More organs means more human

So, apparently when you get a kidney transplant they leave the old ones in for at least a year. I never knew that.

Anyhow, my dad came through the operation pretty much with flying colors. We went to visit him yesterday and he was annoyingly cheerful. I'm sure that you're not supposed to actually be that peppy for at least a day after a surgery like that. Anyhow, the doctors say that he should be home by Wednesday with an unrestricted diet. We've already planned his welcome home meal. Unsurprisingly, it consists of foods that until a few days ago he wasn't allowed - Tomatoes and beans (in this case in the form of tomato salad and casoullet).

So yes, we're quite happy right now although from my understanding the major hurdle is the whole first month. Still, we're all cautiously optimistic. Thanks for all the support we've been getting from everybody else.

And on a very personal note. I'd like to extend my sincerest condolences and thanks to the family of the donor. Although we don't know who you are and you don't know who we are and never will, thank you. Your loss provided one kidney for my father, another for a second man, and a pancreas for a third. Thank you.

Better late than never.

So after 3 years on the waiting list, my dad's finally getting a kidney transplant.

The soonest flight that I can get back to Calgary is 7:15 tomorrow morning. I don't care if this is supposed to be a relatively routine surgery. I don't think that Ill be sleeping much tonight.

Good luck, dad.

The waiting game sucks

Here I sit, at work again.

I was here all last night until 8 this morning, at which point my coworker and I were relieved (unlike last weekend, we had just enough forewarning to allow us to work shifts). It was tiring, but the testing we were doing was relatively quick. By the time we were done starting one test, another would be done and equipment would have to be cleaned and reset. Repeat ad nauseum.

Tonight, the testing has changed. We're getting closer to the deadline, and the tests take longer. There is little in my life more frustrating than sitting here waiting for an 8 hour test to slowly tick down at the same time the deadline ticks down.

Also, daylight savings times. Most times I don't care about it at all. Tonight, if we didn't have the deadline, I would have been fine with only working an 11 hour shift rather than a 12 hour one. But we do have the deadline, and I'd realllly like that extra hour.

Oh, yeah. I'm also not happy with the snow we had on Friday. I'm sure that my contract explicitly stated that I would not see snow while I was down here. Ah well, at least I haven't had a chance to plant my herbs yet.

What's This?

One of the larger annoyances I had of working (pretty much literally) the entire weekend was that it was the nicest weather that we've had down here since autumn. The weather was in the 70s and bright and sunny and I was really looking forward to firing up the grill for the first time this year.

Obviously that didn't happen. "No biggie," says I. "I'll just enjoy cooking outdoors on Monday, or maybe Tuesday if Monday's too busy.

Well, yesterday was pretty much a full day torrential downpour which, while it ruined my grill plans I was still happy to get since it stopped raining the day that I planted my trees and I haven't had time to water them since.

However, when I woke up this morning, I was greeted by a strange sight:


Everything was covered by this cold, white stuff. It was sort of like tiny ice crystals, but very fine and delicate. It seems familiar for some reason.

No matter, we got more of it falling out of the sky for most of the morning, then it all melted away in about an hour.

I tell ya, Arkansas has some strange weather.

Wow.

Preface: I do like my job, and the company I work for, and most of the people I work with. Some days, though, are just bad. And sometimes those bad days all congregate together.

It's been a hell of a week. One that I won't soon forget. Some of the highlights include (in no particular order):

-A string of fuck-ups by yours truly.
-An electrical fire.
-Working for nearly 42 hours straight.*
-Getting showered in some rather unpleasant (read: not safe for human consumption) chemicals.
-Going into my bosses office and and asking him, quite literally, "how close to being fired am I?".**

I also learned something about myself. When given a situation where I have a choice between sitting on my ass waiting for somebody who knows what they're doing to get over and fix the (rapidly escalating) problem, or doing something that I know is completely futile and somewhat stupid in a vain attempt to solve the problem, I'll invariably choose option B. Yay me.

In conclusion, if you've phone in the last week and I've been rude to you, I apologize. As I said, it's been an interesting week. Hopefully in a couple more days I'll be recovered from it.

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*I'll admit that there were a couple of 5-minute cat naps around the 30-hour point, while I was waiting for a truck to show up, but that's it.

**Short answer: I'm not. But I do need to pay a little more attention to my work.

The Customer Is NOT Always Right.

I work in the service industry. It might not seem like it to most people at first glance but our job is to service our customers - as some of them are all too happy to remind us.

There are times when I would like very much to tell these customers to bugger off, and that we don't need their work that badly*. Unfortunately, the repercussions of such actions would likely go beyond just losing one job. It's probably a good thing that I'm in not in sales and have limited access to the customer, especially immediately after some of their more outrageous requests come down.

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*Yeah, yeah. Warning: Internet tough guy and all that stuff. I'm still pissed off, just not as much as when I initially got the latest request.

I haz an orchard

Or, rather, I will in a couple of years (hopefully). I went down to one of the local nurseries this weekend and bought myself a bunch of fruit trees. On top of the standard apples, pears, peaches, and plums, I was happy to discover some persimmon saplings as well, and bought one. All the trees are still quite small (about two years old), so I'm not sure if my plan will bear fruit while I'm still down here. I think I am going to have to come back down here in 10 - 20 years and see how they've grown up.

I was also thrilled that the nursery will deliver dirt (or in my case, compost) in smaller loads than dump-truck size, so I finally have some dirt for my herb garden as well. Wheee! Hopefully they'll last a little longer than the ones that I potted last year.

Hooray For New Math

It never fails. Every year I try to do my taxes by hand, get frustrated, and go an electronic route. This in and of itself does not bother me. Electronic filing, despite being more expensive is much quicker and simpler.

What amuses me is the discrepancies between what I calculate and what the software calculates. This year, I went from owing the government to them owing me. The total swing was in the neighborhood of $10,000.

I reallllllly hope the software is accurate.

No, I Didn't Go to Oz

Thanks for everybody who was concerned that I might have had problems with the recent tornadoes. Fortunately for me they all hit about an hour west of me, so I'm fine. It did prompt me to finally double check my house insurance policy to ensure that tornado damage is covered.

How To Make My Monday*

Inform me that our district administrator raises chickens and I can buy eggs from her.

Squee!
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*Alternate title: How to tell I'm a cooking geek.

Apparantly, It's Not All Bad

So I understand that the weather in Canada has been a little nippy as of late.

Yesterday the weather got up to 71 degrees down here. It was like a nice little Chinook.

Currently, my most pressing concern is how to set a suet feeder so that the raccoons don't eat it all overnight (or, if the feeder isn't bolted down, they just steal it).

I'm Sure That It's Perfectly Normal

So a list of items that Amazon recommends for me includes exclusively a variety of horror movies and cooking equipment.

In a completely unrelated event, I've found myself wondering lately whether the travel channel would hire me as a replacement if I killed Anthony Bourdain.

Probably not. I'm not nearly as good at that whole writing thing as he is.

That Was Fast

One season. I was hoping for a little bit more. Don't get me wrong, I can understand why he did it and wish him all the best, but it would have been nice for him to stay around at least a few seasons more. On the plus side, it takes less than 30 minutes longer to drive to see an Ole Miss game than to drive to see a Razorbacks game.

Now, for those of you that don't care about football, how about some geekery? Like, say, a rubber band gun that shoots 288 rubber bands in 7.2 seconds? I wish I had one of those when I was still in the office in Calgary.



Alternately, I wonder if the company would let me mod my truck like this (pic via Tesla Downunder):

Happy Birthday Mom!

Have a great birthday!

Things That I Learned in 2007

1.) Despite my bitching, moving to Arkansas is one of the best things that I could have done for my career.
2.) It also happens to be one of the worst things that I could have done for my social life.
3.) You can live in a dry county and still get drunk very easily on good alcohol.
4.) Sometimes making your parents cry and call you a dumbass is a good thing. Sometimes.
5.) Arkansas is a culinary wasteland.

Success!

Finally got out of Little Rock. No problems in Dallas with the exception of the airport not having free wi-fi (Fie! Fie!) Malcolm was awesome for picking me up at the airport.

Now I have to go Christmas shopping.

Kovbasa Watch 2007

And the year ends as it begins - with me sitting in an airport with a delayed flight.

Fog has delayed my flight by just long enough that I won't make my connection in Dallas unless they're delayed as well. The next flight from Dallas to Calgary doesn't leave for another 7 hours.

I hope that there's a good bar in the airport.

UPDATE #1

Flight delay has gone from 35 minutes to 55 minutes. Joy.

UPDATE #2

Flight was originally scheduled to leave at 8:55 a.m. and is now scheduled for 10:20 a.m. I've re-booked my connection. I now leave Dallas at 6:10 p.m.

Diamond Back Brewing Company makes a pretty good IPA.

UPDATE #3

Now scheduled to leave at 11:15 a.m.

I know that I shouldn't be installing certain software on this work laptop, but I'm thinking that it might have been worthwhile installing Civ IV on it for this trip.

UPDATE #4

11:35 a.m. now.

I'm beginning to wonder if I'll make that 6:10 flight...

UPDATE #5

11:55 a.m. now.

The fog's cleared a little bit. A flight for Chicago is just taking off now. I imagine that it's too much to hope that my flight gets moved up, not that it matters any more.

UPDATE #6

12:20 p.m. now.

The guy running the bar is, unsurprisingly, in a good mood. I'm kinda regretting that I didn't bring my dongle with me. I could have gotten a decent amount of work done this morning while I waited for my flight.

UPDATE #7

12:40 p.m.

Will somebody please explain to me why the 10:00 flight to Dallas gets to leave at 11:30, but my 8:55 flight keeps getting pushed back?

UPDATE #8

12:50 p.m.

The extra 10 minutes doesn't bother me. What does irk me is that the 12:15 flight to Dallas is scheduled to leave before mine.

I Just Drove Through a Disney Movie.

Driving out to location this morning, I saw a young deer standing in the ditch. I slowed down as it bounded across the road (no mujahadeer this time!) and noticed that, standing next to it was a small rabbit.

"Hmm." I mused. "Bambi and Thumper."

As I looked back at the deer, I noticed that it had a new companion on the other side of the road.

A skunk.

I kid you not.

This Isn't Right

It's raining. In December.

I'm from Calgary and used to bizarre weather, but this is freaking me out.

Wildlife

The birds are loving my back yard. It's filled with gold finches, house finches, juncos, chickadees, tons of cardinals, and the odd titmouse. It's getting expensive feeding all the greedy buggers. They can empty my feeder in about a day now. I'm wondering if it's because word's getting around in the avian world or if it's just because it's now "cold" down here. In any event it's a small price to pay for the cathartic effect of watching all the birds flitting about. I still haven't had any woodpeckers show up for my suet feeder yet, though. This surprises me since my neighbor has stated that she can't get a suet block to last overnight.

I also have armadillos. I haven't actually seen them, i've just seen the mess that they're make of my lawn while digging around for grubs overnight. I'm using deer repellent in the hopes that it drives them away - anything made with "putrescent egg white solids" (I kid you not) would drive me away. If that doesn't work, I've also had moth balls suggested to me. I really don't want to have to resort to traps (live or lethal) or shooting them.

Now, I go home and drink. Heavily. Between work and other stuff, this week can not end soon enough. Thank god I've got some chicken carcasses ready for making stock this weekend.

Oh, yeah. I also want to have Jade Raymond's children.