as prank
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12208992/

Doesn’t say much for 911 dispatch in Detroit, especially since apparently the operator is still working through the investigation. Customer care … tech support … sales – fine, we’ll deal with sub-par representatives who are only there for a paycheck when it’s not truly a life-or-death situation, but if there was any phone-related job that required truly passionate people on staff – period – wouldn’t this be one of them? Poor kid…

Apparently the family is suing and it sucks that it’ll be a burden on tax payer money, but if that’s what it takes to force the system to re-evaluate this horribly malformed process, then so be it. I’ve only ever had to call 911 once and it was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done – nobody should be faced with any kind of resistance when making a call like that. If it does turn out to be a prank, then the police can deal with that afterwards, but whatever happened to “every call is an emergency until proven otherwise”?

9-1-1 Emergency Response – it’s even in the name, for pete’s sake.

pet peeve for the drive home…

Motorcycle riders that opt to pass between two cars going 80+ mph on the freeway
Sorry, cyclists, but between the passing on dotted lines, shoulders, and pretty much anywhere else that you think you can fit your crotch-rocket, you’ve officially trumped distracted soccer moms on my list of people who annoy the hell out of me on the road. Check your Motorcycle Owner’s Handbook – it says you have the same rights as automobiles, and that includes staying between the lines and passing only on the right of way. Whereas my worst will probably be a nasty set of cuts and bruises if I fuck-up on the highway, yours will likely result in a funeral procession and an article in next week’s paper about bike safety for any collision at 80+ mph, so what’s fucking wrong with you?!

Helmet law??? Bah! To quote Jerry Seinfeld, “The only thing dumber than the helmet is the helmet law – the point of which is to protect a brain that is functioning so poorly, it’s not even trying to stop the cracking of the head that it’s in…”

I didn’t sleep well last night…

…and I don’t know if it was my back, or just too much sleep altogether, or the stupid chirping that kept me half awake from about 5:30am thru 7:00am, but I’ve certainly had better nights, that’s for sure.

I need to get myself back on a schedule of sorts, stop taking naps when I get home that result in my staying up until 2am to compensate, and more or less just start making better use of my time. I know the doc is going to say that I need to crack down on my diet and exercise, so I might as well do it all at the same time…

Tonight:

  • water plants
  • exercise
  • dinner
  • write
  • sleep

phlebotomy and more…

So I finally got up early enough this morning to go and get my blood work done for the doctor – scared the hell out of me, too, but at least now it’s over. I’m sure there are a lot of folks who’ve done this more often and think nothing of it at this point, but I absolutely hate needles and that’s all there is to it. I had a really bad experience as a child when some dumbass nurse took my samples wrong and had to redo them, so from there on out, I’ve never been a big fan of needles. I always say, no worries of me becoming a heroin addict here!

Anyways, fortunately it all went by rather fast and the lab guy took the hint when I turned my head just as far in the opposite direction as it could go and told him, “Just let me know when you’re done…” My appointment with the actual doctor to go over the results is next week, so I guess we’ll just have to see what happens. My blood pressure hasn’t really changed all that much since I started measuring it, but then again, I can’t exactly say that I’ve been trying very hard recently, either. It always takes so much longer (and costs more) to prepare healthier food, but I guess that’s just something that I’m going to have to get used to…

In other news, the next couple of weeks are going to be very busy. I didn’t go to Disney last weekend like I had planned and now I can’t go again until 4/22, so I’ve decided that I’m going to shoot to get a lot of my creative stuff done and online by then so that I can go play in style! I’ve got a feeling these three weeks is going to fly by very fast and I really have a whole lot of stuff to do, but it’s really past time that I kicked this laziness / procrastination / whatever and got it all done. Another two weeks after that, I’ll be flying up to Michigan for Lori’s wedding and I’m really looking forward to all of that, so there’s all the more incentive to get everything done now so that it won’t even be on my mind during my vacation. So if you see me having any fun over the next couple of weeks, tell me to quit screwing around and get back to work, will ya?! 😉

Time for bed. Tomorrow is a new day, and one that does not include needles, at that. It’s sounding better already…

swiffer help

Help a single guy out, will ya?

Does anybody else happen to have one of those swiffer things that you’re “supposed to use” to mop the floor with (specifically the wet one)? I bought one when I moved into my condo because it’s mostly tile floor, but it seems like lately, it hasn’t been working worth a damn for me anymore! I’ve used it in the past to clean up spills and whatnot, and that wasn’t too bad, but today I “attempted” to use it to clean the entire living room floor and pretty much failed miserably. I even swept first because I was afraid that it wouldn’t cope well with the more ferocious of the dust bunnies in my home, but even with that all it really did was muck around the dirt on the floor and make it worse than it was before…

Am I doing something wrong? Is there maybe a special dance or something that needs to be done in order to please the Proctor & Gamble Gods and thus enlighten my floor before the cleansing can ensue? Any advice that you might lend would certainly be appreciated … if I don’t figure out something soon, I might just buy a rug and call it a day.

Best April Fools Pranks (of the web, anyways…)

RIAA and MPAA merge to form MAFIAA
http://www.mafiaa.org/

Slashdot Goes All Ponies, All the Time
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/04/01/004231.shtml

Grand Theft Auto: Chicago
http://www.gtachicago.com/

Cure for Information Overload
http://machinereadable.blogspot.com/2006/04/cure-for-information-overload.html

Google Earth April Fools Joke
http://www.jarnot.com/mt/archives/2006/04/they_come_in_pe.php

Also from Google this year and past…

Google Romance
http://www.google.com/romance/

Google Copernicus Center is hiring
http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html

Why Google’s patented PigeonRankâ„¢ works so well
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

bah…

I just found out that the lab that I had been planning to visit this afternoon for my blood tests was only open until 11:30am, so not only have I been fasting today for absolutely nothing, but now I also have to get up super early Monday morning to try to fit it in before I go to work. w00t!

I’m going to go have breakfast now… 😛