Long day today. Exhausted. Got a bunch of maps at AAA and K planned us yet another alternative route in case the weather is bad, which it looks like it will be. K posted the exciting details on our site: http://karenandlori.com/2011/03/19/stormy-weather/

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There is not much there yet, but if you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and visit us at KarenandLori.com

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K and LB @ Slainte Pub in Baltimore

Me and K spent the past week in Baltimore and Florida and had a great time. We want to move to Baltimore, but we can’t. It sucks. We decided we wanted to move a few weeks before the economy crashed. Things looked pretty good for us then. Now we are stuck here for what could be a long time.

We both love Oakland and the Bay Area, but it is time to go. About 5 years ago, we visited Baltimore and came home thinking about moving there to help out K’s folks with stuff that they have a hard time doing, but that would be easy for us to do. They told us we shouldn’t move because of them, and we didn’t. In the 5 years since, we have accumulated many more reasons to move there and fewer reasons to stay.

I have 2 beautiful nieces now that I didn’t have then, Hannah (3) and Abilgail (10 months). I want to see them grow up. I want to know them. I would also like to see the rest of my family more often. Even though they are in Florida, I would still see them way more often than I do now. Florida is a long drive or short plane ride away from Baltimore. Even if I am having a hard time traveling, I could get there. When my grandma was sick and moved to Florida to be closer to family, I wanted to see her so bad. I wanted it worse than anything, but I couldn’t get there. Then she died. I missed my chance forever. If I had lived in Baltimore then, I could have gotten there, maybe even several times. I never want anything like that to happen again.

K has lots of great friends in Baltimore that she has known for many years. For some reason I find it really easy to be with them and always have a lot of fun when we visit. It is very rare that I am that comfortable around people, especially groups of people. I have a couple of friends there too, including Kim who I have known for 25 years and would love to live near again. I spend most of my time here alone. Mostly by choice, but it would be nice to know that other options are available once in a while. There are options here too, but I am never organized enough to make plans and can not predict when my brain will cooperate. I suppose that will be the same wherever I am. Too bad.

Many things have to happen before we can leave. K has to take the national social work test and find a job, we need to figure out what to do with our house especially if selling it is not a viable option, and we need to do it all in a way that we end up with enough money to move and not get totally screwed if our unsold house goes without tenants for a month or more. This would be a good time to win Lotto.

It is hard to be here now. My new medicine combo is making some things much better than before, like traveling, but other things are worse again. I am very tired. My head is louder. It is easier to get out of the house than before, but only when my head is quiet. Otherwise, it is harder. Not sure I will ever find the magic combo of drugs/doses/whatever. Glad to have ones that help as much as they do though. I hope we can get out of here before too long. I don’t know if things will be different there, but there is only one way to find out. It will be very sad to leave our house. We both love it a lot. Wish we could move it across country.

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Mon 9/22/08 10:46am

On the plane from Baltimore to Oakland, stop in Denver. Had lots of fun in Baltimore. We went to an overnight birthday party for a couple of K’s friends that were turning 40 and had a great time. I really like K’s Maryland people. I am strangely comfortable around them. They remind me of people from Buffalo. The party went all night. At some point, I got tired of people and went to read in the living room. Most of the people were outside. I was happy that I had a book I could read. Got a Robert Ludlum book at the airport. The Ambler Warning. It’s a fast reader that does not require a full attention span. Other people started coming in and reading too after a while. I thought that was pretty funny. There were some books on the coffee table. K kept bringing people over to say hi and hang out for little bits of time. That was fun too. Little spurts of party.

The next day was fun too. Lots of people had slept over and others came back in the morning. After the party, we went to Kim’s place and then out for a drink. On the way home, she gave us a great tour of her neighborhood. I love tours with stories and she know a lot about her neighborhood. It was great to get to see her again after such a short time.

The first night we went to a restaurant/bar that a couple of K’s friends are opening soon. The place was amazing! Huge. They were building most things themselves, including booths and other assorted furniture from old church pews. It was fun to hang out there. Can’t wait to go back when it is open. We also helped K’s folks with their new fiber optic tv system. It was nice to be able to do that. Some stuff that is very hard for them is very easy for us. K will help them some more tomorrow. She is not coming home until Thursday.

I am looking forward to being home. Have work to do. Server was down for a while yesterday. Of course it has to happen when I am out of town. Got stuck in a loop and was overloading the CPU. A reboot fixed it, but today I got an email that the main hard drive partition might be dying and needs to be repaired or replaced. The server will need to be down for 1-4 hours. Crap. I told the techs to monitor it and reboot if it goes down again, but to wait until 3am US eastern time to take it down. I think it will affect the least amount of people at that time. Update: It did not go down again and is repaired now.

I met with the business consultant again before I left. New plan is to meet twice a month for 2 months, 2 hours each time. We covered a lot of ground in 2 hours. Got the basics of a contract written for my next project. Should be able to easily adapt it for other projects. We spoke some about pricing and how I need to raise mine and also about some other ideas I have that will bring in some steady income.

I am trying a new system of tracking hours. Only got to try it once before I left, but it actually worked. I was reading an article by David Seah that described a system where you set a timer to go off every 15 minutes and then fill in ovals on a piece of paper to track what you are doing when the timer goes off. I don’t do well with paper systems and the online version was alpha and not quite my style, so I combined some programs that I already had to do a similar thing. I set up a spreadsheet in Numbers with a sheet for each project, then set a calendar alarm to open up a 15 minute repeating timer in Alarm Clock Pro every weekday morning at 8am. The timer is set to make the spreadsheet pop up every 15 minutes. When it pops up, I just check a box for the project I am working on. The spreadsheet keeps track of how many hours I have worked on each project for each month by counting the checkboxes and dividing by 4 to get time in hours.

Turbulence. Hate it. The lady who was sitting next to me at the beginning of the flight kindly gave up her seat to another lady with a baby. She got free drinks for doing it. I usually don’t like being near kids on planes because they are loud, but I don’t mind it so much at the moment. Cute kid. Nice mom. Some screaming when they first got settled, but quiet now. My ears are clogged anyway. Enough writing for now.

Thu 9/25/08 3:54am

I never did get around to posting that. It is nice to be home. K is coming home tomorrow. I can’t wait to see her We both have a little time off before going back to work. I am hoping to use the time to do some business stuff that I hardly ever have time to do. Today I set up an online project management system to make it easier to communicate and share files with clients. It is very similar to Basecamp, only open source, free, prettier, and hosted on my own server. Currently, I am using it to manage my hosting affililate program project. The affiliate system is ready to go, but still needs a couple of web pages, graphics for banner ads, and text ad copy. I am also thinking of starting a newsletter to send to clients and other interested people every few months. I would like to announce the launch of the affiliate program in the first one. Hopefully I can get that done this week because I have a big project starting soon.

It is 4:06am. I think I should go to sleep. Jetlag.

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I am too busy. I suck at being busy. It is my worst thing and it always ends badly. I am not sure how to not be busy. It is a vicious cycle. As soon as I start feeling better, I want to do things. All the things that I can’t do when I am sick. I want to work. I want to play. Sometimes, I even want to see people.

I was sick for so long. First a year of bad meds and then cat scratch fever. I was lucky that the meds thing got straightened out before the CSF, but it is only very recently that I can enjoy it. Suddenly, I find myself feeling great! I still get tired and confused, but that is ok. It is part of how I am. After such a long time of not being able to do things that I wanted to, I feel like it is a race for time to do them now that I am feeling good. I would love to think it will always be like this, but the truth is that it is not and never has been.

The thing is, I think it could be like this most of the time if I didn’t have stress. I know that is impossible, but it would be possible to have much less stress. Only problem with that is I would be stuck not doing anything I want to do again. I am stressed by working. I am stressed by traveling. I am stressed by being around people. My brain gets overloaded and bad things happen. I get sick. The screaming in my head that is kept in the background by the meds gets louder. My brain shuts down. I twitch like crazy. I become miserable and useless.

I have no idea what to do about this. I want to work so badly. I love what I do. It is like being paid for doing puzzles and arts and crafts. When I code, my brain is in a happy place. Everything makes sense. It has to. As an added bonus, I get to take that code and turn it into a (hopefully) beautiful thing to look at. I am not a graphic artist by any means, so even the art part is like a puzzle. I combine graphic art made by actual artists, with photoshop skills and an eye for detail, and create an entirely new thing that never existed before. What’s not to love?

I was wanting to go to Florida to see my niece Hannah and the rest of my family for a whole year, but couldn’t because of being too sick. Then all of a sudden, I was okay to travel. It is a rare and beautiful thing. There was no way I wasn’t going to Florida. The trip (airplane, etc.) went pretty well thanks to Dramamine and, as always, being with Karen made everything better and more fun. Being in Florida was even okay. I love my family, but I hate Florida. I can’t deal with the hot and humid weather. We completely lucked out with that. Not insanely hot or humid. Last time I was there, I couldn’t even stand to be outside for more than a minute. Got instantly exhausted and dizzy.

It was really great to see my family. Hannah is beyond the legal limits of cute. It was so nice to get to know her better and see her sweet smile. I really loved getting to see her with my brother, sister-in-law, and parents too. They are a family. I am so glad they live so close to each other. Sometimes it is hard living so far away. Sometimes I wish Florida was in Nevada. My cousin Eric was there too. It is always nice to see him and my aunt Wilma and uncle Pat too. Sarah’s (sister-in-law) family was there too. It was nice to see them too. So nice, that we brought her sister Sam back with us. She will be going to acupuncture school in Berkeley starting in January and has been staying with us this past week. She magically found a great place to live in Berkeley on her fist try and will be moving in today.

Bad Apples

Haven’t had enough rambling yet? Then on to the saga of the bad imacs. Me, my dad, and my brother all got new aluminum imacs last month. 2 out of 3 of them were duds. There was a problem with the ATI graphics cards. The whole computer was unstable because of it. Black screens, blue screens, strange graphics, freezing, etc. Windows X 10.5? There has been a firmware update for the graphics cards released that appears to fix the problem for most, if not all, people. Thankfully, my brother’s was fine from the start. Both me and my dad returned our computers and got brand new replacements. All is good now.

The new imac came with Leopard and now that it works, I have been loving it! The screen is huge! Not only is it 24″, but I have been using Spaces, a new feature of Leopard where you can have several “desktops” and easily switch between them. For example I can have photoshop open in one desktop, giving it the entire screen to itself, mail and safari open in another, Firefox and BBedit in another, etc.

Time Machine is totally cool too. I can’t even believe how easy it is to back up. You plug in the external drive and the mac asks if you want to use it for Time Machine. You click ‘yes’. That is it. Your hard drive is being backed up every hour and saving daily, weekly, and monthly backups for as far back in time as the drive will allow. When it gets full, it asks if you would like it to delete the oldest backups to make room. Unbelievable! I will still make daily clones as soon as super duper is Leopard ready, but Time Machine offers a different kind of backup that is easier to use, automatic, and frequent.

Just a few more things to ramble about before I go…

K – I am so very proud of K! She has been saving the world as always. In recognition of her hard work, she has gotten a promotion at work and is now a supervisor, which is the direction she has been wanting to go. Congratulations K! It makes me happy to know that people will have an opportunity to learn from her and benefit from her years of experience.

Warcrack – Shikibee has joined a new guild and is about to ding level 50.

Rehab – I am meeting with someone once a week who will help me research if there are jobs available where I can do contract work from home or with a very flexible schedule. I would really like that. Freelancing is great because I set my own hours and don’t have to answer to anyone except my clients, but I work all the time and barely make any money.

If I did contracted work instead, someone else would be dealing with the clients, setting the prices, and all of the other business related things that I can not do. Even splitting the money with an agency or other company, it is very likely that I would make more money than I do now. I hope something like that could work out. I was hoping that I could keep my current clients and stop taking new freelance jobs if there were contract jobs available instead.

WordPress 2.3 Update – This one went much more smoothly than the last two. I wish there was a way to manage tags, but from what I understand, the dev team is waiting to find out what people want rather than starting with a ton of features that people may or may not use and then having to change them later. I am looking forward to 2.4 and the new admin changes.

Joomla 1.5 – I am working on a new client site with Joomla 1.5 RC3. It has been very stable and the code is MUCH cleaner than before. I love the new templating system and look forward to its final release and the updated extensions that will follow. If you are planning to integrate any kind of forums into your site, stay with 1.0.x for now.

phpBB3 – Love it! Tons of improvements over phpBB2. Current release is RC8. This update has been a long time in the making. I am hoping that converting from older version will not be total hell.

I have finally run out of things to ramble about for now

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We got here on Sunday and hung out downtown. Met K’s friend for dinner. It was fun. Yesterday I explored Lynwood, which is technically where we are, but I can see why no one seems to want to advertise that fact. Not much going on from what I can tell.

There is a nearby mall with an apple store, which is one of the few things that can get me voluntarily into a mall. I was walking over there and passed right by the convention center where k’s conference was. I had a little fantasy that it was time for her morning break and she would call me. She called about one second later. Gotta love that timing. I stopped in to visit and then headed to the mall.

The mall was huge and sprawling and I instantly hated it, but I managed to find the apple store and spent my whole time there playing with photoshop on a 24″ imac. I ended up making one of the nicest things I’ve ever made in photoshop, probably because I was not thinking at all while I was making it. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a flash drive on me, so it is gone. Maybe I will try to make something like it some day. I remember the process for the most part.

Met K for lunch after that, then back to the hotel. Played warcrack for a little while, but couldn’t concentrate. I was really tired and ended up falling asleep at around 7pm near the beginning of ‘A Prairie Home Companion’. At least K got to see it.

Today, I checked us out at around 11:15, left our bags behind the counter and went to meet k for lunch. It was nice to get to see her and hear about the conference. Stopped at compusa on the way back to the hotel and played on another 24″ imac. Now, I’m at the hotel hanging out in the atrium. There is some nice muzak playing, which thankfully includes some non-xmas music.

I finally had the attention span to play warcraft, but couldn’t because there was a big patch to download and it was going to take 5 hours on the hotel’s relatively slow wireless connection. I decided to do some work, but the information I needed was on my other computer. I really should keep my computers more in sync. I forget how often I use my laptop.

Besides from seeing the kitties, I am not really looking forward to being home. Kind of sucks since that is usually my favorite place to be. There is too much going on. I need to drop my classes and take a break from school until I am feeling better. There is no way I can keep up unless I get a real attention span very soon. Not likely.

There is lots of work to do and much more to come. It is exciting and overwhelming at the same time. The good things are that at least one of the projects will probably involve working with d and that I can spread out the deadlines or, if need be, turn down the jobs where it will be impossible to meet them. I hate to think about turning down jobs, but there is only so much one person can do.

No word about my meds yet. Stupid medi-cal. It sure would be nice to know what is going to happen to my life. I am doing everything I can to make things better, but the truth is that I need to take meds in order to have any kind of a ‘normal’ life. I hate that my life is so dependent on a decision made by some random bureaucrat.

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We had a really good time. Ottawa is beautiful and the weather was perfect. Fall weather. We don’t see that much around here. There was so much open land and trees and animals everywhere. Ros and Rob’s backyard was like a nature preserve. They have a creek running along the far side and we saw a muskrat and a couple of ducks. Ros said they once had a porcupine there!

Everyone was so nice. It was really great to get to meet K’s extended family. I had met most of them before, but had more of a chance to get to know them this time. I was especially appreciative of them all treating me like part of the family and being okay with my need to escape occasionally. They also made lots of amazing vegetarian food so I didn’t have to eat matzoh and peanut butter all week, which I would have done happily, but not quite as happily.

We got to experience Tim Horton’s coffee, which appears to be mandatory in Canada, and Bruce took us on a great tour of the city. I was very comfortable being around all of them, which is not a very common thing for me. It was great spending time with all the kids too. Adam kept us entertained with costumes, music, and a constant soundtrack of the Doodlebops greatest hits, Leah taught us how to play hockey and act like a princess at the same time, Omi did puzzles at lightening speed and provided nonstop adorableness, and Max adopted me as a friend and kept taking me away from the crowd to play in a more quiet place. Thanks Max : )

Pictures from the trip are up here.

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I wasn’t expecting things to still be so bad after hurricane Katrina. I was expecting to see damage and I knew that there were people who were still homeless and businesses that were still closed, but I was shocked to see how bad things still are.

Spray painted X’s still on many houses and other buildings. After Katrina, the national guard, search and rescue, the spca, and other organizations went around checking for people and pets in buildings. The X’s were surrounded by numbers; how many people, how many alive and dead, how many pets.

The roads are trashed. Huge trenches on the sides of roads, now blocked off with wood and tape. Giant pot holes cover many of the roads. The term “weather damage” has a whole new meaning to me now. Dirt and debris everywhere, most of it now arranged into piles on what used to be the sidewalks. One evening, we had to move a bunch of rubble out of the way so we could park Blanca’s mini.

Some neighborhoods are okay. The French Quarter wasn’t hit so bad. Blanca’s house wasn’t hit so bad either. Many of her neighbors weren’t so lucky. Thousands of people were forced to leave town and go to Texas, Mississippi, and other places for work and shelter. The local media speaks of the city in terms of “pre-” and “post-Katrina”. So many businesses boarded up; even big chain stores. Some will never open again. We passed a Taco Bell that was leveled to the ground; only the big metal sign was still standing.

There is no 9th Ward anymore. The lower 9th Ward is a large predominantly low-income African-American neigborhood that was catastrophically flooded during hurricane Katrina. People of this area and groups such as the Common Ground Collective have been fighting to bring relief and restoration to this neighborhood, which has been greatly neglected by government and other largescale relief efforts.

There are FEMA trailers everywhere, but not nearly enough. Many people are living in abandoned cars. There are so many abandoned cars. Many traffic lights are still down. There are Stop signs to help keep things in order, but we saw several car accidents while driving around. One time we saw a guy lying in the road, bleeding from his head. He may have been hit by a car, but we had no idea what actually happened. It was so freaky. It looked just like it does on tv.

Okay, I needed to get all that out before I was ready to write about the good parts of our trip.

One of the things that affected me most about our trip, besides from seeing all the damage, was seeing how so many people manage to go on and even have some fun amid all the rubble. There were many creative costumes incorporating Katrina in some way or other. Many were a commentary about the crappy job that FEMA has been doing. Some were more of a general “You can’t stop us, Katrina” kind of theme, and others were a mix of things that I think can only be labeled by the people who wore the costumes, or possibly others who also shared the experience of life in New Orleans during and after Katrina.

On Sunday, me, K, and B went to the “Bacchus” parade. It was led by Michael Keaton who has apparently done a bunch of stuff to help the city. There were lots of cool floats, mostly ‘Wizard of Oz’ related because the theme was ‘Yellow Brick Road’. There were lots of marching bands too. I got too overwhelmed to stay for the next parade, so we left and went back to B’s house. I think K and/or B were tired too, but they may have just been being nice. Either way, it was good to leave. New Orleans is full of flashing lights after dark. Before dark too, but it is not as noticeable during the day.

Monday, aka lundi gras, me and K went to the French Quarter to hang out while B was picking Dexter up at the airport. It was fun to walk around and way cool to see the Mississippi River! Great music coming out of every corner; brass bands, blues, jazz, and more. That was one of my favorite parts of being there. We stopped to get a drink at a place with about 15 frozen alcoholic drink machines. I had a perfectly mixed Jack and coke and K had a pretty red drink. We had dinner at a cool bar that was playing lots of 70′s music. At night, we hung out at B’s and had some tamales that her mom sent on the plane with Dexter. Thanks mama Rivas!

Tuesday, aka mardi gras, we all went to the French Quarter for a final day of partying. Bourbon Street was a crazy madhouse nightmare smelly frat party, but I’m glad I got to see it. We had some beignets at Cafe du Monde. It was my powdered sugar fantasy. Beignets are these french donut-like things (except with no holes) that are covered with a giant mound of powdered sugar. I was pretty hyper by the time we left, but I’d do it again! We got a very stylish souvenir mug with K’s chicory coffee. When we were leaving, we noticed that as soon as we left the French Quarter, there was a totally other mardi gras happening. New Orleans is still very segregated. One step outside the quarter was the African-american mardi gras; inside the quarter was the white mardi gras. There was some overlap, but not much.

Blanca had to work on Wednesday. In the morning we all went out to breakfast and then me and K and Dexter drove around and took pictures of random rubble, destruction, rebuilding, waterlines, and giant houses. In some places, the waterlines were above our heads. Freaky. Dexter gave us a ride to the airport in crazy rush hour traffic. Thanks Dexter! We had a night flight and didn’t get home until after midnight. I fell asleep pretty quick, even though the Dramamine I took was of the “less drowsy” variety. It didn’t knock me out nearly as bad as the regular Dramamine that I had to take on the way there so we could get onto our second plane. Travelling is very hard for me, but I love going places. Thank you Dramamine.

We are back home now and have been resting, spending qt with the kitties, and playing video games. K doesn’t have to go back to work until Monday. It is good to be home.

Click here to see the the rest of the pictures.

Note: Click here for a list of organizations that are helping with relief and recovery for victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

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We went to a pretty fun but not very well attended halloween party at Fab with Lorena and Tess on Saturday night. There was dancing and a drag show that was pretty good except for the volume being way too loud during the second half. My favorite part was the good and evil Dolly routine where there were two Dolly Partons, one the good angel Dolly and one the bad angel Dolly. They were arguing back and forth through a medley of lip synced Dolly tunes. Never enough Dolly Dolly Dolly Dolly.

Yesterday we walked around town and got some presents for people and a book for K and a finger puppet monster for me. At night we watched ‘The Princess Bride’ which I had never seen before. It was excellent. We also drank a little mini bottle of champagne we got at Korbel that afternoon. Nice

This morning we walked around Armstrong Woods. I love that place so much. It is so beautiful and magical. I especially like going there with K. It was perfect weather for a walk in the woods. Cool, but not too cold. There was mist coming from some of the trees that added to the magicalness. The colors were so bright and everything was glistening and covered with dew. Everything so green and brown. No other colors except for an occasional purple flower, and if you’re lucky, a yellow banana slug. No sounds besides from birds and one woodpecker. It is such a nice change from the rest of the world. Happy birthday K!

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It was a fun trip, even though it was so short. We had some great food, some excellent booze, and got to see a few of the sights. We also saw “Wedding Crashers”, which was very hilarious. It was nice to get to walk around in the city. It’s been a long time. I’ve never seen the streets so empty! Apparently everyone is gone for the summer, and it was a weekend, but even still, it was very strange.

Me and K went walking around in the village, and had lots of fun. Went to Christopher St. Park (photo above), had some amazing lemon italian ices, and got a little bit of hope for the world from some guy that K was buying a bag from. He didn’t take credit cards, and she didn’t have enough cash, so he just trusted her and said she could send a check when she got home! I was pretty amazed. Of course, she sent the check as soon as we got home

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