Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Jim's LiveJournal:

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Friday, July 10th, 2009
10:27 pm	Words! Words provided by baeritone: Arthur - Arthur Knight Hammer...he's hard to put into words. I owe a lot to the self-styled King of the Bears, including pretty much the whole life I have now. If it weren't for Arthur and Bearidise, I'd probably still be living in my mother's house, completely alone and emotionally walled off from everyone. Arthur and Bearidise mean a LOT to me, even if I'm somewhat avoiding the man and the place at this point in time. It's unfortunate and it hurts a little, but the cliff has been jumped, and I'm the one who's still standing up top. Eighties - Big hair! Members Only jackets! Leg warmers! Michael Jackson! Cyndi Lauper! Pegged jeans! Reeboks! The second half of my childhood/adolescence...the 80s is my nostalgia center. It's the decade I go back to when I want some comfort music. I was born in 1971, graduated high school in 1989, so the 80s were definitely the bulk of my conscious memories prior to adulthood. Flashback Eighties Weekends on the local radio station are a minor thrill for me. Gaming - I am geekazoid, hear me roar. Okay, hear me clicking the keyboard, then. I'm a bit of a gaming geek, but not necessarily with the kind of games that hardcore gaming geeks actually respect. I'm a casual but frequent WoW player (and have been for over 3 years now). I'm also a pretty dedicated player of "casual games"...my bailiwick is Hidden Object games. Sometimes Match 3. I'm a member of Big Fish Game Club. I will usually download and try out every Hidden Object and Match 3 game they come out with. It's the one thing that keeps the WoW in check. :0) Pennsyltucky - There's a saying that Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in between. Not TOTALLY true, but it definitely resembles that more than it doesn't. I've lived here (in between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia) most of my life. I'm used to it...that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the most possible pleasing situation, but it does mean that the pros outweigh the cons, to at least a small degree. Pros: My family lives here...not HERE, in this city, but here, in central PA. My job is here, and it's a good one (when we're getting paid). My love is here. My friends (a large number of them, anyway) are here. Even living here in Lancaster, I sometimes miss the mountains around Altoona/Johnstown. There are good things and bad things, and the bad things don't have to shove the good things into the background. Fury - I can have a temper. I try very hard not to let it go, but it exists. If the offense is bad enough, it can be pretty white-hot. I had a few very bad days on temper control Nov 5 of last year over Prop H8 in California, mitigated only by Obama's victory. I'm pretty sure I posted some things at various online forums that day that I would regret if I could actually remember them. At the same time, what seems like fury to me inside here often isn't even visible externally. I FEEL like there's fire jetting from my eyes but it's not something that's breaking the surface. That's one of my flaws, I think...I don't really show emotion unless you actually know me very well. It's all part of my walls, you see. Current Mood: introspective (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 6th, 2009
9:57 pm	Feeling naked at work... My computer at work wonked out today. It got stuck on the start-up screen and wouldn't go any further. So...I spent the day out in the cubicle farm taking calls. IN THE CUBICLE FARM!!! I felt so naked...I've been working every day, all day, in the phone room, by myself, door closed, moderate privacy guaranteed for over two years. The day has STRESSED. ME. OUT. And I have no idea just when tomorrow morning the tech is supposed to come to fix it. So I may spend another half-day, at least, out in the open. Occupational agoraphobia? :0) In health news, I am officially an insulin-using diabetic. Had my doctor's appointment tonight. My A1c that I took last weekend was 10.7. So we're going insulin. Twenty units, long-acting so I only have to inject once a day. At the end of a week of use (which will be next Tuesday), if I don't have a fasting glucose of 115 or lower, I'm to increase the dosage by 5 units. And so on, weekly, until I get a fasting glucose between 75 and 115. I'm authorized to go up to a max of 50 units per day. If I don't get a suitable fasting glucose by that point, I need to see the doc again to figure out what to do. We're using Lantus Solostar pens since I have pen injection experience from when I was using Byetta a couple of years ago. I still have a box full of BD Ultra-fine needles, which are compatible with the Solostar, so I'm fine for those for a while. I got a sample pen from the doctor and a prescription for more pens and needles. I'm set. The good news? The doctor thinks my diabetes is curable. All I have to do is lose about 250 pounds. Current Mood: ambivalent (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
8:46 pm	I just got a call from my aunt this evening. My mother is in the hospital in preparation for the insertion of a pacemaker tomorrow. Yeah, I had no idea. It's interesting...when I was first away from home, back in the early 90s, I lied to my mother until my lips bled. "I'm fine. Everything's fine. I'm okay." I was actually behind on rent, blowing my pay on frozen cordon bleu, cigarettes and Doritos, and horribly lonely. Now, she lies to me. Constantly. "I'm fine. Everything's okay. I'm okay." She doesn't tell me about any new health problems unless I'm right on the verge of a visit, because she knows she can't hide it in person. I didn't know she was having trouble breathing. I didn't know she was so sick at one point that she couldn't even clean the house. I didn't know that her diet consisted of junk food and yogurt because she didn't feel like cooking. And she lies to my brother, as well. The only way we know she's sick 90% of the time is if her younger sister, my aunt Rosanne, call us to tell us. And half the time my mother threatens to stop telling her about her health problems if she calls us. So, apparently, my mother had a heart monitor all weekend, which she didn't see fit to tell me about even thought I talked to her on Sunday. She took it back in to the doctor today. An hour later, she gets a call at home: "The doctor would like you to go to the hospital." My mother asked my aunt to drive her (they told her to have someone else drive her over), and then my aunt promptly called me and my brother to let us know. As soon as I hung up with Rosanne, I called my mother's hospital room and we...had a little talk. We had been planning to go up to visit the weekend after the Fourth, because my mother's church's festival was that weekend. I told her we were coming up THIS weekend and probably NEXT weekend, too, to make sure she was okay. She tried to put us off repeatedly. I told her in no uncertain terms that we WERE coming up. At that point, I let her go so my brother could call and bawl her out. Then I took supervenusfreak and his brother to the ballgame and came back home. My brother had called. I called him back and we worked out that he and his older son would go up this weekend, so we can go back to our original plan (with extra mother scrutiny!). It's strange...I didn't have to have my own kids for my mother to get her revenge for my childhood... Current Mood: exasperated (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 29th, 2009
10:07 am	Dear Client, I refuse to believe that you just TOOK A CELLPHONE CALL while I was waiting for you to find a pen to write down your worker's number. Do they just not teach people etiquette anymore? Current Mood: aggravated (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
5:29 pm	Haley Joel Osment looks like someone photoshopped a 12-year-old's face on a 20-year-old's body. Poor kid's going to get carded until he's 60. (Comment on this)
Friday, June 26th, 2009
7:55 am	This is going to make Anna Nicole Smith look like a Jane Doe potter's field burial. Current Mood: cynical (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
12:55 pm	Like an ass, falsely... I hate anticipating "Thank you!" It happens regularly, since my job consists in large part of someone requesting information about their case and me looking up that information, whether the information is who their caseworker is or when their case was closed or exactly what benefits they have active. And the natural (and, even in these decadent days, common) wind-down of the conversation is for the client to tell me "Thank you for your help!" or "Gracias!" and for me to say "You're welcome!" or "No problem!" or "De nada!" Unfortunately, that predictability leads to me looking like an ass when I anticipate the thanks. If I say "You're welcome!" before they say "Thank you!", it looks like I was expecting them to forget to thank me and that I was prompting them, passive-agressively, to thank me. Which I wasn't. I fully expect people to say thank you because probably 95% of them DO. Then again, it's probably like most of my supposedly horrible character flaws, something that only I agree is one. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, June 5th, 2009
9:24 pm	Bloodstone Pt. 2 ( Cut for courtesy ) (Comment on this)
9:20 pm	Again, posting another David Eddings fanfic I wrote almost a decade ago, for purposes of linking to it for a friend. Bloodstone ( Cut for courtesy ) (Comment on this)
8:43 pm	For general purposes of making certain things available to some people, I'm republishing a piece of fanfic that I wrote about 10 years ago. It's David Eddings fanfic, and his recent death made me remember the stuff I wrote in his universe. Beloved Disciple ( Cut for courtesy to my Friends list...click for the story ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
2:13 pm	I haven't forgotten to test or forgotten to post it. I've been thinking about how I've been doing this after someone sent me a PM after my last glucose posting. And I realized he's right. I've been looking at the situation entirely the wrong way, really. I've been seeing this as "My blood has too much sugar in it. If I watch what I'm doing and take my meds, it should go down, like a bank account that's in active use. $100 - $80 - $65 - $40..." And that's not how it works. I have been concentrating far too hard on the idea that my sugar is lower today than it was yesterday. Yes, it is, but not for the reasons or under the rationale I was thinking it was. It's not a matter of time...even watching everything I was supposed to watch and doing everything I was supposed to do, my daily fasting glucose was huge, by any reasonable standard. Which means that my body isn't going to work with me the way it's supposed to. I mean, I knew that wasn't the way it worked, intellectually, but I wasn't thinking straight about it. At this point, I can safely say that my A1c is going to be higher than desired...I've been over 100 units more than I should be for 3/4 of the time I've got until I get the blood draw done. There's no way, with less than 3 weeks left, that the numbers are going to be good. This doesn't mean "give up", though. It just means "mentally adjust to the fact that I'm probably going on insulin". I can recognize denial now. :0) I'm going to try to avoid it. Current Mood: pensive (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
11:14 am	Home from work today...let's just say I don't want to get too far from a bathroom. Anyway, I'm listening to the Price is Right in the next room and Johnny (or whoever the hell the announcer is now) is describing a showcase, and says, "This pair of corn-holders..." That is NOT what I actually heard, though... Current Mood: amused (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 30th, 2009
7:42 pm	I've been having somewhat gloomy thoughts this afternoon, accompanying some gloomy googling of diabetic insulin delivery options: i.e., pens, pricks and pumps. Judging by the fact that my downward trend for blood glucose, while still downward, seems to be plateauing at around 250, I can pretty much predict that my A1c in a couple of weeks is going to be well above 7. Which means I'm probably going to be put on insulin. The thought doesn't so much terrify me as annoy me. I'm going to be saddled with a life-saving but perpetually annoying regimen of injection, to be added to my current regimen of simple bloodletting, and probably multiplied by an approximate daily factor of 3 or 4. I KNOW that if it's necessary, it's necessary. I know I'm not the first or only person on the face of the earth that has had or continues to have to do this. I know I'm whining. Some people want to trade in their current spouse/partner for a newer or prettier model. I just want to trade in my current body for one that runs without so much maintenance. Current Mood: annoyed (6 Comments |Comment on this)
12:07 pm	You all know that I rarely embed YouTube videos, but this was posted by niebuck and I DIED watching it. Current Mood: amused (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 29th, 2009
11:17 am	Blood glucose: 254 Yesterday was fun. No, let me rephrase. Yesterday was...busy. First of all, supervenusfreak has been sleeping VERY poorly lately, mostly because the window air conditioner in our bedroom is old and rattley and he cannot stand it. It IS very loud, and sometimes (though much more rarely than for Dwight) it even wakes me up in the middle of the night. The problem being that we NEED that air conditioner to be running or we both don't sleep anyway because we're soaking the sheets and pillows with sweat. (We're the people who have our bedroom window open ALL WINTER because otherwise we'll drown in our own perspiration, remember) So he called off yesterday because he'd gotten about three hours of sleep the night before. When I got home from work yesterday, I had dinner and right after, Dwight comes down the steps from where he's been trying to nap all day and tells me we NEED to switch out the air conditioner upstairs with one of the ones downstairs. So we switch it out with the new one we bought the other week. Which involves the confinement of our escape artist cat (because open windows with no screens in are not a good thing to have her around), the banishment of the dog to the backyard, and a lot of lugging heavy machinery up and down a narrow and steep staircase. Oh, and some good old-fashioned short-tempered sniping on both of our parts as we get in each other's way, trip over each other's feet and generally make each other crazy working together in small spaces. SO...after we get everything switched out (and the new air conditioner is PERFECT...not mousey quiet, but definitely worlds better than the old one), it turns out we need to go to the supermarket to get some things that we're going to need before the big grocery trip tonight (paper towels, mostly...we have a puppy...) We went and did that, giving up my nice parking spot, and come back to another okay parking spot. (I have a hangup about parking in our neighborhood...I grew up in a slightly more suburban neighborhood than this one, where everyone had room to park their car(s) in front of their house and parking in your neighbor's spot was considered bad manners...HA!) Finally home to stay, I take my iPod up to the newly quiet bedroom to elevate my feet for an hour or so, when I hear Dwight's sister in the bathroom next door... "Dwight? Can you come up here a second?" The bar that lifts the ball in the toilet had lifted its last...it finally broke. So, we have to go to Lowe's to get a replacement. Another trip out. I'm the kind of person who loves to come home after work and STAY THERE! Anyway, we go to Lowe's and come back to find that other okay parking spot taken. *sigh* And I finally got to stay home. Current Mood: amused (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
11:33 am	Blood glucose: 260 Same yesterday. The Jeopardy audition yesterday was fun. The drive to and from was not. The Baltimore and Capital Beltways are not fun during rush hour, and I got a double dose. I left the house about 7ish, hit the traffic on 695, then 95. Got to the Greenbelt metro station about 10ish. Drove around looking for a parking space in the Park & Ride for about 15 minutes, then found one all the way at the far end of the lot. I walked to the station, by which time it was around 10:30. I had seen the sign that you couldn't pay cash for parking coming in, and thought that meant you had to use your farecard, so I put about $20 on it, to make sure I had enough at the end of the day to get out of the parking lot (more on that later). Transferred to Red Line at Fort Totten, got off at Farragut North, walked the block to the hotel (the St. Regis...god is that hotel beautiful!). Got there with 15 minutes to spare. When I arrived they were still doing the earlier group, so my group waited in the hallway and filled out our application-information sheets. When the early group was done, they called us in and we were seated at tables, two or three to a table. They explained how things would go, how casting was done for the show, how the clues were written, then did a few clues to test our timing (you can't answer until the clue is fully read...she wouldn't pick people whose hands were raised before she was done reading). After that, we did another 50-question written test (no form of a question required!), which I think I did pretty well on...there were only about five questions that I had to leave blank because I had NO IDEA what the answer was. They then gave us a short break while they "graded" the tests and (I assume) discussed us. After the break they started calling people up in groups of three to play a mock show, with the actual signalling devices! Each group did about ten questions, then each contestant had a mock interview, like on the show. I had the worst time remembering to answer in the form of a question! And I was really the only one who was that bad in the whole group. When you're actually playing the game, against other actual people, with the board in front of you and the signalling device in your hand, it's TOTALLY different than just shouting out answers from your couch at home. It's hard to coordinate all of that and still remember how to phrase your answer. I got some laughs, too...one of my "interesting facts" was that I live in a tiny rowhouse containing four people, three cats, a dog, and a rabbit. Maggie (the contestant coordinator who was playing "Alex") asked me which I liked better, the people or the animals? I responded, "It depends on the day." Also, one of my interesting facts was that I am addicted to Klondike Solitaire on my iPod, which Maggie mentioned. I reached into my pocket and took out...my iPod. Proof! Oh, the parking thing...well, after I got back to Greenbelt and slogged my way to my car in the 90% humidity, I found out when I got to the gate that it was NOT the farecard you use, but what's called a SmarTrip card, which costs $10 ($5 for the card, $5 on it). So I spent $30 yesterday to take what amounted to a $6 metro ride, since they don't offer refunds on farecards. I can put it on my next Jeopardy audition "interesting fact" sheet as "I was held hostage in a metro parking lot by a little old Hispanic lady (the booth person at the gate)". Looks like I need to go back to DC sometime soon to use up the rest of my metro fare... Current Mood: amused (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 24th, 2009
5:06 pm	Blood glucose this morning: 279. It's hovering around there right now...not sure why. *sigh* (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
2:44 pm	Gaaaah! I have a toothache and I'm miserable. At least, I think it's a toothache. Right above my upper right incisor I'm feeling pain and swelling right behind my nostril. Hurts worse when I smile or blow/wipe my nose (and of course I have a sniffle today). *sigh* Either it'll go away over the weekend or I'll have to schedule a dentist appointment Tuesday. I'll probably end up going to my Jeopardy audition on Wednesday with a baseball-size lump on the front of my face... Current Mood: annoyed (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 17th, 2009
10:44 am	Blood glucose this morning: 255 Lowest yet! And that's AFTER going to a pizza buffet for dinner yesterday! Had a great time at Bear Happy Hour last night. It was great to see everyone again...we dropped out of going for a little while because we were either sick, tired, busy or poor. I'm glad we went. Current Mood: happy (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
7:16 am	Blood glucose today: 302 I'm still figuring out what I can eat when...this will be down again tomorrow. In other news, this is absolutely true: see more Funny Graphs Current Mood: amused (3 Comments |Comment on this)