Monday, September 04, 2006
Odds and ends
While I was organizing my bookmarks today, I came across the URL for a forum post about the band that my final boyfriend before my husband was in (don't be impressed, it was a local band), and followed an impulse to see if there was anything new there. There was; the bass player for that band, who I'd had a very brief involvement with before my ex-bf made his move, DIED a year ago. Someone I saw naked is DEAD. It's been freaking me out all day; not just because of the sexual angle, but because he was my age, and, although he hadn't been any more than a casual drinker when I knew him, he died of liver disease... how did THAT happen? Did his life take a big turn for the worse, driving him to drink, or did he just turn out to be one of the unlucky ones whose livers fall apart apropos of nothing?
I don't think of this guy often, but when I do it's with appreciation of his, er, areas of anatomical superiority... and from now on, when that happens, it'll be immediately followed by the memory that he's dead... how CREEPY is that?
A few hours later, I heard my husband cursing loudly and repeatedly in his study; he's usually a 1-curse-per-disaster type, so my blood virtually froze in my veins as I contemplated what he'd forgotten or destroyed THIS time that was causing such an atypical furor. It turned out that his explosive dismay was because he'd read that one of our heroes died today; Australian hunk, wildlife warrior, and hyper-caffeinated madman Steve Irwin (aka "The Crocodile Hunter").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Irwin
Irwin was always getting up close and personal with large, dangerous creatures, but had shown himself so adept at dodging the endless attacks aimed at him that we thought he'd be at it until he retired; realistically, I guess we can't be too surprised that one of these enraged critters finally got him, but, heartbreakingly, it wasn't a shark, poisonous snake or croc that did him in, but a STINGRAY... there's something just plain indecent about him having been killed by a creature that's virtually never deadly after surviving so many that ARE. According to this article
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/5311298.stm
"Attacks on humans are a rarity - only one other person is known to have died in Australia from a stingray attack, at St Kilda, Melbourne in 1945."
His death is tragic, both for the usual reasons and because of all the educating, preserving, and passing on of passion for animals that he won't be able to do. RIP Steve; the Omni household will mourn you for a long time.
I'd left you hanging about several things, and I've belatedly remembered that I need to post updates, so here they are:
My mother still hasn't gone back to work; she's due to give it a try on Friday. Once they decide she's fully recovered from the surgery, they'll start with the radiation; for now, she's doing about as well as can be expected.
My aunt and uncle are leaving on Thursday; after the frenzy we went into trying to get the house cleaned up enough for them to visit, they never even came over here once (because my mother ending up being home every day rather than returning to work after 2 weeks as they originally thought she could)... which is just as well, as after the original surge of progress my husband refused to invest any further time in the project, or even to not make a mess out of what we'd already managed to tidy up. Despite my best efforts to hold back the deluge of dirt and disorder he creates wherever he goes, the only difference between the house now and before we worked on it is that the filthy carpet got Rug Doctor-ed... and since he never wipes his feet, the high-traffic areas are already looking dingy, sigh.
Speaking of the Rug Doctor, we made a bizarre discovery: Normally, we pre-treat with Spray 'n' Wash (it's far cheaper than the pre-treater they sell where you rent the machine, and does a better job), but we had a bottle of their new product, "Dual Power"
http://www.spraynwash.com/product.html#1
which has their regular formula on 1 side and Oxy on the other, and my husband, ever the tinkerer, wanted to give it a go; since it shoots a stream rather than being sprayable, he had to work it around with his feet to spread it throughout the carpet... and this agitation led to the carpet getting far cleaner than usual per pass, such that it was almost totally clean after several passes even though it looked like a mud puddle in the beginning. I know it sounds a little crazy to be rubbing cleaner into the rug with bare feet, but it WORKS; give it a try if your carpet's beyond the reach of normal cleaning.
The jury duty news is good; yes, I spent a week with my heart in my throat, not knowing which day, if any, my whole life would have to be put on hold at a moment's notice... BUT, I didn't ever have to go in. WHEW!!
The computer news is mixed: The good news is that my laptop's getting close to being totally squared away, and my husband's nearly done sorting through the 5000 files that he recovered from my wiped hard drive (see my post of 8-27-06), so I'll have the ones that were downloads rather than from cache back in my possession soon. The BAD news is that he wasn't giving me the full story when he told me that he'd recovered 5000 files; what he ACTUALLY recovered was 5000 GIFS... and TWENTY thousand jpgs, which he's ALSO going to have to sort through to find the tiny % that was stuff I'd saved, much to his chagrin (he'd convinced himself that I'd NEVER downloaded any jpgs, and thus that he could ignore them). He sure wishes now that he'd backed up my laptop before taking it in to be fixed, that he hadn't brushed off my concerns about the safety of my files, and that, when he was asked by the repair place if there were any un-backed-up files on the machine, he hadn't said "no" when he knew otherwise; he's got lots more hours of work ahead of him during which he can contemplate the wisdom of classifying my concerns about my computer as examples of "hysterical female" behavior, and of refusing to do a few minutes of work to prevent a disaster that'll take WEEKS to fully fix.
The bursitis news is good; it turned out to be just a brief flare-up, rather than 2 months of agony and the arm being useless until after the new year. Sadly, due to all the stress I've broken out in a lineup of big hives along the middle of the other arm; it doesn't affect my ability to use it, but it looks like I've got some exotic skin disease... and they ITCH.
A couple more things before I stagger off to bed:
It's usually easy to tell if a blog is written by someone who's using English as their 2nd language; their English is much better than that of the average American. I've noticed, though, that there's 1 word that non-native speakers often misuse; they say "stuffs" instead of "stuff." As a noun, "stuff" refers to multiple things and has no plural, but because the VERB "stuff" CAN have an "s" on the end the spellcheckers don't catch it when "stuffs" is used as a noun; it's one of the few ways to tell a non-native speaker from a native speaker with better than usual ability to use the language.
And I'll leave you with this jaw-dropper:
"An Indian businessman born with two penises wants one of them removed surgically as he wants to marry and lead a normal sexual life, a newspaper report said on Saturday.
The 24-year-old man from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh admitted himself to a New Delhi hospital this week with an extremely rare medical condition called penile duplication or diphallus, the Times of India said.
'Two fully functional penes is unheard of even in medical literature. In the more common form of diphallus, one organ is rudimentary,' the newspaper quoted a surgeon as saying."
http://today.reuters.com/News/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=DEL270522
Can you imagine what an AMERICAN man with 2 penises would do? Take out ads, put up billboards, and hire skywriters to spread the news that he's TWICE the man the average guy is, most likely. He'd have representatives from the porn industry knocking at his door night and day, pleading with him to use his assets on film; if he agreed, even people who'd never bought or rented a porn flick before would be paying top dollar to see whether both penises could be used at once, and to indulge their prurient interest in any sort of abnormality... heck, even an old married lady like me, who's done more than enough penis viewing for one lifetime, would probably be willing to part with a few bucks to take a peek at them. ;-)
I don't think of this guy often, but when I do it's with appreciation of his, er, areas of anatomical superiority... and from now on, when that happens, it'll be immediately followed by the memory that he's dead... how CREEPY is that?
A few hours later, I heard my husband cursing loudly and repeatedly in his study; he's usually a 1-curse-per-disaster type, so my blood virtually froze in my veins as I contemplated what he'd forgotten or destroyed THIS time that was causing such an atypical furor. It turned out that his explosive dismay was because he'd read that one of our heroes died today; Australian hunk, wildlife warrior, and hyper-caffeinated madman Steve Irwin (aka "The Crocodile Hunter").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Irwin
Irwin was always getting up close and personal with large, dangerous creatures, but had shown himself so adept at dodging the endless attacks aimed at him that we thought he'd be at it until he retired; realistically, I guess we can't be too surprised that one of these enraged critters finally got him, but, heartbreakingly, it wasn't a shark, poisonous snake or croc that did him in, but a STINGRAY... there's something just plain indecent about him having been killed by a creature that's virtually never deadly after surviving so many that ARE. According to this article
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/5311298.stm
"Attacks on humans are a rarity - only one other person is known to have died in Australia from a stingray attack, at St Kilda, Melbourne in 1945."
His death is tragic, both for the usual reasons and because of all the educating, preserving, and passing on of passion for animals that he won't be able to do. RIP Steve; the Omni household will mourn you for a long time.
I'd left you hanging about several things, and I've belatedly remembered that I need to post updates, so here they are:
My mother still hasn't gone back to work; she's due to give it a try on Friday. Once they decide she's fully recovered from the surgery, they'll start with the radiation; for now, she's doing about as well as can be expected.
My aunt and uncle are leaving on Thursday; after the frenzy we went into trying to get the house cleaned up enough for them to visit, they never even came over here once (because my mother ending up being home every day rather than returning to work after 2 weeks as they originally thought she could)... which is just as well, as after the original surge of progress my husband refused to invest any further time in the project, or even to not make a mess out of what we'd already managed to tidy up. Despite my best efforts to hold back the deluge of dirt and disorder he creates wherever he goes, the only difference between the house now and before we worked on it is that the filthy carpet got Rug Doctor-ed... and since he never wipes his feet, the high-traffic areas are already looking dingy, sigh.
Speaking of the Rug Doctor, we made a bizarre discovery: Normally, we pre-treat with Spray 'n' Wash (it's far cheaper than the pre-treater they sell where you rent the machine, and does a better job), but we had a bottle of their new product, "Dual Power"
http://www.spraynwash.com/product.html#1
which has their regular formula on 1 side and Oxy on the other, and my husband, ever the tinkerer, wanted to give it a go; since it shoots a stream rather than being sprayable, he had to work it around with his feet to spread it throughout the carpet... and this agitation led to the carpet getting far cleaner than usual per pass, such that it was almost totally clean after several passes even though it looked like a mud puddle in the beginning. I know it sounds a little crazy to be rubbing cleaner into the rug with bare feet, but it WORKS; give it a try if your carpet's beyond the reach of normal cleaning.
The jury duty news is good; yes, I spent a week with my heart in my throat, not knowing which day, if any, my whole life would have to be put on hold at a moment's notice... BUT, I didn't ever have to go in. WHEW!!
The computer news is mixed: The good news is that my laptop's getting close to being totally squared away, and my husband's nearly done sorting through the 5000 files that he recovered from my wiped hard drive (see my post of 8-27-06), so I'll have the ones that were downloads rather than from cache back in my possession soon. The BAD news is that he wasn't giving me the full story when he told me that he'd recovered 5000 files; what he ACTUALLY recovered was 5000 GIFS... and TWENTY thousand jpgs, which he's ALSO going to have to sort through to find the tiny % that was stuff I'd saved, much to his chagrin (he'd convinced himself that I'd NEVER downloaded any jpgs, and thus that he could ignore them). He sure wishes now that he'd backed up my laptop before taking it in to be fixed, that he hadn't brushed off my concerns about the safety of my files, and that, when he was asked by the repair place if there were any un-backed-up files on the machine, he hadn't said "no" when he knew otherwise; he's got lots more hours of work ahead of him during which he can contemplate the wisdom of classifying my concerns about my computer as examples of "hysterical female" behavior, and of refusing to do a few minutes of work to prevent a disaster that'll take WEEKS to fully fix.
The bursitis news is good; it turned out to be just a brief flare-up, rather than 2 months of agony and the arm being useless until after the new year. Sadly, due to all the stress I've broken out in a lineup of big hives along the middle of the other arm; it doesn't affect my ability to use it, but it looks like I've got some exotic skin disease... and they ITCH.
A couple more things before I stagger off to bed:
It's usually easy to tell if a blog is written by someone who's using English as their 2nd language; their English is much better than that of the average American. I've noticed, though, that there's 1 word that non-native speakers often misuse; they say "stuffs" instead of "stuff." As a noun, "stuff" refers to multiple things and has no plural, but because the VERB "stuff" CAN have an "s" on the end the spellcheckers don't catch it when "stuffs" is used as a noun; it's one of the few ways to tell a non-native speaker from a native speaker with better than usual ability to use the language.
And I'll leave you with this jaw-dropper:
"An Indian businessman born with two penises wants one of them removed surgically as he wants to marry and lead a normal sexual life, a newspaper report said on Saturday.
The 24-year-old man from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh admitted himself to a New Delhi hospital this week with an extremely rare medical condition called penile duplication or diphallus, the Times of India said.
'Two fully functional penes is unheard of even in medical literature. In the more common form of diphallus, one organ is rudimentary,' the newspaper quoted a surgeon as saying."
http://today.reuters.com/News/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=DEL270522
Can you imagine what an AMERICAN man with 2 penises would do? Take out ads, put up billboards, and hire skywriters to spread the news that he's TWICE the man the average guy is, most likely. He'd have representatives from the porn industry knocking at his door night and day, pleading with him to use his assets on film; if he agreed, even people who'd never bought or rented a porn flick before would be paying top dollar to see whether both penises could be used at once, and to indulge their prurient interest in any sort of abnormality... heck, even an old married lady like me, who's done more than enough penis viewing for one lifetime, would probably be willing to part with a few bucks to take a peek at them. ;-)
