Category: Life

We lost our broadband connection on Saturday night, and have just managed to get them to open up a trouble ticket, so I don’t know when we will be connected again. I am writing this post from a friend’s house.

Lunarpages is our webhost and mail service provider. According to their forums, they are suffering from a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. Although this weblog is working right now, our email service is not. I am still receiving email at my gmail account, if you have that address. If you need to contact me, leave a comment.

I seem to be on the mend from my case of shingles. I think I have a fairly light case: only one or two days of excruciating pain. Today I have almost no pain, though I am still having a lot of tingling and pins and needles feelings. At least these are far less bizarre than the weirdest sensation, when I felt invisible insects crawl on my arm. My various patches of rash seem to have reached the point where I should no longer be shedding chicken pox virus, so that is a relief.

I have been trying to get stuff done in the early part of the day, because when I get tired I notice the pain a lot more. Then all I want to do is read while resting my arm on a hot pack. The worst times have been in the middle of the night. Half asleep, I will toss and turn trying to find a comfortable position for my arm, when there are no comfortable positions.

Shortly after my arm hurt so badly last week, I thought it coincidental that I had an outbreak of eczema on the same arm. In addition to the eczema failing to respond to home treatment that usually works, it stopped looking like any eczema I had ever had before. Also, although my arm was never quite as painful as that first day, it didn’t quite feel like past episodes of overuse either.

I went to see the doctor today. I had started to think that I might have shingles, and, unfortunately, so does the doctor. I’ll be taking one of the antiviral drugs, and ibuprofen does seem to help the pain, but shingles seems to be one of those wildly varying complaints that can take a long time to heal. It is good to know that all the weird symptoms in my right arm probably has the same cause. In the space of ten minutes, I will have throbbing pain, shooting pain, tingling and itching. The weirdest feeling is not painful though: occasionally I feel as though I have a drop of liquid on my skin, but it is dry when I look at the area. It is like the stupid little nerves in my arm are just firing at random.

I have been trying to minimize keyboarding and mousing since I have had a flareup of some RSI symptoms that plague me from time to time. Today is better: my right arm is not actually throbbing. More to follow soon, I hope.

We got the forecast cold (-9F) but not the forecast snow. There is an inch or so of new snow, just enough to make things look pretty. We were slightly concerned when the lights flickered several times last night before we went to bed, and I was reassured to wake up in the middle of the night and find out that we still had electricity.

The horses, viewed from the house this morning, look fine. Hap is doing airs above the ground while Rags sees what he can find in the outside hay feeders. I threw hay to them in the barn yesterday afternoon, and called down blessings on whoever invented stock tank heaters. I can’t imagine taking care of horses during a cold snap like this without stock tank heaters.

Having driven there, I can concur that Kansas Is Flatter Than a Pancake. (via Letters of Marque.)

As this headline from Techdirt suggests: When Sending Out Your Jammed Printer For Repair, First Remove Counterfeit Money.

Jack called this afternoon to tell me that his parents, who were on route from Maryland to Colorado Springs, had to make a connecting flight in Houston Airport yesterday. Unfortunately, the flight to Colorado Springs was cancelled due to Rita. Fortunately, while my sisters-in-law were scrambling to find a flight for them out of Houston, my in-laws were able to walk onto a flight to Denver.

I got spoiled the two years we lived in Dallas: we could find a direct, non-stop flight to almost everywhere.

I hope they get this wildland fire under control quickly. I saw the smoke as I was driving home this afternoon.