Category Archives: Ideas (blog)

bug babble.

OMG THE GLASS CLASSPIDS

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I was asleep when the alarm on my IV pole started going off. I woke up enough to read “GLASS CLASSPIDS” rolling across the marquee in red lettering. No clue what that meant so I hit the nurses’ station bell and tried to fall back to sleep.

Holly had only been in here 20 minutes before, to shut off an equally annoying IV alarm, and I knew it had taken her a few minutes to respond then because of another patient emergency, so I didn’t worry when she didn’t show up right away. I fell back to sleep, but the alarm continued to sound, so I didn’t get much more than a few fitful moments of rest before I was up staring at the GLASS CLASSPIDS alert again.

I tried ignoring it two or three more times, with no luck. Finally upon re-waking I realized that the IV pole’s manual was out on my bed, flipped open to the apart for GLASS CLASSPIDS.

It said:

TELL HOLLY YOU HAVE A SORE THROAT AND YOU NEED A DRINK OF WATER.

This woke me up firmly, and I realized there was no alert on the powerless IV pole, nor was the a manual. According to Google there’s no such thing as a glass classpid. There’s just my lizard brain trying to get the attention of the sleeping brain bits using whatever metaphors it thought would work in my current envoironment.

I drank two cups of water from the pitcher at my bedside and started typing this up… And my GLASS CLASSPIDS feel much better now, so I’m going back to sleep with the hope that lizard brain doesn’t find anything else to harass me about before 7am.

Tonsils go bye-bye

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Got my tonsils out today.

As with most of my life, I appear to be running about 20 years behind the rest of the population on this. For things like learning to knit or joining a martial arts class, that’s not necessarily bad. But for getting your tonsils out, apparently, the experience is much more painful as an adult than as a child.

So let’s cover the basic questions first:

Yes I can eat ice cream all week if I want to, though they actually recommended shakes and smoothies over dairy products because of mucous production.

Yes I get two weeks off. Yesterday this sounded like a great opportunity to get some small things done around the house, but today post-surgery I’m convinced I’ll be asleep for the whole time. I’ve now been awake for almost a half hour and it’s closing in on the longest I’ve been awake since they took the loppers to the inside of my throat.

Right now it feels like the worst sore throat or case of strep or whatever that I’ve ever had, and that’s with the pain drugs having worn off. If I could stay awake when the drugs were in effect, I’d probably feel ok when not swallowing.

I have zero appetite.

I also have a whole new appreciation for my iPhone and my iPad. Since I can use them from the sofa comfortably (unlike my desktop or even my 17″ laptop) they’re my main source of communication when my throat hurts too much to talk. I cant imagine how isolated or frustrated I’d feel without them.

I still swear Steve Jobs designed the iPad when he realized how much using a computer in a hospital bed sucks. No one else believes me, but I say it’s no coincidence the guy stuck in a small sterile room for weeks at a time devised a one-button computer with good-sized keys and the ability to complete the day-to-day tasks that keep us as part of the human race. His liver cancer was the greater hands-on study of technology in a medical setting that an innovator could ask for.

Having an extremely limited ability to communicate by sound has also given me a new desire: to find a charity (or charities) that provide children with language issues iPads so they can interact with their world.

If you know of any, can you drop them in the comments?

I’m falling asleep writing this, so you’ll hear from me again later.

Links to odd stuff

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Sleepyti.me is hands-down the most useful site I’ve discovered on the web this week.

A true blue moon in November even though there was only one full moon in November.

The top 10 daily consequences of having evolved include hiccups, wisdom teeth, and mitochondria.

the 17 best invisible-item cat pictures

Gamification and its discontents is a look at how this idea of making everything into a game is off-kilter.

The 30 freakiest ads of 2010 has some funny, some NSFW, and some very thought-provoking advertisements. Nighthawk and I think #21 should be somewhere in the top 5, but all will definitely catch your eye.

Help, My Half-Elf Is Pregnant! The 11 Strangest Questions From The D&D ‘Sage Advice’ Column

My two favorite Hyperbole and a half columns: Dogs don’t understand basic concepts like moving and This is why I’ll never be an adult have lots and lots and lots in common with me.

It was famous comic people night in Anne’s head

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I had a beautifully long post here about a very strange dream I had.

I met comic author Lea Hernandez and her son at the supermarket, and they helped me find the right yarn for the project I want to knit (it was in the refrigerated section between the Coca Cola and the milk), and we all got free cookies that Fox picked out because i won a contest at the supermarket.

Then I went to a party with my friend Steen and her daughter at a ski lodge, where some of the guests from another party, including Neil Gaiman, thought our party was cooler so they joined us. (Neil had planned to hang out with Scott McCloud and Amanda Palmer, but Scott was sick and Amanda was in New Zealand. Scott, if you’re reading this, get well soon! Amanda, I don’t know if you’re really in New Zealand right now, but it sounds awesome.)

Then we all went back to my house (which wasn’t my house – it was located where my parents house is, but it was my friend Camille’s parents’ mountain cabin from that trip we took 20 years ago) but we got lost on the way. This happens so often in my dreams that it didn’t even stress me out (this time). Friends shouldn’t let friends dream and drive. But if you have to dream and drive, it helps to invest in a good dream-based GPS, which apparently I had with me, in the purse I carried in high school.

Once at my house, we figured out who would be sleeping where (Steen and her kid got the big bed because there was a Tinkerbell decal with “Christine” over the bed, and Neil Gaiman was totally OK with taking one of the two twin air mattresses on the floor. My brother took the other one.) and we got down to the task of partying, which consisted of some people jamming on the guitar, others talking about writing, and still others playing Killer Bunnies.

The reason I wrote this beautifully long post was because as I wrote it, I realized that a whole bunch of situations that would have totally stressed me out when awake (like, how do you ask an autistic kid to help you at the supermarket? Is it rude to just assume he could and would help? And how do you say “Just pull up a chair,” to Neil. Fucking. Gaiman? And is it really OK to give the only guest bed to the person with the kid when you have people with bad backs and people who get cold easily and famous people in the house? And why do all my dream parties look like high school theater cast parties?) totally failed to stress me out at all.

In fact, I woke up because in the dream I was starting to stress out about what I looked like and suddenly had the need to put makeup on (which, by the way, I screwed up. I painted lip gloss on my eyeball, trying to use the lip gloss as eye shadow) and guests started asking me questions like “Do you really think Neil Gaiman wants to be at YOUR party?” and I realized I must be dreaming because I hadn’t been stressed out about this stuff the whole night and it was stupid to put on makeup just because someone famous I wanted to be friends with was at my party.

It turns out I am a much better person when my left brain is asleep, because my right brain doesn’t care if people might be offended or might think I’m a no-talent hack or stupid or ugly or I haven’t updated my comic in months. My right brain says, “say hi, be polite, and you might get something awesome.”

My left brain tries to put green lip gloss on my eyeball to make me look pretty for my guests, all the while telling me I can’t possibly look pretty enough for them to like me. Like whether I look nice was going to matter to Lea Hernandez and her son.

And then I had to exit the post for a split second because of an incoming text message, and WordPress ate the entire goddamned beautiful post.

I lost easily a half hour of writing, nuance, and description on a dream that it now rapidly fading from my mind as it’s replaced by grouchy dog whining.

So goodbye beautiful post and beautiful dream, good morning world, and fuck you WordPress app. I’m going to go feed the dogs.

“I’m in an airport!” is not probable cause: musings on TSA and security

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OK, let’s be frank. I hate airports. No, let me reword, that: I HATE airports.

Get me in the plane, start driving me around in the sky, no problem. Planes feel just like roller coasters, and my brain is convinced I’m just riding a big track I can’t see. As long as the air conditioning’s running I can handle them. (Thank you Northwest for teaching me to include that little caveat.)

But airports? They’re full of hundreds of people rushing about hoping to make flight that might be cancelled “just because”, connections are always late, and you never know you’re in the right spot. One too many hours standing at the wrong gate then running across airports has ruined the experience of sitting around on dirty uncomfortable furniture in freezing cold or stuffy hot seating areas breathing dry stale air that’s vaguely scented of jet fuel fumes. You know, in case that experience needed to be ruined.

And then there’s the security measures.

(This is really damned long, so here’s a cut.)
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How to make lunch vaguely dissatisfying

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  1. Make the conscious decision to blow away the day’s calorie count by getting the delicious-sounding Havana pulled-pork wrap with grilled bananas, rice, and black beans (910 calories).
  2. Order sandwich. Get told there are no bananas (the main draw) and no rice. Realize pork has seen better days as well.
  3. Decide to abandon dreams of grilled banana sandwich.
  4. Discover cafeteria has your favorite soup on hand (forest mushroom – 200 calories). Get that instead.
  5. Eat delicious mushroom soup, all the while dreaming of grilled bananas.
  6. Sigh.