Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

This past weekend, Ben and I had planned to drive to Las Vegas for a much-needed long weekend away from Utah and the house. Unfortunately, the house kept us here… because we decided that it wouldn’t be prudent to spend money in Vegas immediately after making the first, very-very large payment for our roof.

Being responsible. Teh Suck.

(Besides, this gives me more ammo to push for a trip to San Diego Comic Con in July!)

Oh yeah, have I mentioned that our roof is finished and the skylights that we purchased in October are finally installed? That HUGE headache might be easier to write about after it’s really done, because we still have to fix drywall in several places upstairs and stain the inside trim of the skylights (which we could have done before they were installed, as it turns out, but we were so occupied with finding someone to install them that we never even took them out of the box). And I have to call the manufacturer from whom we purchased said skylights because one of the handles is broken and the pole for opening the mini-blinds (that we still need to install on the inside) is not long enough for my short arms like Sales Guy said it would be. Ben doesn’t even need the pole because of his height.  He has a freakishily large armspan, not unlike that of a condor.

(I was going to say golden condor, and then link to the Wikipedia page about the freakish 30-foot or whatever wingspan of that amazing bird. But then I discovered that the cartoon condor I imagine every time I think of a condor was actually an ornithopter [a mechanical bird] from the shown-on-Nickelodeon-in-the-eighties Japanese TV show “The Mysterious Cities of Gold.” Damn cable television interfering with factual knowledge. See, creators of cartoons? See what power you have over the young minds that turn into older minds? Oh, wait, you were already QUITE aware of that power, and you perpetually laugh in the face of responsibility that should accompany it, don’t you?)

Wow, I’m already way off topic from what I thought I was going to write about.

Where was I? The damn house? God, do I have anything else to talk about? Of course not. I bought a house and it will never ever be anywhere close to finished in the way that I once imagined. Oh, those were nice times… times when I thought that the house would be “pretty much perfect” in a couple years. HA!  HA HA!  I laugh at your naïvete, former self!

Ahem.

This weekend, after having a nice anniversary dinner at the Macaroni Grill (after waiting an hour for a table because it was also BYU graduation weekend but we didn’t mind because we talked and “reconnected” and all that smooshy relationship stuff), we accomplished some more house-related stuff and tried not to think about how we could be in Vegas right now, dammit. We pitched the oldish and somewhat mildew-y tent, which I then spent precious daytime hours cleaning with a sponge, smelly lysol solution and a garden hose. That was a sonofabitch to clean, because it’s a huge 4-16 person tent (depending on the size of the people and their stuff, I guess).

Incidentally, if you own an Armadillo tent made by Walrus, that company went out of business and there are NO ONLINE INSTRUCTION MANUALS TO BE FOUND. If I’m irresponsible enough to let my tent grow some mildew, how could Tent Company possibly expect me to hold on to the instructions for setting it up? Anyway, with the help of Ben’s gargantuan armspan and our combined we-should-be-in-Vegas brainpower, we figured it out. Ben retreated to the garage to clean (and maybe find one of the fifty screwdrivers he owns so that he doesn’t have to borrow my ONE ratchet screwdriver that I keep very close tabs on because I need to know where to find one when I need it).

We had also planned to paint that third coat of red on the family room walls, but didn’t. Ben painted a couple of coats of white on the top half of the back wall that primed for red, and also put a coat of white on the ceiling. It’s looking really sweet. Hopefully this week we’ll buckle down and spend a whole evening just doing a final nice, even red coat so we don’t have to think about it anymore and can enjoy the red room.

What other exciting, boring stuff went on? Ben changed the oil in his car and I cleaned up inside and did the cookin’ like a proper wife. Yeah, we had breakfast for three meals in a row! We also planned out where we will transplant the weirdly placed tulips and the still-surviving young hawthorn trees in our yard (farther away from the house than they are now, thanks to stupid previous flip-this-house homeowners) and where we will plant two more trees. And all of that will help decide where the future sprinkler system will go because if you want grass in Utah, you have to water it, and Ben has been using a garden hose and moving sprinklers around the old fashioned way for two summers and it’s time we install a more efficient, less time-consuming system.

Ah, gardening. I also spent a little time with my two square foot gardens. It’s a neat system and I recommend it for fisrt-time gardeners, even if you’re like me and really are only sort of on the ball in the third year of gardening. My gardens have not yet looked like Mel’s do in his book, video or website, though.

There, that’s my weekend update. Stay tuned for LOTS more excitement. Maybe someday!

Happy Anniversary, Ben. Here’s to four years of never fighting, always saying the right thing, buying the perfect home, and simply having the perfect life. It’s all turned out exactly the way we expected it to!

Oh, not quite. In fact, that’s a load of horseshit. But I wouldn’t want to have had any of the good, bad, horrible, amazing, sweet, gruesome, stupid, incredible or character-building experiences in these last 4 years (officially speaking, and many more years unofficially speaking) without you.

I love you, you big handsome turd.

(Remember, don’t ever change unless it’s exactly the way I want you to. And I’ll try to do the same. Also, let’s try to follow our dreams and not get caught up too much in life’s little tragedies. That sounds cheesy, but dammit, I mean it!)

Photos taken by eatch other at a Starbucks near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco last month. We were seriously enjoying our experience away from Utah and the fact that lots of people were drinking coffee and walking and recycling all around us. Not all at the same time, of course.

A couple days of stress later, we’ve decided to keep the satin-sheen red paint on the walls of our family room.

I managed to cconvince Ben that he did NOT need to repaint the entire family room again with primer plus two coats of paint.  The walls still need a third coat of red, though, and hopefully that will even out the splotchiness a little. I am very happy with this decision and hope that everyone is happy after the third coat of paint is on and the white accent wall is finished.

I wish I had done a little more research on red walls before diving in. Apparently it’s a lot harder to paint a room red than any other color. WTF? It’s just another color. But it’s also the color of red after it’s exposed to oxygen, so maybe that has something to do with the level of difficulty? The shade has a natural coagulant or some shit? Whatever, as long as it doesn’t scab up. That’s gross.

And suddenly I realize that I’m more tired than I thought and I may edit this post tomorrow morning to rub out that last paragraph. But then I’ll leave this paragraph in and leave you wondering if the scab paragraph is the one I’m talking about, or if there was another grosser paragraph that you never got to read.

Oh, what mysteries lie ahead of us! Joy and excitement and a good night’s sleep all around! 

In response to my previous post, "What percentage of geeks are vegetarian?" (prompted by an interesting email), I received this sub-question from "Mankoi" via email:

Just a thought on this, FYI. Most of my friends are geeks, and actually most are vegetarian. The ones who aren’t are usually the less geeky ones. I’m not though. Meh. I know it doesn’t really matter. Actually another interesting thing I found is that almost all of my geek friends (myself included) are Atheists. Do you think there is any connection?

Well, anybody want to share their thoughts on a connection between geekiness and atheism?

This post was mostly written and should have been published on March 11, 2008. 

According to a poster at the Utah Valley Regional Medical Center Emergency Room, the average  (national?) time spent in the emergency room is 2.5 hours. Ben and I were fortunate, because our trip there Monday evening, from entrance to exit, was a short two hours.

Ben dislocated his shoulder last night [March 10] in a pretty bad way. He has a history of shoulder dislocation, and because of that we’ll never know how far he may have gone as a baseball player. He runs like a gazelle and fields like nobody’s business… but throwing a ball in is pretty much out of the question.

Was he playing baseball when he dislocated it this time? No. Was he playing another sport? Nope. He was upstairs working on the house after work and the phone rang, but there is no phone upstairs right now, so he ran downstairs and grabbed the ball at the end of the banister to help him make the 180 degree turn into the hallway to reach the room with the nearest phone. Except… *pop* his right shoulder came out of its socket and he didn’t make it to the phone.

I was the one calling. Just to let him know that I’d stopped by the store after work and would be home late.

So my poor husband was writhing in pain and finally made it to the phone to call me back. But I was at the store, so I didn’t hear the phone ring the first two times… and when I did pick up the phone about fifteen minutes later, he told me in very short, frustrated sentences that he’d dislocated his shoulder… and I mistook Ben’s communication of pain for him being mad at me for not coming home sooner. Whoops.

I didn’t stick around the store much longer, and when Ben called me again I was in the car on the way home… and it was clear that I needed to get him to the emergency room STAT. Normally he can ease his shoulder back in on its own, but this one was staying belligerently out of its socket.

As I drove home, I was overwhelmed with guilt from not recognizing that he was in a serious amount of pain over the phone, from not being able to come home more quickly as soon as I realized what was going on, and (the big kicker…) from being the one to call and technically cause the dislocation. Oh, and I felt terrible for him for being in so much pain in the first place.

When I finally got home, I left the car running in the driveway (though I did tack on some extra guilt to my conscious for letting the car idle, even in an emergency situation). I escorted Ben into the car and tried to get him to take some ibuprofen to start reducing the swelling, but my man does NOT like to take "unnecessary" medication and wouldn’t take any. We even had some extra Lortab heavy duty painkillers left over from his visit to the emergency room in August he tore his leg muscle… but no, he refused to take anything. I wasn’t going to fight too hard against his stupidity while he was in pain, so I just became the ambulance driver and tried to avoid bumps because it quickly became apparent that they are the worst thing for someone whose shoulder is out of its socket.

A pretty sucky ambulance driver, though, because I wasn’t confident that I’d be able to find the hospital without taking a wrong turn. I knew how to get to the hospital further North because that’s where we went in August, but the one that’s closer to home is in an area with twists and turns that still confuse me when I have to drive around there. So I called one of our friends and had to briefly explain the situation.

While I was on the phone, before we’d hit the freeway, Ben started telling me to pull over because his shoulder was slipping back in. So I got off the phone, pulled over, and sure enough his shoulder "undislocated." And Ben breathed a sigh of relief and told me to just go home and not waste a trip to the emergency room.

"Though it did make kind of a crunching sound when it went back in," he said.

I laughed, threw up a little in my mouth, called him a dumb ass, and kept on driving to the hospital. Something instinctual telling me that if a shoulder is dislocated for an hour, and especially if it slips back in with a crunching sound, that an x-ray is probably in order. He admitted that it was still hurting, though not as critically as it did while it was out of place.

Then Ben got mad at me when I made him get out at the entrance to the emergency room while I went to park the car in the boonies. "I can walk," he said, clearly not envisioning his shoulder popping out of its socket as we walked like I was.

I think he said something like he’d never talk to me again if I made him to the apparent "walk of shame" into the emergency room. I rolled my eyes, as any sane person would, and told him something along the lines of "I’ll dislocate your other shoulder if you don’t get out of the fucking car." God, he’s a pain in the ass when he’s in pain. Remember, he still hadn’t taken any sort of pain medication.

We waited for a little while in the emergency room and humbly watched other people arrive after us and actually be seen by the doctor before us. People with heart or stroke issues or probably high fevers. Still, even when we were almost the last ones being forced to watch the awful local news station (I really, really hate local newscasts), we still made it back to radiology pretty quickly.

Ben had four x-rays taken, and reported that he had to move his shoulder in very uncomfortable ways to get into the positions that tech wanted him to. Happens to the best of us, right? Anyway, the emergency room doctor examined him and told him that everything looked okay in the x-rays, but strapped Ben into a serious immobilizing harness and made us take more Lortabs home.

Then we learned something that gave us hope and practically turned this sneaker-wearing emergency room doctor into Obi-Wan: that there was a surgery Ben could have that might repair his shoulder to workable order. He’d had an arthroscopic surgery 11 years ago, but apparently that was the "light" shoulder surgery and clearly hadn’t worked for him. The other option is more of an open surgery that would put Ben’s arm completely out of commission for several weeks, but the end result (with proper physical therapy) could mean that Ben would one day be able to throw a baseball overhand again. Not Major League fast, but overhand at least.

For me, and I think for Ben, it made the emergency room trip worth it.

Since then, he’s seen an orthopedic surgeon who was eager to cut his shoulder open ASAP and promised a good recovery. Ben wants to wait until fall to have the surgery so that he can finish some more stuff around the house and take care of the yard over the summer. We’re both excited about the prospect of his shoulder recovering to a normal capacity, but nervous about the actual surgery part. And we’ve put off discovering what percentage of the surgery our insurance will cover.

Don’t worry, we still have a few Lortabs leftover from the hospital "starter pack" to carry us through the shock of how much the surgery might cost us…

If you want to read my random thoughts throughout the day, and I haven’t posted on my blog, maybe you’ll find something interesting in my new twitter feed:

http://twitter.com//innergeek

I think that this may come in handy if/when I go to San Diego Comic Con in July, since I can post a thought to twitter from my mobile phone. How exciting! Seriously, I can’t stop thinking about Comic Con and how much I really want to go.

Last weekend, Ben and I primed the finished portion of our basement that is the family room with the big TV. Like all areas of the house that we have not yet painted, it had shiny, textured beige walls and ceilings. Ick.

We finally decided that we would be brave and paint it red. Yes, a lovely red that’s not too bright and not too dark… Behr has a color called "Cherry Cobbler" that we decided would be perfect. (Hurry up and buy it before we change our minds!!!)

So after spending a few evenings this last week touching up the (dark base) primer and painting the edges of the ceiling white (we’ll finish that last because we have plans for ceiling lighting), yesterday we started coating the walls with red.

It was exhilarating, and because the room is fairly large, took some time. 3 CDs and a movie’s worth of time, to be exact….

"I am Sam" movie soundtrack
The Barenaked Ladies’ "Rock Spectacle"
Green Day’s "Insomniac" album
and the first "Back to the Future" movie 

And after we finished, we noted how brilliant the room seemed, and how the light still reflected off the walls. The color is fantastic and I love it. But… a little more shiny than we were expecting.

In fact, just as shiny as the icky beige walls had been. WTF? Turns out that the beige walls were Satin enamel, just like the new Cherry Cobbler paint that we’d purchased. We never looked at the cans the previous homeowners left for us.

I don’t mind the shiny red as much as the shiny beige, but the sheen is driving Ben to the brink of insanity. What to do? Should we suck it up and buy another can or two of Eggshell-sheen Cherry Cobbler? Would that work? Or should we just sell the house and move into a double-wide to avoid the hassles of being a privileged homeowner?

I see a red wall and I want to paint it black…. 

Here’s how I get myself into trouble when browsing teh interwebz first thing in the morning while waking up with coffee. I attribute today’s "shiny!" attention span to the splash of French Vanilla International Delight non-dairy coffee creamer in my normally black–and-strong coffee.

So I remember that my subscription to Toyfare magazine needs to be renewed, but there’s no "renew online" on the stub that I got in the mail (btw, Wizard: that’s stupid). So, refusing to renew by mail because OMG who does that anymore, I go to wizarduniverse.com and find that of course you can renew online. And, for only a few dollars more, you can get an exclusive Futurama Series 1 Variant Dr. Zoidberg action figure by Toynami. 

Then, still budget conscious despite the caffeine high, I price check to find out how much the toy would cost without the subscription: $15 plus shipping. HELLO, I can get it way cheaper than that if I just add it on to the subscription that I was going to buy anyway!

But there are other Futurama Series 1 action figures in the regular line that I don’t have.

Doo d’doo… off I go to toynami.com/futurama.html and click "Where 2 Buy" and yes, I just ignore the fact that I had to click on a button in which a company has chosen to use the number 2 instead of the word "to." Whatevs, just show me where to buy mah toyz!

I recognize WickedCoolStuff.com
and go there, but find that they don’t have what I’m looking for. What do I instead see that I think is awesome and would be the perfect addition to the garden of my looks-normal-on-the-outside house? A Wizard of Oz Wicked Witch of the West frickin’ LEGS PLANTER. Nothing says domesticated oddball quite like one of these!

I don’t know if Wizard of Oz stuff can really be considered geeky, considering how ingrained in pop culture it is. But do you think that having this planter on my front porch or front garden would be geeky? Or just freakin’ awesome?

I wonder how quickly something like that would be stolen in my nice suburban Mormon neighborhood. Hey, it’s vandalaized once in a while just like any other suburb where meth and cocaine use are on the rise… I mean, Ben found toothpaste on his car one day, and neighbors informed us that they got toothpaste in their mailboxes. Dang kids and their petty vandalism. *shakes mouse like old man shakes a cane* 

Anyway, I need to go renew my Toyfare subscription and get my exclusive Dr. Zoidberg. I’ll hold off on the other action figures because I don’t really need them right now. But that reminds me… I think that the new Futurama DVD is out and I should order that, too… 

Aw crap. I don’t even have a PS3 or a Blu-Ray player yet, but Amazon.com has a Buy 2 Get 1 Free offer right now for Blu-Ray discs. Luckiily, the new straight-to-DVD Futurama movie (The Beast with a Billion Backs) isn’t coming out until June 24th.

It never occurred to me that a non-third world country would view cell phones as anything but ordinary at this point in the timeline of the technology-addicted world. But I never paused to think about the possibility that the Cuban government would have prevented people from getting them.

Oh yeah, communism still exists in some places of the world.

That changed today, according to a report from the Associated Press. Good for the people of Cuba. But too bad that the cost to get a phone and maintain a calling plan is so prohibitively expensive for the average person. Baby steps, right? I hope this is a sign of better things to come for them.

Even with a work day that extended until 8:15pm, I finished my taxes with 24 hours to spare. Hooray!

Probably would have been done sooner had I not encountered unclear and cyclical instructions for something really minor that ended up not being an issue after all. At least I’m 99% sure.  And so is Ben. So hopefully that adds up to 100%.

Here’s another April 15th resolution: to keep better records and document more receipts. I think I improved over last year, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

Maybe I’ll also shoot for getting everything done by April 13th? Errr… best not to be making too many promises!