Bo showed up this morning with a couple bags of groceries. He walked in the door, peeked into the living room and said, “Breakfast?”

I jumped up and did the dishes – they’d been plaguing me anyway – and while he made cheese dreams, bacon, veggie sausage, and potatoes (IT WAS DIVINE!) Joe got up to join the fun and even Kevin and Orion came out!

At some point this morning the dogs yanked the phone line off the house, so we had no dial tone and I couldn’t get online. (Right now Kaia’s outside the back door barking to be let in. She’s soooo bossy!) I had to go out and replace the outside jack just to check my email.

Right now I’ve got a satisfyingly full belly. Bindu and the cat are asleep on the futon here in my office. (The cat is sleeping on his back, belly up, and snoring.) The guys are all in the living room playing Grand Theft Auto.

All in all, it’s a lovely Sunday afternoon!

 

I love my job because sometimes I get to see internal emails like this:

 

I’ve had PMS for two weeks now: cranky, hungry, moody, sore boobs, cramping, the works. I IM’d with Reni last night and she’s was a day or two late, too, and we commiserated about how bloated it feels. Neither of us thought we were late for any particular reason. I told her I’d decided to take a test this morning, ’cause there’s nothing like wasting twelve bucks to get AF to show up.

Well, I took a test this morning. And it was a big fat positive.

I was shocked. It hadn’t crossed my mind that I might be preggo. But there it is. I took the test out into the living room and handed it to Brett, who was playing video games. “I took a test to make my period start because I’m three days late. But it’s positive.”

Brett looked at it and handed it back, saying, “That’s a pretty positive positive.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I thought it was PMS.”

“Mmm,” he said. “I’m really not sure how I feel about this.”

“Me neither,” I said. “But as these things have a tendency not to stick, I don’t think either of us have to decide just yet.”

“Damn, baby,” he said.

“Ain’t that the truth,” I said as I left the room.

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Brett made the dryer work yesterday. It was (are you ready for this?) a bad fuse. Not a blown fuse, but an intact fuse that was bad out of the box. Can you believe that?! I did three loads of laundry yesterday and it was heaven, I tell you. Sweet, warm, fluffy heaven.

I did basic kitchen maintenance.

I cooked twice – and dinner was black bean, onion, and Mexican feta enchiladas, fried hominy, refried beans, and a fantastic rice pilaf I made up.

I did surface maintenance of the living room (dust, tidy up, throw away Brett’s junk.)

I took out the garbage. (Not as trivial as it sounds. “Taking out the garbage” at my house means collecting current trash into a plastic bag and hauling it up to the dump truck and chucking it in. Since the weather’s been so muddy and shitty, I had three of those bags, plus all the shipping material from our recent Amazon.com order to carry up there in the rain.)
I put laundry away.

And I cleaned the bathroom. Which made me feel utterly overwhelmed and disgusted with my gross old home.

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Krista’s baby shower was on Sunday. I went up with Barb and ate ice cream cake and presented my knitted baby things and took pictures.

Barb and I stopped at Walmart on the way back, and wasted quite a bit of time looking at stuff. Then we printed out a set of the pics in the gallery for Barb, and I bought some groceries. All in all, a pretty girly day.

 

Brett’s been playing Rockstar Games: Grand Theft Auto San Andreas all weekend.

I brought it home around eleven thirty Friday night. He stayed up ’til four AM playing it.

Then he played it all day Saturday, and all day Sunday.

He’s a Grand Theft Auto geek!

 

This afternoon I was digesting my lunch and updating my knitting entries over at Iowa Chicks Knitting, in between processing Evergent emails, when suddenly I felt a rush and I was extrememly dizzy, my palms were sweating, and my heart was racing. My chest hurt. My vision was fuzzy, spotty around the edges. I thought I was going to pass out, or that I’d just had a heart attack. I felt nervous, freaked out, amped, and supremely scared and uncomfortable.

It was sort of like doing a big fat line of coke, only it wasn’t fun.

I started to breathe deeply, then I worked up the balls to check my pulse. (Yup, still beating. Too fast and too hard, but it’s still beating. At least the dizziness isn’t the result of no fucking blood flow to my brain fer chrissakes!!!) I got up and walked around the building for awhile, breathing. Then I went outside and walked around the block, breathing and letting my mantra roll around inside my head. I tried to return to my desk five or six times before I could actually stay seated. I was tingling, practically hyperventilating, and saturated with adrenaline. I wanted to crawl out of my skin and take a nap in a corner somewhere.

(By 2:07, my heart rate had slowed down to 106 BPM. All I was doing was sitting here in an office chair, copying emails and pasting them into a Filemaker database, and my heart rate was so absurdly high that it took time for it to slow down to 106.)

I googled “rapid heart beat” and got all kinds of scary shit about cancer and anxiety disorders. (Bad news is *just* what I need when I’m in adrenaline hell. Yay.) But then I read that this exact experience is one had by – are you ready? – periomenopausal women.

Periomenopause? Hello! I’m 36! I’m not that old. Is it possible that I will quit bleeding as early as 38? (Do people do that?) Are the majority of my symptoms (as my Well Woman care provider has repeatedly suggested to me) “simply” symptoms of periomenopause? Is this shit really all normal fucking aging?!?!

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When I pulled up to the house after work last night, Joe and JB and Brett and Brady were all in the process of unloading the replacement dryer from the back of the black truck.

(It doesn’t work, by the way. The new dryer. Doesn’t. Work. We’re going to buy a new dryer power cord as soon as we can find one. And if it works, I might just bring the old dryer back in and see if it works. And if it does, I might just return the second new dryer altogether.) (Either way, it was sweet as hell for Joe to return the dryer for me yesterday.)

Joe and JB went to the Hickory House for redneck food and baseball. Brett and I went in search of food and a dryer power cord. When we got home I actually fell asleep on the couch, which is something I virtually never do.

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DNS Stuff: DNS tools, WHOIS, tracert, ping, and other network tools is a lovely, lovely tool when you’re trying to troubleshoot routing issues! I love it!

 

Interpreting Traceroute Results is a good primer if you think you understand what tracert’s really doing but don’t: “When using ping or traceroute as troubleshooting tools, consider ping a good way to determine connectivity, traceroute a good way to determine path and connectivity but neither should be used as the final say in determining the cause or location of latency.”