Happy Non-Existent Day!
Fri, Feb 29, 2008 - 6:23pm EST
Every four years, we have an exception to our calendar. And every one hundred years, we have an exception to that exception, making it like our normal calendar. And then every four hundred years, we have an exception to the exception to the exception, which makes our calendar act like the normally excepted calendar. If you're entirely confused, cool. Today's Leap Day!
I'd hoped to update earlier once something in particular happened: my getting a new operating system for my computer! However, WindowsXP didn't merely get here late and now I'm finally updating, no no. It never got here. Upon giving up and requesting my friend seek tracking information, he learned that it wasn't being tracked, there was no information, and the reason was the order had been rejected! Dude! The company never even sent him notification! (He ordered via card, I paid him via check, you can see how that went now.) So instead of the plan, I'm simply updating in spite of the event's occurrence-or-not. Even more amazing is that buying WindowsXP cheaply online was Plan B to buying a computer cheaply locally (which failed when I got there and learned that they'd had their operating systems removed, comPLETEly defeating the entire purpose of my even wanting one in the first place!).
In the meantime, I've been really sick this past week. After defeating two Cold contenders no problem, on came the big boy, Influenza. He hasn't knocked me out yet, but I do need to keep drinking more water and stepping back in the ring! *~whew~* I hope to have squeezed him out of every pore by Sunday. I've said it before, I'll say it again: I don't get sick very often, but when I do, MAN. And then I'll add this um.. addendum. It seems I get past the sick stuff pretty quickly, too. I'm hearing people say ten days on the flu. I got symptoms one night, and then it hit me superhardest throughout the entire next day, then after that each day has been a bit of a pick-up. We'll find out.
Menthol! Horrible, disgusting menthol! I used to live in second-hand smoke, and now I work in it a lot of the time; in fact, I'd say there were only about five years in my life when I wasn't constantly bombarded by filthy, nasty, disgusting cigarette smoke. I generally hate medicine. I don't take pain medication unless I'm fighting tears or already in them. I avoid drugs which hide symptoms from virus infestations as if the drugs themselves were the plague; after all, the symptoms are the bodies' defenses at work, why would I want to get rid of the body's defenses? it's not like those drugs can defeat the virus; coughing drives it out; mucus traps it unto more driving it out; fever, caused by the body's overdrive, turns back around to help kill it; I'm fine with each and every one of my symptoms. O, but getting worn out. Sleep and rest is the only real help there, which I've been doing EVERYthing in my power to maximize, failing miserably when it came to certain work-duty obligations, BAH, but overall has been going much better than it could be, so rock on. You know this is leading somewhere, right? Cool, hang with me, we're almost there. I've been coughing. And coughing. And coughing. And coughing. And coughing and coughing and coughing and coughing. I'm fine with coughing. But MAN, my diaphragm was getting so sore that every time I coughed, I was about-doubling-over in pain and weakness. I may have strong lungs, (good endurance, never smoked,) but days straight of coughing wears the muscles out! Well, Wednesday, I figured enough was finally enough. Just to give my midsection some rest, (it finally started getting difficult just to breathe I was getting so worn out,) and perhaps stop my slip down the road toward getting supremely nauseous upon every cough, I went ahead and bought some cough drops. I know these days, cough drops can actually taste good, so I figured, fine, why not. I bought some Honey Lemon flavored drops for a dollar. Read the ingredients. Has real honey. No lemon, no huge surprise there. Active ingredient, menthol, okay, sure, cool. Get on the road, pop one in, and.. Okay, yeah, I guess I can taste honey. I'm not sure I would've guessed had I not already known. Lemon? What lemon? Nothing even remotely citrussy. I feel a little bit robbed here. But maybe it's just my outta-whack taste buds. Meanwhile, however, the disgusting taste flooding my mouth and half-burning my throat must be the menthol, ugh. But that's fine! Within minutes, I didn't need to cough! At all! Well.. Once it dissolved entirely, it was only minutes more when I needed to cough again. I didn't even see before that the thing had directions for use. I just took another one. I might've taken a total of three or four Wednesday, not sure; I believe it was this day that I even took one and chewed it just to get some quick relief a good half hour before break so that I could eat without my burger necessarily tasting so much like cough drop. Then Thursday, I think I took another total of three or four, surely in a much shorter time period, because you see, a couple things happened. One, I saw the instructions, that you're supposed to let one dissolve slowly every two hours as needed; bah; well, by the time I finally started letting myself cough again, I noticed that I wasn't in such intense breathing pain anymore, meaning (I suppose) that my diaphragm finally had enough time to rest to heal some; that was nice. Two, the taste; the taste stopped going away; oh, it's gone, it's gone now; it's been gone for awhile; but I breathe it; it's still there; when I cough; when I breathe in, I can feel it, deep in my lungs; almost like it's reapplying anasthesia to my entire bronchial/tracheal/everythingal tube system every single blasted time I cough, let alone inhale and exhale, giving me this raspy, rough, hollow, nasty, stupid, smoker's-cough-sounding-filth cough! It's this blasted stupid menthol! Horrible, disgusting, vile, ugly menthol! If I could cough up a lung, I'd be happy with it--then I could dig all the stupid menthol out of it! I sounding like a smoker when I cough! I hate feeling like a smoker when I cough! I hate tasting like a smoker when I cough! Smokers smoke menthol--I don't! I'm not a self-destructive, suicidal, selfish-against-everyone-including-self smoker!! Blasted menthol!! ::exhale::
Almost finished playing Final Fantasy with Plfr Deth Pain Bkst (Pilfer, Death, Pain, and Backstab -- the LIGHT WARRIORS!), but the final temple is turning out to be much harder than anticipated; there's that one little miniboss before the two treasure chests and the "stairway" that looks exactly like a rope ladder hanging down through a hole in the ground, and of course that one kind of enemy (and it seems the only kind of enemy) made of "Gas" (do they even have a weakness?); I'm having difficulty even using this place as a levelling ground, as my superpowerful Level 8 Spells do nothing when I need them to, ~rolls eyes.~ Anyway, I just kind of want to be done with this so I can give it back, and I'd rather finish it since I'm this close and have worked this far with such an otherwise underdoggish party. I find it sad that no one (locally) wants to play old school games with me.
I also find it sad that a lady to whom I was highly attracted, and in whom I was highly interested, has lost a great deal of her weirdness over the years. Quirky humor? Wordplay and doublespeak? Games with unspoken rules being invented and played without ever explicitly having to say so? Gone. Shunning of quirks? Avoiding crazy hyperbole and deeply involved analogies? Pretending no game any longer exists? Oo! pick me, pick me! As one friend of mine put it, "Mm. Pity." Indeed. She still has certain attractive qualities, but I just can't say I'm interested anymore.
Perhaps my reordered Windows will make it to that friend's house Saturday, and we can install this Sunday; or, perhaps it'll come sometime next week, and we can install the following Sunday; or, perhaps it won't come at all because the company in question likes to reject perfectly good orders without telling anybody about it but instead opting to leave their customers to their own wiles such as checking the status of why in the world they haven't gotten their packages yet only after an entire week and a half have already passed, and we can buy it from another company.
By the way, I hid the little "updated" time-date thingy from the very front static-welcome-page because it gave a false impression that my site was old and decrepit, and you might as well leave at the Entrance while you still have the chance. Couldn't have that, now could we? Until next update, have fun.
theUndiscovered
Brandon W. Horton
ParodyKnaveBob $:^ J