A setback, part 1

Last Wednesday in the early morning hours, I awoke in pain. This hasn't been unusual as my CPAP would force some air down into my pouch causing gas pain. The severity of the pain was unusual though. I made a quick and fruitless trip to the bathroom, and decided to try some Gas-X. Immediately after I took that small sip of water with the pills, I knew something was VERY wrong.

I woke Chrissy up and told her to take me to the hospital immediately. I struggled through the pain to even put on sweatpants and a T-shirt and only put on slippers. They skipped the triage room and took me straight to an ER bed.

They gave me a "stomach cocktail" pretty quickly. I begged them for pain relief but they wanted to make sure the stuff they gave me wouldn't work first. After they determined it didn't work, they gave me some strong painkillers and sent me for a CT.

Shortly after getting me back in the ER, they hooked me up to I-V antibiotics and told me I had a perforated ulcer. They started calling my Bariatric surgeon to get me transferred to St Agnes. After a long back and forth, several hours later I was loaded on an ambulance and sent on my way. That ride would be the most painful of my life. Bay bridge, Severn river bridge, 97, 695, Rt 1, and Caton Avenue....why not 95 to Caton?

Anyway, they put me in the ICU and just a bit over an hour later I was being operated on.  After surgery, I was put back in the ICU for Wed night. I had an I-V line in each hand with antacids, antibiotics and fluids being pumped in to me.  I had the nurses giving me painkillers every 4-5 hours. I barely knew what day it was but was able to move better on my own then they expected. I drifted in and out of sleep all night.  And thus, Wed was over.  I will cover Thur-Sat in another blog post later.

Tired of this partisan crap

In the political realm, I fall more to the side of Republican than Democrat, but by stating that, I have already given readers a perception of who I am.  That is the main thing I hate about our two party system. Yes it gives you a way to align with people of similar beliefs, but with only two parties to choose from, that leaves a lot of grey area.  That grey area leads to terms like "extreme (left or right)" and "bleeding heart liberal" which lead to even more division.

I don't want to be thought of in the same way as the anti-gay, bible thumping Republicans, but just from my opening statement some people may have left my blog without reading the whole post with that impression of me.

Why not declare as independent? Then I would have even less say in the government. I wouldn't be able to vote in primaries. At least there is a slimmer of hope that I can vote a moderate Republican in to the main election that would get support from both sides.

So, let same sex marriages occur, leave the Bible out of our laws, and do people really need to be able to buy an assault rifle for "hunting" purposes?  At the same time, cut some social programs, and ditch the healthcare bill as is (and start with tort reform, and protections for consumers not mandates they have it). Of, and get rid of the Social Security tax ceiling.

I have now totally pissed off both parties, my work here is done. /rant

At some point I will write that other blog post I had planned for winter break.

2011 - A Brief Review

2011 was an interesting year for me. Shortly after ringing in the new year, I started a new job (Feb 13th to be precise). At that point I was also working my way towards Gastric Bypass with a pre-surgery diet and exercise regiment.

As time progressed, so did my proficiency in my new position. I was gradually losing weight and waiting for the pre-approval to come through for the surgery. The date finally came July 5th and life has not been the same since.

In the first 6 months I have lost around 140lbs (more precise number tomorrow morning when I am able to use my scale at home.) I have also had to completely change my eating habits. Breakfast every morning now consists of a protein shake rather than a breakfast sandwich. My food intake so small that people look at me funny. I have also had to go "shopping" in the basement for smaller clothes. What was old is new again to me :-P

Chrissy and I again took our annual anniversary trip, returning to the Northeast. Rather than Niagara falls like last year, we hit every state in New England that we hadn't yet seen: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Rhode Island. We also made our annual Florida trip visit my family that migrated south. I am actually writing this post while Chrissy drives the first leg.

I guess that sums up 2011 pretty well. Now to take a nap till I have to drive.

Leaving Florida is hard to do

Leaving my Mom's house is always a hard experience for me. I usually only see Mom & George once a year but at least I can talk to them. They also understand what is going on. They won't be suddenly surprised when they come out the next morning and we are gone (we leave very early when we depart here). The dogs on the other hand, will wonder where the people who have been petting them all week have gone. Brew, Mack, Spencer, Ebbie and Baily will wonder why their old friends have come and gone again. Star, and Kai will wonder where these friendly new people have gone. I will wonder which dogs I have just seen for the last time.

In the past few years, Bernie, Newt, Misty and Shannon have passed on. Mack is a HUGE Swissy who is now 9, and Baily is old with two bad rear legs. I also feel very bad for Star. She is a more recent addition and is a rescue. She obviously was mistreated by a previous owner. She is very timid and expresses symptoms of abandonment issues. Yes, I know she is a dog, but they have personality. The way she looks at you, the way she looks back when you let her outside, you can see she is thinking if she will be allowed back in to the home. She warmed up to me so well, that I am not sure how she will react. And Ebbie and Brew who liked to "break in" to the bedroom if we didn't lock the door and join us in the mornings will wonder why the spare bedroom is now empty. No suitcases, no clothes, no people.

So, while leaving family is hard, there is some comfort in knowing that they understand where you are disappearing to. They have a way to reach out and communicate with you. And they understand that despite your absence, you still love them. With dogs, you can't know what they understand you can only judge their reactions, and based on the past, I know that they won't be happy tomorrow, which makes it harder on me.

Believe what you want, but leave me out of it

Forward: This is post 1 of 2 that I said I had in mind for writing during my Christmas break. I waited to write this to avoid putting myself into the type of situation I am telling people to leave me out of. This isn't directed at any one person, it is directed at everyone that tries to cram beliefs down my throat.

I don't care if you give praise to God, Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, Ra, or Mickey Mouse. As long as your beliefs don't affect me, I don't care (I'll get into this later). You could believe that your toaster commands you to hop around on one foot everyday for all I care, just don't lose your balance and fall into me. I do care when you come knocking on my door telling me I am a horrible person for not believing in X and that I will burn in hell if I don't immediately repent and follow YOUR way of thinking.

You are welcome to write blog posts, status updates, tweets, newsletters, or billboards about your beliefs. I might not read them, much like many people will choose not to read this. The fact that people won't choose to read this means I will have to tell them next time they try to preach to me that I don't want to hear it, so I would prefer they read this now, but it is their right not to read this. What crosses the line, at least for me, is sending me articles about how important it is for me to have X in my life. Saying that I must go to church. Telling me that I must believe in X or I am a horrible human being.

Personally, I am somewhere between agnostic and atheist, but before people jump down my throat about being the devil spawn: 1 - see above and 2 - how am I affecting you? I am not one of those people who feels like I need to waste the time of the Supreme Court debating whether "under God" should be in the Pledge of Allegiance. Do I think it belongs there? No. Nor does "In God We Trust" belong on our money. Those words being there doesn't affect me enough for me to care. So how do my beliefs about that affect you?

I keep saying "it doesn't affect me I don't care," but what do I consider affecting me? Well, here is a rough idea. If your beliefs say that you should kill me because I don't believe in your beliefs, that is something that affects me and then I will want to hit you over the head with a stick to either knock some sense into you, or give you amnesia so you forget that part. If your beliefs say alcohol is forbidden and you try to pass a law outlawing it, that affects me. If you decide to forever avoid me because I have a drink, that is fine with me, because obviously your beliefs are very important to you and odds are you would start preaching at some point. (That last point isn't directed at anyone running for election, or anyone I know...unless one of them starts acting that way). If you think alcohol is forbidden, but think that is your personally belief and choose to exercise that restriction on yourself and not get preachy if I have a drink, then we will probably get along.

I am tolerant of some religious influence on the policy of our country because I know it is impossible to separate people's religion from their personal views, but most of those influences are things make us civilized, that were put into religions early on to drive civilization in it's current direction. But when things start going all "the bible says" in the process of writing a law, then I get annoyed.

I wrote this while I was awake in the VERY early morning hours after not much sleep, but I think it captures most of my thoughts. With that, I will just hit "Publish post" and be on my way. I have TWO more posts planned now (the original other post I had, and a post about PR due to an on-going PR nightmare for a game accessory manufacturer) but I will get to those when the mood strikes me.

A rough time of year at work

It used to be there was one rough time of year at work where I had to do my performance write-up*. Then I would just have to update my resume to submit it with that for promotion consideration, and that wasn't too bad. Now the pain is twice a year.

First, I have to do my performance write-up in August. That is painful for me. I can boast and brag with friends to a degree, but I don't like to do it too much. When it comes to professionally, I have a REALLY hard time selling my own accomplishments. I think it is mostly because I don't see my accomplishments as major things. It is just a bunch of PHP code to improve some web applications and add features. Other people see programming as some black art, I see it as just another task.

So, if going through that once a year isn't bad enough, I have to do another performance write up soon that is the one that goes to management to try to convince them to promote me. It is a crappy exercise and made even crappier and more stressful by a freeze on annual pay increases and my next scheduled pay increase not happening till 2013.

Oh well, enough of a rant for today.

* When I say I have to do it - basically, the way it works with most managers is they give you your objectives, but you have to write what you did for those objectives and hand that to them so they can give you a score and pass it up the chain. Some bosses help you more than others, some won't lift a finger and expect you to do all of your self-selling.

Latest goings on

Figured I would shoot in a little update here since it has been a few weeks. I did in fact build my new computer and have been playing Battlefield 3. The graphics are amazing, online play is awesome, but the campaign kind of sucks. Lots of "Click the left mouse button here, tap space bar now, press e" in spots that could have been REALLY awesome otherwise. The story was great though.

Other goings on...I bought a truck. A VERY used truck. 2002 F150 XLT 4x4 with 239,000 miles. Why? We live a long way from work, a possibly bad winter is coming, and there are projects around the house I have been putting off because we didn't have a truck to haul things like mulch and gravel in large quantities. We might actually pick up some gravel this weekend to fill in under the truck. It is passed MD inspection and we just need to wait for the dealership in DE to finish processing the title to register it here (and pay the 6% tax to do so). I will try to take some pictures and add the them to the garage page this weekend. I will be working on posting the description of it shortly.

And then there is work, which has me over-extended on duties and understaffed (only me) on my primary project. The other project I manage has tons of people working it (3 interns now and 1 future full timer), and I can't redirect them to my primary project because they only came to the office to work on that other project. I still have been roped into doing some of the coding on that lately though in order to save the system from itself. (it was growing quickly and thus some very inefficient queries were dragging the server down) I am also left as the lead for a working group and doing the prep work for a related briefing in January (that I thankfully got a volunteer to help with).

So that is what is going on, and on top of that, I am considering going back into web work on the side. So, what's up with you (my 1 or 2 occasional readers)?