A bad afternoon

What a fun afternoon (or day) we both had. Actually I had kind of a "fun" (see sarcasm here) day. As mentioned on the previous post we are off on vacation in 10 days (actually as of right now 10 days, 13 hours and 14 minutes) and this is one of the most stressful times for me.

We knew the day was going to be screwy when we woke up to snow. SNOW!!! Damn snow. I really hate snow. It got Kathleen out the door more than an hour late and that was just the start of the fun.

Let me see if I can explain the work problem. I have a newsletter I need to get to press before we can leave. This is my annual premier issue. It happens every April. That's when I showcase all the new products and services from the company I write about. It's a very big deal for my customers who use my newsletter. It is the biggest issue I do all year. And I have to get it to press before I leave.

Most months, getting my newsletter out to press is just about me getting the work done but this month is different. I have to depend on people in our marketing department to get me the info so I can write about it. Today I spent all day trying to get some of our new software installed (in a very beta version) so I could do screen shots for publication. Nothing we did (tech support and me) could get it to work the right way. That's the way a bunch of my day went. If it doesn't work tomorrow I don't know what I will do. It still has to be proofed and then I need a full day to get it to press.

Then Kathleen called about three minutes before she came home and said she had stopped at the mailbox to get our mail and "the woman with the dog" is out walking it without a leash again. Explanation here: I am on the board of our condo association. Probably the president now that the current president is gone. We have a rule about dogs. They have to be on a leash. HAVE TO BE ON A LEASH. This couple who lives in the complex has two dogs. They walk them in the complex. One is always on a leash and the other is NEVER on a leash. We have sent them letters. We have fined them under our house rules. Our fines double every time you break one of the house rules. Their current fine is well over $1000. We have talked to them in person and they still walk this dog off a leash. When we have talked to them they act like they just don't care.

One of the problems is that when we fine them, they just don't pay. We can lien their property (and we will) but we don't get their money until they sell their unit. Our only other option is to foreclose on them. We may be doing that now.

Which brings us to this afternoon. Kathleen stopped to get the mail and saw the woman of the couple out walking the dog--of the leash. She gave Kathleen a really dirty look and after Kathleen had the mail she said to her that they were going to get fined again. The woman waited until Kathleen was back in her car and she threw her bag of dog poop at her car. When Kathleen stopped the car she ran up to the driver's side window and slammed the window with her open palms. Kathleen did the smart thing and came home. We called the police to file a complaint.

While we were waiting for the police to come I was reaching for my coffee cup to go upstairs and I dropped it on my keyboard. Thus the keyboard disaster. Not sure if it is going to work tomorrow morning but I cleaned it out and I hopefully got it all.

The police came and looked at the hand prints on Kathleen's car, took her statement and left to speak to the woman. What a thrill.

So that's been our day. We had a really good time. Can you tell?

I can say that every time that couple takes their dog out without a leash I will be not only fining them but calling King County Animal Control and bugging them until they fine these people as well. And I am going to deal with the board about starting foreclosure proceedings unless they pay their fines.

If they don't pay attention to the rules pretty soon, no one will. And their will just be anarchy in the complex.

One of those nights

Tonight is one of those nights when I have lots of stuff I can write about but I just don't feel like getting too deep. So let me just review my day. Up at 4:20 am, on the bike by 4:30, at the club to lift weights at 5:15, home by 6:00, out of the shower by 6:20, Kathleen out the door at 6:25. Breakfast until 6:45. Work until 8:45 then off to the dentist. Back by 10:20. Work until 12:30 with a very numb mouth. No lunch because it would have just dribbled out the side of my mouth. Off to see some schools. Back at 5:00. Leftover chili that Kathleen made and we froze (Yummy!) and then down for the evening which brings me to now. What a day.

It's Friday!

I can't believe it's finally Friday. Seems like I have been waiting for it all year. This has not been a good week. First Kathleen got shingles on Sunday, then on Wednesday I got one of the worst sinus headaches I have had in years. And work-wise this has been a typically before-I-fly stressful week. I have to head out to Jostens National Sales meeting on Sunday and getting ready for it and getting everything done before I leave can be a real pain. Especially when my head hurts so much that I am seeing double. 

Finally yesterday afternoon we saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Kathleen's shingles seems to have turned the corner and started getting better. She is certainly in a better mood. And I am sitting here right now with only the slightest tinge of a headache left. The rest of my body is a little sore but that's just the end of my exercise week. Tomorrow is my day off the bike but right back on it on Sunday morning before I fly to Orlando. 

I will try and post on this blog for the week that I am gone but I am never quite sure how much internet access I will have at the hotel. I don't mind paying for internet access but I hate paying an arm and a leg. It's just wrong. Especially in a $175 a night hotel room. Thankfully I don't have to pay that, this one is on Jostens. Ever since Jostens developed a partnership with Disney we have had our meetings at a Disney hotel. My hopes are that this year's WDW hotel will be better than last years. Last year we were at the Coronado Beach Resort. Sounds nice doesn't it? It was OK room wise (kind of Motel 6 ambience) but the rooms were literally more than a mile from the meetings rooms. You had to get up 30 minutes early just to be at breakfast on time and no chance going back to your room if you forget anything. 

This year we are at the Contemporary Hotel which is one of WDW's oldest hotels but recently renovated. But it is an indoor motel. Everything under one roof. That's how a convention hotel should be. Where you can run back to your room if you forget something and you can do it in under 15 minutes. 

It's also funny how everyone I told I was going to Florida today said something like this, "Oh, at least you'll be warm," or "Sun! There's sun!." Well let me describe my day trip. I fly on Sunday and get in around 9:30 pm. I go right to the hotel and go to bed so I can be up for breakfast by 7:00 and teaching a class in Photoshop by 8:00. I teach until lunch then we have a group lunch, then I teach Photoshop 2 from 1:00 pm to 5:00. Then an hour for a group dinner and I teach InDesign until 10:00 pm. That's my day. Then I stagger back to my room and try and talk on the phone with Kathleen. Then off to bed to basically repeat the day the next day except that after noon, I no longer teach, I am now just in the audience until Thursday evening when I dress for an awards banquet. We have no free time other than one evening when I will probably have dinner with friends and that's it. No sun, no warm (they keep the meeting rooms freezing) for the week. I will have to wait to enjoy Florida until we go back to sail on Solstice in March.

Psoriasis makes me look like The Edge

The last few days have been a pretty downer. Not sure why but part of it has been my new scalp psoriasis treatment. If I have not mentioned it before I have psoriasis. Many people do not know exactly what psoriasis is so let me clarify. If you have psoriasis then your skin (or at least parts of it) grows about five times as fast as other people's skin. Since everyone's skin grows and flakes off in microscopic pieces and you completely shed your entire skin about every month or so those of us with psoriasis can do that on parts of our skin (plaques) in about an hour. I can seriously say that I can scrape off some of the skin and an hour later it will be back. 

I have had this since I was about 42 or 43. It's hereditary. My grandfather and one of my brother's has it. So I have been fighting it for more than 13 years. And not very well. It gets better and it gets worse. At the end of November I got totally fed up, ditched my current dermatologist (who was an idiot) and found a new one and I can now say that the man is a miracle worker. At the end of November I would say that I had psoriasis plaques over about 30% of my body and in my scalp. As of today, I have NONE other than my scalp. 

I have been doing narrow band UV light treatments three times a week at Group Health in Seattle for almost all of November and December and it works. THANK YOU GOD and Dr. Green. But my scalp (because the light doesn't get to it) is still giving me problems. I did try some medicine for the entire time I was doing the light treatment but it didn't work too well. So when I met with Dr. Greene last week he suggested we try something new with my scalp.

So now, for six hours a day minimum, I have to put stuff in my hair and then wear a shower cap to keep it moist and warm. It's really fun as my scalp itches like crazy when I have it on. Thank God I work at home and can wear the shower cap in the morning when I am hear alone. Some people wear it at night but I sleep so lousy now that doing that would only make it worse. So I have elected to wear it from 6:00 in the morning when I finish my workout until just after lunch. And it's not fun and it really puts me in a bad mood. And this week I have had people coming by to service things here at the house so I got a ski cap to wear when people come by. Kathleen decided it makes me look like The Edge. (If you don't know The Edge, he is the guitarist for U2). 

So that brings me to my bad mood this week. It's hard to concentrate on work when your scalp is itching like you have poison oak. It's the pits. Today I had a lot of non-computer work to do and that seemed to help. I packaged and shipped my newsletters today and that keeps me busy enough on menial tasks to ignore the itching. Which brings me to today, which was a good day! Now maybe I can sleep tonight.

At last

OK, I am the first to admit it. When they passed out the "fix it" genes in my family, my brother Steve got them all. Let's review. My dad is one of the handiest men I know. There isn't much he can't do. I am his oldest son and I am the most inept do-it-yourself guy you will ever meet. Most of the time my "fix it" projects are less projects than challenges. I mean, I can change a light bulb but a lot past that is not for me to do. 

My brother Steve (the middle son) got the "fix it" gene from Dad. He can build stuff, repair stuff and tackles stuff I wouldn't even consider trying. And he's good at it. He and his wife have a beautiful home that always seems to be in great condition (although his wife Jamie might say differently--I just don't know). I have to admit that I do not know if my youngest brother John has the "fix it" gene. I'll have to ask him next time I talk to him.

I got the creative gene, by the way. It's served me well over the years. I write, take great pictures (I think) and do pretty decent design. 

Which brings me to today. As a homeowner whenever anything breaks in the house that I can't just replace it freaks me out. It means I have to try and fix it or I have to try and find someone to fix it that knows what they are doing. 

Do you know how hard it is to find someone who does little "fix it" jobs? It's crazy. No one wants to do small jobs. And if they do, they want big bucks. So last week we had a built-in fan in our laundry that is an integral part of our whole house ventilation just stopped working. To me, that means the fan needs to be replaced. We also have a VERY noisy bathroom fan that we thought we might replace as doing both might entice someone to come out and do that for us. 

I started off calling a place we had used before (Gleem Handyman Services) but they wanted $168 to just come out, look at the fans, tell us what was wrong with them and what parts were needed to fix them. Then I would have to go to a Home Depot type store and pick up the parts after which they would come back and install them for another $168. YIKES!!! That's almost $500 to repair the fans. 

So I kept looking. And as the title of this post says, "AT LAST" I found someone. Honey Do Services. I know, it's a funny name. But sure enough today, out came the Honey Do guy and I showed him the fans. He said, "Let me look at them and I'll tell you what I think." So he went to work and I went back to my office to work. About 45 minutes later I realized (it was a really busy day) that he was still working. The dollar signs went off in my head but a few minutes later he came down and asked me to come up and see what he had figured out. 

With the laundry room fan (that is on a timer) he found that the fan was fine. He had cleaned it out and gotten it to work. He found that the timer was broken. He had pulled it out of the wall, showed me exactly what to do to remove it so I could take it to Home Depot, tell them I needed to replace it and then how to put it all back together. He gave me detailed instructions without being condescending. A really great guy. Then he showed me how much guck he had pulled out of the bathroom fan and that just by doing that and pushing a small piece of wood between the housing of the fan and the ceiling it would cut the vibration sound by half. But he told me, "This type of fan will never be really quiet." But it is so much quieter I am thrilled. 

But the best is yet to come. After cleaning up after himself we went back down to my office so I could write him a check and he asks, "Would $55 be too much?" Too much? Too much? I would have paid him $155 (I actually gave him $75) just for coming out and being so incredibly honest about what needed repair and what didn't. How refreshing and wonderful is it to find someone like that in this day and age. And he said, he'll come back anytime. YAHOO! I am thrilled. I can stop worrying about home repairs. 

What to write?

So many topics so little interest tonight. Didn't sleep well last night and had a kind of long day so writing is not something I am inclined to do. So here I sit at 6:10 with Kathleen watching NCIS on TiVo. Speaking of TiVo maybe there's a topic.

First, I love TiVo. If you have any other brand of DVR you aren't seeing what TiVo is all about. I first got TiVo in 2003. One of the first ones to get one. I have had one ever since. Actually we've had two most of the time. Right now, there are four in the house (two are disconnected and not being used) which I know seems excessive but I do love TiVo. Just not as much right now. 

Just before Christmas I got a great deal on a new HD TiVo. This one allows for the recording of high definition programming as well as having a ton of other great features (like we can watch all kinds of stuff off the web, direct downloads from Netflix and a bunch more). And yes, we do watch too much TV but we're sorry. We like it. We have a bunch of shows we watch. Many of them are what I would call partial attention programs. That means I pay partial attention to them and surf the web, write or read while we watch them. NCIS is a good example. As are CSI, Bones, House and a bunch more. I like the characters and enjoy watching them but the plots are pretty much the same from week to week so you can sit and do other things while they are on and laugh at the funny stuff the characters do. And watching them on TiVo without commercials makes it even easier.  

Other shows are total attention shows. I put the computer down, the lights go low and I watch closely. Those shows are becoming fewer and fewer each year. Off the top of my head they include Fringe, Lost, The Closer, Burn Notice, Entourage and a few comedies that we watch on Friday night while and just after we eat our Friday night take-out. Those are what I would call my favorite shows. Someday I think I'll write up a review of these shows and tell you why I like them so much.