Tag: Cold

April Fools

Happy April Fools Day.  If I get some time today I will scour the internets looking for web site April Fools jokes.  I saw one this morning where Mashable reported that CERN had discovered The Force and that gravity was just some prankster Jedi holding us all down.  That’s pretty good.  Google is traditionally the April Fools King.  I’m looking forward to seeing what they have in store this year.

The real April Fools joke came from my phone though.  The weather channel app told me it was 25 degrees out as I was getting ready to leave for work.  That’s funny.  25 degrees on April 1st.

You realize now of course that the joke was on me… because it wasn’t a joke… it was really seven degrees below freezing on April 1st.  Winter will never end.

Is it Cold Enough For Ya?

The word of the day is, Brrrrr.

There’s this from the weather channel app:
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There’s this from the dashboard of my car:

The kids school was delayed for two hours due to the cold. I’m not sure I get the logic there. The temperature was below zero at 7:00am. It’s still below zero just before 9:00am. Does the fact the sun is up change things in the school district’s opinion?

Anyway, when I went out this morning at about 5:50am to start my beloved’s car I saw that the sky was clear and the moon was looking cool. Of course I took a very cold picture.
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Here’s another one that I cropped a little closer.
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Stay warm, boys and girls!

Out of Nowhere

I’m working from home today and the kids don’t have school so we all slept a little late this morning. About an hour later than usual the kids and I piled into the car and I drove them to their father’s house. It’s a Dad weekend so my wife and I won’t be seeing them until the middle of next week. That sucks, but it’s the way things go around here.

I came home and sat at my computer with a bottle of water, a breakfast bar, the vague notion of looking for random people’s Best CDs of 2014 lists to see if I could stumble upon some new music, and about an hour to kill before I had to punch into work.

I stood up to take my breakfast bar wrapper to the trash. I sneezed, boom. I immediately sneezed again, boom boom. Then three, one-two-three false alarms in a row. More sneezes were there, but they just wouldn’t happen. I went to the bathroom for a tissue and blew my nose. It was like opening the flood gate. Sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, runny nose, runny nose, runny nose, sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, false alarm sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, runny nose to infinity.

That was about five hours ago. The sneezing hasn’t stopped. The runny nose hasn’t stopped. I’ve used about 20% of the one box of tissues left in the house. Remember the movie Twister where about half of every character’s lines throughout the whole film include the phrase, “we had no warning,” or at least some variation of that? That’s what this morning feels like to me. Just out of the blue, BAM! Head cold. How did it happen? There was no warning! It’s a category five and I had no warning!

I think I know what happened. It’s going to sound weird, but in that Sherlock Holmes method of after you remove every impossible reason whatever left, no matter how improbable, has to be true way it makes perfect sense.

I think I am allergic to January.

It Continues

Am I still sick?

Oh yeah, you betcha.

I feel about the same as yesterday. Cough, sneeze, stuffy, runny, the whole kit. I am going to work today though, but I’ll work from home. We are always short handed on Friday afternoons so I was going to be punched in this afternoon even if I was in the hospital. I figure I can suck it up for the full day and then go back to bed when I punch out at 5:30.

I slept a little during the day yesterday, and then went to bed about 8:30. I was planning on just putting the Bruins game on the radio and vegging until sleep claimed me, but they were playing so poorly that I switched to music. I was still awake when the kids went to bed at 9:30, but not much after that. I woke up a few times during the night, but only for a minute here and there.

I expect this weekend to be a washout. I hear it’s supposed to rain the whole time anyway. I suppose getting sick during bad weather is preferable to getting sick in good weather. Probably not, but let me have this delusion at least.

Speaking of the Bruins. They played a generally sucky team last night and lost. They also lost Zdeno Chara for 4-6 weeks with (I believe) a knee injury. I was worried that the lofty expectations were going to bite us on the ass, as they did with the Red Sox, and here we are… a 4-5 record and our best defenseman out for a month or more. It’s going to be a long year.

Hopefully I won’t be sick for the whole thing.

Oh No!

It started on November 18, 2008. That was the day I started a new blog using Blogger. In all the years since then, there had been exactly one day where I did not submit a post. Sure, the Blogger site was split into two at some point early on, and later the public blog was moved over to WordPress.com, but through all of that there was only one day that I missed completely. It was pretty recently too, if I remember correctly.

Well, now there have been two days that I missed. I was bouncing around between buildings yesterday so I didn’t have a chance in the morning. In the evening…

Last Friday, my beloved bride Jen came home from work feeling sick. On Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, she was barely able to get out of bed. She still feels crummy, but at least she managed to go to work yesterday.

As for me, I was feeling really tired on Monday but otherwise all right. Yesterday I just felt blah. Really run down. Little to no energy. Then around 2:00ish I had to cave in and get some caffeine to keep myself going. On the way to the 3rd floor kitchenette I thought to myself, “hmmm, self, your throat is feeling a little sore.”

Yes, yes it was. It still is. I officially am in the early stages of the mega-cold that kicked my beautiful wife’s butt this weekend. Oh good. I went to bed early, hence no post in the evening, and slept pretty well, but I’m still getting worse. I’d say I’m down to about 70% on my health meter, but it was closer to 75% when I got out of bed an hour and a half ago.

Hoo…ray…

Yip…pee.

It’s October and I Hate It

Today is October 1st.

Is anyone else seriously pissed off that it’s October again?  Sure, October means hockey is starting up again, and the Walking Dead’s 5th season is going to kick off in less than two week.

Still… it also means constant raking.  Colder and colder temperatures.  The threat of snow (we’ve had October snow in two of the last three years, haven’t we?).  All of the plants and trees are dying.  I just hate it.  Spring is so hopeful.  Summer is so alive.  Fall is so dreary.  Don’t even get me started on winter.

Today is the day that I usually start California dreamin’.  San Diego, specifically.  I’m just tired of being cold.  I want to spend more time each year being warm.

Screw you, October.

Snow Sucks

It’s been a busy morning so far.  Busy and freakin’ cold.

I spent some music time.  I redid the rhythm guitars on song and also did the rhythm guitars on song #13.  I actually did that one twice too.  After I finished it I listened back and didn’t like it, so I just did it again.  I then did the lead guitar on song .  That one is about two measures of drums away from being complete.  I wrote 12 and 13 at about the same time.  I had listened to 1 through 11 and decided I was lacking in dumb rock songs.  12-14 were meant to fix that oversight.  Unfortunately, 12 and 13 sound really similar.  I might glue them together.  After making a nine song, 34 minute suite in November, I wasn’t going to do anything like that this month.  Now I think I am.  Song 14 was supposed to rock too, but after adding the drums it feels a teeny tiny bit funky.  About as funky as a fat, white, Irish American can get at least.  I might make that one acoustic.  We shall see.

After the music was done, it was time to watch USA play Slovenia in men’s ice hockey.  After one period it was Slovenia 0 and Phil Kessel 2.  I thought I’d run outside quickly and clean off some of yesterday’s snow.  In one of those happy magical events, a plow dumped snow just off the side of our driveway.  In doing so, the driver completely cleared the snow bank.  Thank you, oh blessed plow driver.  You made my day 100000 times easier.  I will forever appreciate your kind gesture.

So after I shoveled and cleaned most of the ice off of the cars, and dug out the fire hydrant again, I went slightly crazy.  The previous owners of our house left one of those roof shovel things in the garage.  We had major icicles hanging of the gutters.  We also have ice dams.  Yippee.  At first I thought I’d take that roof shovel thing and just knock down the icicles.  After I finished the front of the house I went nuts.  I couldn’t reach too far up onto the roof, but I dragged down as much as I could.  There is still an ice dam that seems to be located mostly in the gutters themselves, but there is a lot less snow on the edge of the roof itself.  I did the back of the house too. In some places I sank knee deep into the snow.  I’m something like six feet five inches tall.  Knee deep on me is chest deep on normal people.  There is a ton of snow out there.

So team USA won their game against Slovenia.  They are 3-0 in the preliminary round.  Amazingly, Russia and Slovakia are scoreless in overtime right now.  If Russia loses again… damn.

Later today we are going to go to my nephew’s third birthday party.  I am still not feeling terribly well, and my wife woke up with the same bug today and is really feeling sick.  Therefore we are going to go to the party, but we aren’t going to stay very long.  We need to go home and let my love get better.

In unrelated news, I started a backup of my Flickr account yesterday afternoon.  It’s about half way done.  I have so much stuff over there, you can’t even believe it.

I might try to do some more recording later today.  We’ll see how the day turns out.

Go Team USA!

Northern Lights

Read this story.

How cool is that? New England might be able to see the Northern Lights tonight. I’ve never seen the Northern Lights with my own eyes. How awesome would it be to see them tonight? If I find myself awake in the wee small hours I might consider popping outside with my camera.

Of course it’s going to be 16 or 17 degrees out, so maybe I’ll stay in bed.