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Spent most of today in bed. I've eaten two slices of cheesecake and a banana, plus some fuzzy water (that's fizzy mineral water, for those of you not well versed in Batpupese) and my digestive system appears not excessively unhappy. Still feverish and tired though; cleaning up the living room was the most I could manage on the eternal to-do list. The Batpup and the Boy Wonder are rampaging about now, but the Beloved and I are both too knackered to chase them, so I guess if they accidentally behead themselves we'll just have to grow new ones or something.

Tagging is coming along nicely. Tag10k is a good program, although rough around the edges. One odd bug is that, every now and then, the next and previous buttons just stop working, so you have to upload your changes, quit and restart. Hey ho; it's better than the LJ default method, and I'm up to the end of July 2008, so I won't be putting up with the bugs for much longer. Yay!

The above (subject header; see also tag) is my new favourite name for This Time Of Year, courtesy of the lovely jetspeaks. Yay!

The daughters did it again this year: let us sleep in until 8am before they came to wake us up. Are they mutants or what? Whatever, we were very grateful, because the Boy was a little restless last night. We had a leisurely morning of present-opening and a large breakfast, during which the only downside was that I had a bit of a tummy ache that I put down to overeating. We pootled off to Nanny and Pa's farm for more presents and overeating, during which I discovered that the aforementioned tummy ache was very likely the same gastrolurgi that felled my Beloved for large portions of last week. So I am now feeling infraclimatic (that's "under the weather", for any laymen who may have wandered in) though at least it didn't spoil our afternoon, which was most pleasant and definitely the best way to spend The Day.

So: a week until Hogswatch, before which time we plan to do yet more flooring and perhaps a bit of general house maintenance. But right now I'm going to bed to see if I can sleep off this lurgi before it dissolves me from the inside out. Merry Thingy, and to all a good night!

The BatPup and the EDoD are going to get insane quantities of loot tomorrow.

I've been fairly slack, concentrating on frivolous frippery like floors instead of trawling the shops for pressies, but I did put together one present I'm proud of. The BatPup has lately started noticing the logos on cars -- Toyota's stylised T shape, Holden's lion, Mitsubishi's triple diamond, and so on -- so since I work right near a bunch of car yards in Woden, I popped around and asked them if they had any stickers, fridge magnets and the like with the logos on them. Some of them were very generous: the spotty lad from Commonwealth Motors gave me a sticker, a poster and a balloon; the bloke from Toyota had a keyring, as did one from Ford; and the guy from the scooter shop gave me an actual Vespa logo taken from an actual Vespa; and more besides. So the BatPup will have a collection of knick-knacks to play with, which should pique her interest and help make "spot the make and model" the driving game of 2009. Meanwhile, I couldn't think of anything for the EDoD, but I'm sure I will by Hogswatchnight, so that's OK. And anyhow, the Beloved has been her usual inhumanly legendary self, so they'll have more stuff than they'll know what to do with tomorrow. They won't feel hard done by.

Meanwhile, my back and neck are killing me for some reason, so I shall pop some more Nurofen and go beddy-byes. I'm up to January 11 in my LJ tagging now, so I should have it all done before much longer, but not now. Must sleep.

So very sick. Head feels like it's had its orifices filled with Polyfilla, and my nose is producing, as my Beloved said, enough snot to re-float the Titanic. Aforementioned Beloved has done a sterling job looking after our six hundred and thirty seven (by volume) evil offspring, while I laze around going "urgh" and "bleagh" and other things with g and h in them.

In other news, saw the penultimate Doctor Who for this season, and I am left going "what the frak???" at the cliffhanger. Now that's the way to end an episode! What are they going to do next week? And can it be next week now, please?

Oh, and if you hated the Doctor Who clip in my previous entry, I guarantee you'll loathe this one even more.  Binglebongledingledangle!

The BatPup has come down with a chesty coughy sort of cold. Oddly enough, it's made her chirpy and cheerful — presumably because she's getting lots of care and attention, especially from her Daddy. But tonight she started complaining of an earache, which is decidedly not a cheerful proposition: she's had ear infections before, so this may just be Her Thing for recurring medical conditions. I've got a Thing too: bronchitis; it comes back any time I get a particularly nasty flu, and needs a course of Boogywoogycillin to make it go away until next time. So she's a sad little monkey, and in need of extra cuddles. Anyone who has some spare should mail them to the usual address.

Meanwhile, the Boy Wonder just started coughing too, which bodes ill for the near future. Luckily he's still 98% breast fed, so he has his Mummy's immune system helping him out; it shouldn't be quite as nasty for him.

I haven't come down with anything yet, but with a John and a Johnette¹ at work off sick with the same sort of symptoms, I expect this is one I'll be experiencing some time soon. Share and enjoy...


¹ Personal running gag about my current employer: everyone there is named John, even the women. The truth is not far off that, in fact.

Feeling sick. Ate one small muesli bar, fresh out of the oven, and the stomach ache started ten minutes later. I seem to have the world's most random allergy to some kind (or maybe all kinds) of seed, not just sesame as previously suspected, but something or somethings else. Sometimes I can't breathe easily, sometimes I get indigestion, and sometimes I get a tummy ache. Totally random, totally unrelated to any one ingredient, and a real pain in the arsedigestive system.

In other news, watched the latest Doctor Who and the last BSG in the last couple of days, and they were both excellent. Stephen Moffat hasn't gone wrong yet, and I love River Song. And the last five words of the BSG episode were just perfect. Very pleased. If I survive my strange alien pod allergy, at least I've got some good shows to watch...

Coughing. Head full of snot. Dizzy. Dopey. Can't breathe. Can't sleep.

And this is me feeling much better.

Does anyone have a hacksaw in my neck size?

I'm sick. My head is full of snot, my lungs are coated in sandpaper, and my brain is slower and more useless than a homeopath. I therefore wish to share the pain with you all: here. I hope you all suffer.

The lurgy struck yesterday and I spent last night gasping for air and tossing like a waldorf salad, so I called in dead this morning and planned to spend the day in bed. The Beloved, however, had other plans.

Every Thursday, the local homeschooling group get together for group activities of a generally educational nature¹. Today's particularly inspired idea was a Taking Stuff Apart Day. Knowing my penchant for disassembling computers, the Beloved suggested I come along and maybe find some piece of hardware to dissect.

I knew just the piece.

Years ago, when I was brain-loose and fancy-free, I had a good but certifiably insane friend who I will call Chloe. Now Chloe, apart from being stark staring insane but unbelievably cute to make up for it², was also an Honours student at the ANU, and as such lacked (a) money, and (b) the equipment she needed to do her work. I, meanwhile, had a spare laptop I wasn't using, a sad old thing with Windows 98 and 16Mb of memory and no (count 'em: zero) USB ports. Still, it could run Word, which was all she needed, so I lent it to her.

Her RSI flared up almost immediately.

Lacking even a rudimentary ability to put 2 and 2 together, I later lent the laptop to the Beloved, who was also doing Honours.

Her RSI also flared up.

Suspecting (finally!) that the crappy keyboard and the crappy screen might have something to do with this, I sheepishly took the laptop back and left it in my shed. We christened it The Craptop, and never spoke of it again.

So today, the Craptop came out of the shed and made One. Final. Journey.

If you examine the photo at the top of this entry, you will see the Craptop, in all its glory and a very large number of pieces. Laptops are never very useful for spare parts at the best of times, and a Pentium 1 made by a company that even Wikipedia has never heard of³ isn't any use for even the most basic frankensteining. So it became an educational experience. Armed with screwdrivers, pliers and my Clever Tool (the best present I've ever got, and it came from thelancrewitch, of course) we took the bugger apart.

The second photo demonstrates the best part of the dissection: the discovery of sheets of polarised plastic film, part of the laptop's display, which make eerie optical illusions when you look at things through them. That's the Elder Daughter of DOOOOM, in case you didn't notice.

I went home and collapsed in bed, but I and the Craptop had entertained several kidlets, and that made a successful morning by any standard. Mission accomplished, and good riddance to the Craptop.

---

¹ That's a joke, actually. With homeschooled kids, everything is educational. You could no more get these kids together for non-educational activity than you could herd cats with promises of broccoli. They just get together and do stuff, and the education happens whether their parents like it or not.

² These two qualities go together entirely too often. Or maybe it's that we avoid the insane ones unless they're cute, so all the ugly insane people have to join the Liberal Party so civilised people never see them.

³ Slight exaggeration, but I can't remember what it was now so it hardly matters.

Via the ever-informative Stilgherrian: how to save my life and possibly my career before I go insane(r). I might just try that one.

Had a delightful night last night. The Beloved (that's thelancrewitch, for those of you playing at home) made Apple and Blueberry Crumble, which contained sunflower seeds, among other ingredients. Almost immediately after starting to eat, I got urgent memos from my digestive system, and they built up to horrible stomach cramps, nausea and backaches that kept me awake all night. I didn't actually return any of my dessert the way it came, but I felt like I wanted to. Note to self: avoid seeds in general. Evidently they don't agree with me. Gods only know what the reason is for that, or why I get shortness of breath one time, indigestion another and these insane stomach pains. And why do they completely fail to bother me nine times out of ten and go totally apewire otherwise? Mad, sad and irritating. Bleagh.

In other news...ummm, well, there is no other news. Work, sleep, baby cuddles. Entirely too much of the first and not enough of the second and third. The highlight of my weeks tends to be finding a clean pair of socks. I really need a holiday when I'm not madly tidying the house or gallivanting around the leech-infested countryside. But how likely's that? Bleagh again.

Up to bed to watch a Boy Wonder sleeping, and then emulate him, I think.

I seem to have an allergy to sesame seeds, but only sometimes. Generally, I get indigestion that lasts for a few hours and leaves lingering symptoms for a day or so. Sometimes, I get a tightness in the throat that leaves me vaguely wondering about anaphylactic wossnames, but it seems mild (and never gets worse) so I guess it's fine. The funny thing is: sometimes hummous is OK, sometimes not; sometimes sesame seeds in bread are ok, sometimes not; but my Beloved's apple crumble is never OK, and after a big bowl of it tonight I got a nasty stomach ache followed by indigestion that'll have me sitting up for a while yet.

You might ask why I risked it if I know I'm allergic? Well, I don't; not really. We thought the allergy must have faded because I had tahini in Monday's dinner and it didn't affect me, and since frequently I have Day N's dinner for lunch on Day N+1, I had twice the opportunity to react; not a sausage. So I was lulled into a false sense of not having a bloody stupid digestive system.

Bleagh.

Incidentally, I also have an allergy to some apples and some grapes, often specifically the red apples and the green grapes, although lately the green apples have been a problem too. And cucumbers: they make me ill; I inherited that from my mother, somehow.

Like I said: bloody stupid digestive system.

Could be worse, of course. I'm not gluten intolerant, and if I'm lactose intolerant it's extremely marginal, because beyond hating plain milk and yoghurt I'm fine with all the canonical outputs of our much-loved bovine quadrupeds. Goat's milk's fine too, provided it's magicked into feta. I'm waiting for infoaddict to pipe in with horror stories of her own allergies, which make the boy in the bubble look like Captain Jack Harkness. So I'm not complaining... really. Much.

Bleagh.

The Beloved has been down with a nasty dose of Lurgi, with the coughing and the phlegming and the head like a brick on springs. Last night the Elder Daughter of DOOOOOM showed early signs of it as well. I was counting my blessings that I don't have it, what with being the bread-winner and all... but then I remembered:

Yesterday, the EDoD kept saying she couldn't hear me when I was talking to her.

This morning as I was leaving I said something to the Beloved in one room and the EDoD thought I was addressing her.

Today during a teleconference meeting, Kaptain Kweensland opined that I was mumbling, although I was quite sure I wasn't.

The common thread is that my voice isn't doing what I want it to do. Now, I was a herald for ten years, and a chorister for a large portion of that. I have excellent control over my projection. I have been known, on occasion, to make a comment in a crowded room to one particular person, and have nobody else but that person hear it. I can do things with accoustics that would nargle your dentures.

So when I encounter three examples in quick succession that show that my vocal control is on the fritz, what does that suggest?

Lurgi, that's what!

Bugger.

(Eeeeeeeeh Yakka-Boo!!!)

Back at work, killing time during a long database import, because sick leave, like antibiotics and unlike phlegm, is a finite resource. Ugly taste in my mouth, brain working at half speed, and stomach singularly uninterested in me getting out of my chair too suddenly. And I miss my family! I have come to the realisation that, regardless of the actual job, I just don't like work. Never ever. If someone could pay me a mortgage-worthy geek salary to stay at home and cuddle my BatPup, I'd do it.

I am getting closer to the dream of The Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge Song ("I got no deeds to do, no promises to keep"). Of the four tasks I gave myself before Festival, the songbook is done, the stuff for Steve is out of the way for the moment, Gratian is nearly ready to hand on to the new Canon Herald, and the Politarchopolis website will be up and running, with luck, by the meeting tomorrow night. After that, well... The stuff I'm doing for Polit will be directly usable to update my personal website, so that will get dragged kicking and screaming into relevance again. I'll start cross-posting my LJs there, and resurrect all the old fLog archives (some of them subscriber-locked). Steve has more for me to do, including some interesting work with PDF generation for which I plan to write an open source XML-to-PDF converter. And my local comic shop proprietor keeps telling me she wants some help with a piece of software she uses, so I may be able to pick up some pocket money and discounted comics there. But none of this is the size of Canon Lore and Gratian, and I fully intend that nothing will be. No more impossible tasks!

Right. Database has finished importing. Back to work.

It's 1:00 in the morning. Just finished putting together some CSS and PHP for the Department of Yummy-Nummy Fishies and their "How To Brutally Slaughter, Cook and Eat Australia's Endangered Sealife" brochure. My one and only non-SCAdian, non-choral friend, Mr Death (aka Steve), is off to Brussels shortly where there will be some sort of presentation, and so the web version of the brochure absotively posilutely had to be indistinguishable from the printed version. Rounded corners and all.

That way lies madness. Photoshoppy, anti-Zeldmanny madness.

Still, I got it working, lurgi notwithstanding. I should have started a week earlier, but other things just got in the way, and as usual I underestimated the effort because I misread one of the emails and thought it was a completely different job. And because I've been sleeping large swathes of every day.

The lurgi has begun turning into bronchitis again, so I went to see our smug but loveable GP and got a script for some industrial strength antibiotics. I also got that most wonderful of mixed blessings, the medical certificate. It's mixed because of the incipient guilt: back when I was a contractor, if I were sick any day I'd call in sick, take the day off, recover and come in refreshed and generally better. Sure I'd lose a day's pay, but that's what being a contractor means: you get paid extra in general to make up for having to get paid nothing occasionally. Now that I'm a permanent employee, I feel hideously guilty about the fact that, what with Easter in the way and then ANZAC Day next week, I will have been paid for four full weeks of work and missed seven days out of it. It wouldn't be so bad if it were the government, but we have a mild case of Deadline Hell and I know the boss, and he doesn't drive a red Porsche. (Bosses who do drive red Porsches are pillocks, and deserve whatever happens to them, naturally.) So I feel like I need to apologise for not spreading leprosy of the lungs to my cow-orkers. sigh

Will be over the lurgi soon. There's a house to clean and lots of other stuff to do. Gratian - remember that? Have to get that handed over. And other things. So I shall keep at it. But now, bed beckons. G'night.

I hate pseudoephedrine. That is all.

Ugh. Bronchitis. Can't breathe. Dizzy. Too groggy to sit up, so I'm blogging by phone. Is that teh tragic, or what? At least I'm an employee, not a contractor, so provided I don't run out of sick leave, I'm being paid to produce groaning noises and phlegm, tho I feel guilty and a little nervous about it. Would make Ferris Bueller joke if I had the strength...

Gah. Sore throat. Doctor at Medical Centre turned out to be quite all right, and advised Difflam Lozenges and plenty of fluid, with a script for some antibionics if I'm no better by Tuesday evening. The initial suggestions have done a whole lot of no good at all, but I shall persevere.

Before I nod off, here's a piccie of a large and luxurious tent I'm trying to convince the Beloved we should buy for Festival. It's a three-room jobbie, tall enough to stand up in, and spacious as all get-out. And how much would you expect to pay? Well, nothing at all if you're celsa or evildrakey, who can whip up a palatial pavilion in half an afternoon from an old shopping bag and a few spare poles, but otherwise: $430 all up. That's a whole $30 more than I paid for my ageing dome tent eight years ago, so clearly prices are plummeting.

The Beloved is of the opinion that other things might be more reasonable targets for our limited budget than nylon pleasure domes that we'll use maybe twice a year if we're lucky, so it's a hard sell. But I have two weeks until Festival (it's always two weeks until Festival) so I shall have to be convincing...

Eight hours before I go back to work after a week off is not a good time for insomnia to strike.

Hate hate hate hate hate.

Bleagh.