i don’t care what david draiman says, being sick sucks.  especially in summer.  double especially when it’s like 100°F out and your a/c is broken.  more on that later though.

i have to say that i was probably about due to be sick.  over the past few years i’ve gotten sick on or around my birthday in february.  this past year though i didn’t.  now i wish i had gotten sick, because this last one was a doozy.  i can’t really remember the last time i was this sick.

last saturday night i started to feel like i might be coming down with something.  we’d been drinking and hanging out with a couple of friends during the day (and on into the night too) so i thought it might just be tiredness from that.  that turned out to not be the case.  around 2am i woke up all sweaty and gross.  earlier in the day our a/c had died, so it was like 80°F in the house that night.  anyway, when i woke up i had a pretty bad stomachache.  i felt the cold sweats and knew a painful vomit session was in my near future.  a few minutes later i lived up to that and then some.  after i got all the bile out i felt considerably better and figured i’d be ok by morning.

come morning and i’ve had very fitful, not restful, sleep.  i was still not feeling well, and was starting to get the chills.  this is not a good sign.  i had K take my temperature and it was a balmy 101°F.  ew.  i’ve been a victim of high fevers my entire life.  when i was a baby i used to get them all the time.  it got a lot better once i had my tonsils out when i was 3, but clearly i still get a nice high fever every now and again.

being sick sucks.  being sick in summer is worse.  not having a/c just compounds the suck to levels of suckitude barely endurable.  i’m in bed with a 101°F fever.  it’s about 85°F in the house.  this is a combination for some very uncomfortable convalescence.  i spent the entire day sunday in bed.  usually when i’m sick i feel the urge to at least get up and move to another location to be miserable at.  not this time.  this time i was down and out.  hard. i think from saturday night until monday morning i slept 34 out of 36 hours.  it was pretty intense.  at least i didn’t have those crazy fever dreams.

an aside about fever dreams.  one time when i was in the 5th grade i got really, really sick.  tested for mono and all that.  turned out i had some really nasty strain of the flu that probably kills children in other countries.  anyways, for most of those two weeks i was running a temperature of 102°F/103°F.  this is not good for your brain and can readily make you halluciante.  i clearly remember this dream i had then that my room was filling with monsters, and the only way to kill them was to turn on the lights, so i jumped out of bed and ran to the light switch.  when i turned it on the light bulb exploded and i ran from the room screaming.  in the dream.  in the real world i just ran from my room screaming incoherently about monsters and exploding light bulbs, probably scaring both of my grandmother’s to death (they came to town to help take care of me, i was that sick)

anyways, nothing like that this time around thank god.

jump ahead a week to this past monday.  my ears were starting to hurt me something fierce.  after the flu symptoms i got bogged down with a really nice chest/head cold with the thickest mucuous i’ve ever experienced in my life.  after spending a night waking up every couple hours because it felt like someone was stabbing pins into my left eardrum i decided i might want to go to the doctor.  when the doctor looked in my ears, she told me i should’ve been there a week ago and i wouldn’t have been in this situation now; with an eardrum that is about to rupture and the other one not looking much better.

so i was given 10 days worth of antibiotics to take to clear out the infection in my ears. i also got a good helping of 600mg ibuprofens and, as a nice little addition, a set of 100mg vicodin.  the latter being in case my eardrum ruptured, which my doctor told me “will probably the most painful thing you’ve ever expereienced.  so you’ll want these” (these meaning the vicodin).  so far my eardrum hasn’t ruptured and i think the antibiotics are working because my ears don’t hurt anymore.

i did take one vicodin the first night to see how it would make me feel in case i needed to take one before work or something one morning.  i didn’t really feel any different, maybe a bit more HAHA than usual but that’s about it.  what it did do was give me crazy insane dreams all night long.  i dreamt that i became a part time cop with some of my friends.  it was weird because we would hang out someplace during the day, then go back there at night to bust people and shit.  the most strange part of the dream was that i kept going back into it.  i woke up a number of times that night to drink some water or use the bathroom, and every time i went back to sleep i was back in the same dream.  very strange.  i don’t really know why people take these things recreationally.  i guess the part where you have 2 beers and are completely wasted is a big attraction, but not really for me.

so now that i’m on these antibiotics for 10 days it means i’m going to have a nice sober 4th of july weekend.  which isn’t really that big of a deal because i don’t have plans anyways but it would probably be nice to have a couple beers.  i’d just rather my medicine work and not have my ear drums burst open, spewing all kinds of nasty puss and blood everywhere than have a couple beers by myself on the deck.

oh and of course the past couple of days K has started to show the symptoms i had when i first got sick.  she’s smart though and went to the doctor today to nip it in the bud instead of waiting until the last minute like i always do.

or how i learned that the emergency vet is the home of the highest highs and the lowest lows.

we had marek’s mom jasmin visiting us for a couple days this weekend while her owner was out of town. she’s a great dog and a good visitor (aside from peeing in the basement on sunday before i took her home)

here they are chilling out on my friend’s deck while i was waiting for K to get out of a haircut appointment on saturday afternoon.

everything with marek was great until sunday night when he got sick.  this isn’t all that uncommon as he likes to eat every goddamn little piece of shit he can find on the ground, including rocks (see this pic of him chewing on a rock in the backyard), sticks, leaves, cigarette butts, grass, flowers, tree branches that are low enough for  him to get at, etc etc etc.  occasionally these things make him throw up.  no big deal.  he’s a big dog and doesn’t have too much of a problem getting stuff up.

well, sunday night (technically monday morning) at 5am he threw up again.  i got up to clean up one pile as he made another pile in the bathroom.  K was cleaning that one up and noticed little specks of red in the yellowish mucous that he puked up.  we didn’t think too much of it as it could’ve been tree buds or flower pedals or whatever he ate up during the day coming up.  then, monday morning around 930 he puked again, and again there were little red things in there, something that looked like flesh to me.  this worried us both greatly so we decided we’d better get him checked out in case he ate a screw or something else sharp that was cutting him up inside.

we found the info on what i think is the only emergency vet in the city and gave them a call.  they told us that if we thought he had blood in his vomit we should definately bring him in.  so we loaded him up in the car and drove over there.  when we got to the emergency room it was probably about 1/3 full.  there were a lot of people sitting around just like they do in the human emergency room; kind of dazed, stunned, or otherwise bored.

of course marek was a hit there (as he is everywhere we go) so we got the question “what kind of dog is that?” from about every person that came in after we were there (and a couple of times from the people that were already there when we arrived).  K and i are used to this question as we get it everywhere we take him so it was no big deal.

we sat in the emergency room for about 2 hours before we got to go back and see the vet.  this gave me some time to make the observation above, that the emergency vet has the full spectrum of emotion from extreme happiness to extreme boredom to extreme sadness.  we saw a couple of people that were there because their pets were being put down.  one man carried his dog in crying.  he went into an exam room right next to the waiting area and we didn’t see him again, or the dog.  we also saw people picking up their pets, all fixed up, or on their way to being fixed up, so very happy that their pet was ok.  the worst thing was a woman who came in hysterical about her cat.  they put her in the waiting room, and while she is sitting there with her father (a clearly weird dude) and another guy i assume was her boyfriend/husband, the cat stopped responding in it’s crate.  the nurse came running over and grabbed the crate to take it to the back rooms and i heard her ask “do you want us to perform CPR if we can?” which i found… startling.  i don’t know.  it was upsetting i guess.  and i’m not even a cat person.

so after sitting there we take marek back to see the vet and she checks him out and asks the usual vet questions (what do you think he ate?  what does the vomit look like? whatever) and we answered them.  she then took him back to have x-rays to make sure he didn’t swallow anything that was hurting him.  about 30 or 45 minutes later we got to go back to the room and the vet told us that there wasn’t anything showing up in the x-ray, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t something there (how reassuring, right?) so we would just have to take him home and give him some meds and keep an eye on him.  so he got an antibiotic, a thing to soothe his stomach, and, get this, pepcid ac that we bought at the drug store.   apparently pepcid ac works just as well to control acid buildup/reflux in dogs as it does people.

so anyway, we took him home and watched him the rest of the day.  he got sick one more time yesterday evening around 730 but has been good since.  we gave him his first dose of meds last night and he kept those down.  this morning he ate some food and got more meds and he seems ok.  K went home to check on him at lunch and let him out (poor guy has some nasty diarrhea) and he seemed fine and ate some more.

here he is convalescing on my legs last night while i was doing some work on my laptop.

where the hell does the time go?  one minute it’s all cold and gray and rainy/sleety and the next it’s like summer time.  green, sunny, and only kinda rainy.

anyway, the house is all organazized.  we found out that there were mice getting into the garage from outside.  there was a little hole near the back door that went out under the back deck.  being the badass mofo that i am, i bought some mouse poison to dump in the hole and a can of that foam insulation shit to fill it in.  now the waiting game begins.  i’m pretty sure mice can chew through the foam if they want to.  hopefully they will be so gorged on poison that they won’t bother.

at the chester we had quite the mouse problem for awhile.  i had one cornered in my room behind my desk once, only to watch it jump from the floor to the top of the desk, scurry down the desktop, jump off the desk and into the furnace vent in the floor.  i was amazed at the athletic ability of the mouse.  it would be like me jumping from the ground up to the top of a 30 story building (well maybe not quite that extreme, but it was still impressive).  after that i did some reading on mice and they are pretty amazing little creatures.  they can jump really well, swim, and squeeze through a hole the size of a dime! wikipedia says they are the 2nd most successful mammal (behind one homo sapien)

besides that everything at the new place is great.  i’m loving parking in the garage.  no more walking from the car to the house in the rain.  once winter hits (can’t be long enough away) it’ll be even better to not have to chip ice or any bullshit like that.

of course, now that we rent an entire house, it’s almost like being a homeowner (especially with a landlord that lives a couple thousand miles away).  i don’t mind doing home owner-y type stuff, like the aformentioned mouse invasion defense, but at the same time, i don’t own the fuckin place so any money i put in is pretty much wasted.  no return on my investment.

mowing the grass isn’t as bad as i remember it being though.

goddamnit i signed up for this stupid shit… http://twitter.com/saqsmaq — maybe i’ll use it as little as i use this blog, maybe not.

beyond that, what else is up with me? well, K and i are moving. we found a nice 3 bed/1.5 bath, attached 2 car garage and fenced in back yard (yay for marek!)  place in a neighborhood on the near east side called EASTGATE.  i’ve never heard of it either, so whatever.  it basically sits between olde town and bexley.  our house is about 4 blocks from the governor’s mansion and 2 blocks from the ghetto.  i’m pretty excited.

let’s see… in other news i recently became the promotions department for lo pan (in addition to designing**/hosting their website) by making them some buttons which you can see here and here.

um i guess that’s it.  marek is up to something like 110lbs now, but i’m not 100% sure on that as we haven’t had him weighed in a month or so.  oh and his birthday is in a couple weeks on april 1! which happens to be the first full day we’ll be in our new place!!!  yay us!

**yes i designed that page and yes i wrote it in notepad.  i never claimed to be any good at html.

hard to realize it’s already mid january, but here’s my top 10 from last year.

not so much metal as 2007, but 2008 was definitely another banner year for rock for me

1. torche – meanderthal

2. all the way rider – the eagles revenge

3. black sheep wall – i am god songs

4. the death of her money – spirit of the stairwell

5. a silver mount zion – 13 blues for thirteen moons

6. russian circles – station

7. kowloon walled city – turk street

8. gregor samsa – rest

9. man man – rabbit habits

10. yak ballz – scifentology 2

and the notabale runner ups (in alphabetical order):

the black keys – attack and release
don caballero – punkgasm
intronaut – prehistoricisms
local h – twelve angry months
meshuggah – obzen
mogwai – the hawk is howling
mouth of the architect – quietly
one day as a lion – one day as a lion
spylacopa – spylacopa
zozobra – bird of prey