a visit to the nurse

so growing up in midland where there are effectively no (as in zero) trees, i was convinced that i was not allergic to anything. besides peanuts. i had a rude wake up call when i moved to college station. i am having a ruder wake up call here in the s.a. metropolis. the deal here though is that claritin pretty much rules, except it didnt do anything for my eyes. my itchy red swollen eyes that i wanted to just rub and rub and then just wanted them to go away. so for 2 weeks i kept thinking, this shall pass. finally i had to cave in and go see one of the nurses at work in hopes that i could get some stronger medicine that would take care of my allergies.

sharon goes to the clinic.
sharon waits for 25 minutes.
eyes are itching and red. i think my coworkers probably believe i'm on crack.
nurse comes out and asks who was next, woman cuts in front of sharon and 3 others.
sharon waits more.
sharon finally gets to see nurse.
sharon explains itchy eyes.
nurse stares into sharon's eyes.
sharon is uncomfortable.
nurse wonders could it be pink eye.
sharon reiterates that, while possibly pink eye, most likely ALLERGIES. PLEASE GIVE MEDICATION.
nurse suggests to wash my hands often( i later read that this is one of the job functions of the nurses at work, to encourage healthy habits)
sharon stresses that she does wash hands, please give me medicine
nurse cannot prescribe medicine, please come back tomorrow and see the doctor, after all, 'if you've been putting up with this for 2weeks, 24 more hours wont hurt you'
sharon's eyes itch and remain red like someone on crack.

so i went back to the doctor today. she talked with me for about 5 minutes. was like hmm sounds like allergies. let me give you some medication. this is more like it. 15minutes later, thanks to our onsite pharmacy, i was connected with eye drops and allegra. surely the next few days should go better.

thaddeaus and pierre

so i had bought these fish. and a frog. a cute little water frog. he is an albino clawed water frog. didn't know there were albino frogs? join the club. but he's quite cute. his name is thaddeaus. i also bought a catfish (pierre) and a bala shark (mo) and a bright orange mali (bling). i love these fish and they are quite entertaining to watch and they have a nice little home here at the apartment with me.

then it happened. i was finalizing my snack preparations to be the snackmaster of thanskgiving and about to head down to c.s. i look over, and, thaddeaus is trying to shove pierre down his throat. never mind that pierred is about 2x larger than thaddeaus and there is no way he could fit. nevertheless, thaddeaus has shoved pierre's tail in his throat and is trying to shove him further in, meanwhille pierre's whiskers are shriveling up and pierre is breathing laboriously. i banged on the glass and yelled at thaddeaus to stop. horrified, i watched as he ignored me. i continued banging on the glass and finally he spit pierre out. but it was too late. pierre lasted a few hours more but then passed on. the next day thaddeaus attacked mo, my shark. MY SHARK. now i'm just down to bling. he eats so much i think thaddeaus is scared to take him on for fear of choking. or maybe he's just fattening him up, then getting ready to move in for the kill.

see, this stuff is real

Kiss fatal for girl, 15Sat, November 26, 2005
By CP


SAGUENAY, QUE. -- A 15-year-old girl with a peanut allergy has died after being kissed by her boyfriend, who had eaten peanut butter.
The girl died this week, a few days after being kissed.
The teenager, who lived in Saguenay, about 250 kilometres north of Quebec City, received a shot of adrenalin immediately after being kissed, but did not recover.

http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/National/2005/11/26/1324591-sun.html

the verdict

well i finally picked out a new car. thanks for all your input. yesterday i bought this car, its a 2001 chevy impala with just under 12k miles. its got a nice v6, 3.8L under the hood and a great interior. i hope to see you soon so we can cruise around together.

who knew?

so tonite i made a trip to walmart to check out the boardgames. it brought back many memories from my youth. games like dont break the ice, guess who, battleship, electronic battleship, clue, monopoly, chinese checkers...they bring back fond memories. i settled on purchasing chinese checkers and scrabble for our playing pleasure.

after a close game of chinese checkers, i proceeded to play the best game of scrabble i've ever played in my life. yes, it was incredible, and i have no shame in exulting in that fact. our agreed upon dictionary was of course the ever popular....dictionary.com though i personally think merriam webster (m-w.com) is superior. at any rate, i learned a new word: en.

Printing. A space equal to half the width of an em.

And what is an em you ask?

Printing. The width of a square or nearly square piece of type, used as a unit of measure for matter set in that size of type. Such a measure for 12-point type; a pica.

so there ya have it. ya learn something new every day. that was my learning.

for a co-worker today, another lesson was learned. while in the company store burning some time during lunch hour, we were smelling a candle. a really gross smelling candle labeled Christmas cookies/ biscuits de Noel. the lesson was not that biscuits is french word for cookies, but rather that noel (fyi) is french for Christmas. who knew? sometimes you give the lesson, sometimes you receive it, but discovering new stuff is pretty much the coolest thing ever.

pick a car any car round 2

acura rsx










honda accord

there's got to be a better way

i'm 'on call' this week in case any horrid disaster should befall the computer world. this adds to my array of technicalness one additional cell phone and one additional pager, leading to the ridiculousness that is the picture above. surely, there is a better way.

day light savings time. nice to get an extra hour. terrible to lose it again in the spring. is it worth the hassle? i prefer the morning darkness when i'm not awake as i'm driving to work in the first place over the sadness that comes with darkness at 6pm as i'm leaving work. is daylight savings time worth it? is arizona really got it more together than us? surely, there is a better way.

made a return as an alumni to texas a&m this past weekend. it was excellent to hang out with some family members. it was strange to sit on the alumni side. it was awkward to be informed that the seats i had purchased in the MSC were on sale because the owner was in the hospital from a heart attack he had suffered the previous evening. i thought additional alumni were going to go into a state of shock as the team was dismantled by....iowa state?!?! surely, there is a better way.

pick a car, any car

so here's a fun little game for you. its called help thesharester pick out a new car by voting for one i'm currently considering or suggesting a different one for me to consider.

1. VW Passat








2. Honda Accord



(no pic)


3. Pontiac G6













4. VW Jetta









5. (fill in blank)

o great

so i'm trying to comment on my own blog and at first cant figure out what letters are on the stupid word verification thing, which as mentioned previously, is not really a word at all. but apparently its trying to verify that i'm a person rather than a computer. so if i cant figure it out, what does that say about me?

just another day at the office

dying to know what it is that goes on during my days at work? so am i!! this is a snall sample of what a typical day sounds like:

hey will you log on to IMS and ISPF and do the RL14392s and the CL19854. and if you dont mind taking care of the R6500 report today too.

o thats easy, we just roll up the c1492 and c3045 and c1032 components to get that.

yeah you'll have to ask the SME and then bounce it.

call up the DSA and see if you can get VPN to SCP.


its pretty ok i guess, but i wish i'd taken greek in school. cuz it sounds like they are speaking it at work.

congratulations!

go astros.

a post about lance

so this is kind of a random post because i've been away from my fave place of gresham for quite some time now, but i just wanted to mention what an incredible guy lance is. he is the youth minister at ggbc and he and his wife jen are some of my bff fo shizzle. they are probably the reason i ever went back to ggbc, because that first summer i went they invited me to help at the youth in the evenings, and then would also invite me out to go see movies or chill at their house. then this past summer i got to help out with the youth ministry some more, and go to centrifuge & world changers. pretty much lance is the only person that i've EVER seen eat 10 dumdums at one time. and it was pretty much hilarious. they have a difficult task at their church but they also have some of the coolest youth ever and they do a rock solid job of helping students grow in Christ and leading students to know Christ as their Savior. anyways, he & jen rock my face off. i wish that you could know them because i'm convinced they are 2 of the most coolest people in the world.

p.s. did you talk to joe today?

escalators

i'm not gonna lie. one of my favorite things about work is the abundance of escalators. there are not a whole lot of escalators in midland, zero in particular at midland park mall, so i can remember as a child particularly finding great pleasure in riding up and down an escalator. you'd think i would have grown out of this by now, but i must admit that i still enjoy it. a lot. i've never seen taller escalators than those buried deep underground in the tube in london. you quickly realize that you must stand on the right, walk on the left because some people, are in quite a hurry. sometimes you are that person. and people standing in the middle=uncool. but anyways, those things are huge!! we don't have any so huge at work, but we do have about a bazillion of them.

this morning at about 7.15am I was groggily making my way up the maze of escalators from the depths of the parking garage (which is really quite the process). I'd almost made it out when I decided to try to clip my ID onto my jeans pocket (hooray casual fridays). Normally this is not quite such an ordeal, but perhaps because it was so early in the morning or perhaps in my excitement over the escalators, i dropped my ID. I was already nearing the top and I could see the steps disappearing viciously into the floor. I think I then uttered an audible gasp. Two scenarios flashed through my head, the first that my ID card was simply sucked into the stair sucker never to be found again, costing me a small fortune and some job repercussions, not to mention some humiliation. The other scenario was the ID card catching in the stair sucker and causing the whole escalator to jam, and leaving it painfully obvious to security just who screwed it up, since my name is on the ID. Luckily, I, butterfingers, was able to snatch up the ID just before it was sucked away. And I clipped it on my jeans and went to work.

now that's more like it

so yesterday i didnt' have to go to training class, instead i got to work alongside my mentor, learning how to prepare some reports and about systems that i will be using. he also took me around to meet some people from other teams that i will be working with. i did take a few hours of online training classes, but just doing something at least semi-productive for most of the day made time go by sooo much faster than sitting in class, and it made the day much more enjoyable. of course other factors include a sudden change in the weather from gross hot to oh my goodness chilly but INCREDIBLE and also casual dress friday. or maybe it was the frappucino i had. either way, yesterday was pretty alrite for being at work on a friday.

further excitement came from realizing that i'd had my contacts in the wrong eye for the past 3 days or so. my left eye is significantly more blind than my right eye, but somehow i'd messed up my contacts and somehow NOT FIGURED THAT OUT for 3 days of being blind. but yesterday at work i couldn't figure out why i couldnt see my mentor's computer screen even after he'd adjusted the resolution. it dawned on me as i practiced closing one eye, then the other, that i could only see blurryness out of both eyes, yet my contacts were both in. sure enough, this morning i switched them and it all became clear.

last night i went with some folks from church downtown to investigate 'first friday', a street market similar yet quite inferior to portland's saturday market. so we walked around looking at street vendors and listening to local bands. it was alrite, but portland clearly has it going on in this type of venture. today i was going to meet up with some friends to watch the red river shootout, but as i drove up the place was flooded with burnt orange vehicles and everyone walking in was plastered with tu fan gear. if it was all maroon and howdys, this site would warm my heart, but hypocritically this site makes me nauseauted and wonder what extremists/losers are inside. it was too much for me to handle. so i turned around came home...and turned the game on tv to pull against all odds for the sooners.

quote unquote

from alias-

syd: marshall, its me
marshall: oh yeah, i know. i gave you your own ring tone. so. did you find the bomb?

syd to weiss: i will see you soon. God knows i have plenty of frequent flier miles.
weiss: i was just thinking about d.c. in the summer. i'm a sweater.

*if weiss goes too, then i officially cannot STAND alias.

from Bible study-

jeremy: sara and i, on our honeymoon, i got to hold an alligator. yeah, it was so cool. oh yeah, and we went to the holocaust museum. i'm really good at planning stuff like that obviously. thats why we dont celebrate our anniversaries, because i clearly would mess a thing like that up.

from kara's away message-
people just totally came over and caught me in my robe. i can't decide if that is sexy or loserish.


from my brain-

hip hip hooray for friiiiiday.

i'm sorry

an online card from my mom that will make you laugh.

*i hope you already read it b/c i broke the link b/c i dont want the whole world to know my parents email address. but it was a super funny card. holler if you missed it and i'll send you the link.

go figure

so it wasn't quite the weekend i had envisioned, but i guess is should have seen it coming when vaughn was killed on thursday night. i mean, talk about a downer of a way to start things off. but lets say beforehand i felt maybe a bit like a piece of chewed up gum, and afterwards i felt like spit out gum on the bottom of someone's shoe who just happens to be climbing to the top of a mountain.

there is definitely something therapeutic about seeing friends from old school times, particularly when everyone is doing awesome in life and are succeeding at levels you had previously only dreamed about together. to see what God brings into fruition in your friends lives is pretty much awesome. also having been exclusively hanging out with people i've known for less than a month, seeing old friends was particularly pleasant.

so tonite i hit up barnes & noble for one exciting night. ok, so it was better than watching more tv, but perhaps doesn't warrant the word exciting. but one can always find interesting books there. there were two that stand out in my mind from tonight. the first alarmed me: it was entitled God's blogs, and apparently the author had made up postings for God's blog. imagine. typing God's blog for him. imagine that there's a book about God having a blog. crazy times.

the other one was a lexicon of intentionally ambiguous recommendations (LIAR) when writing refrence letters. you can be honest without being brutal, a key skill you must admit, by saying things such as the following.

I cannot recommend this person too highly.
I recommend this candidate with no qualification whatsoever.
He has made immeasurable contributions to our firm.
In all the discussions she and I have had over the years, her salary never came up.
I simply can't say enough good things about him.
I am sure that whatever task she undertakes -- no matter how small -- she will be fired with enthusiasm.
I am pleased to say that this candidate is a former colleague of mine.
She is always trying.
He is a difficult man to replace.
She is one of the most discriminating people you'll ever meet.
He will take full advantage of his staff.
She takes a lot of enjoyment out of her work.
His input was always critical.
I found myself frequently raving about her work.
I would place this student in a class by himself.
She is now ready to strike out in a career.
He is resigning a position that he has held with our firm for years. I truly wish there were more people like him.
We were teetering on the threshold of bankruptcy last year, but her efforts pulled us through.
For the services he has rendered to our firm over the years, we find ourselves deeply indebted.
She works without direction.
He works effortlessly.
To get the job done, we need ten employees like her.
Attacking a difficult challenge, she doesn't think twice.
You should seriously consider initiating an offer since she probably won't apply herself.
When he worked for us, he never did anything halfway.
We were forever asking her for new ideas.
You can't offer this man too high a salary.
How did she manage those who worked for her? Quite fairly.
There is nothing you can teach a man like this.
She was never away from the job too long.

(no, i didn't sit there and write all these down. they are from here

blog killer

i've been reading up on some blogging legalities, and it seems that once again in our society the misdeeds of a few have brought punishment for everyone. blogging about the workplace is generally considered taboo and is becoming increasingly illegal to mention much of what goes on behind those walls, or in my case, the compound. a pretty cool compound, but still. add to that a layer of intense information security native to my particular workplace, and the many funny comments and happenings, and also the strange little interesting things that go on are not bloggable. which really threatens to kill, or at least hamper, my quote based theme and also much of the events that would give me material to blog about. but i'm trying to get the hang of relating my life to you without being shady in the blogger world.

p.s. did i mention, as a follow up to an earlier blog, that i bought with birthday moolah from my parentsies Adobie Premiere Elements & Photoshop Elements???? heck yes i did!! much greatness. so little time to enjoy.

those words

those words
they sink in deep
deeper than my own thoughts
right into the core
of who i am and
who i want to be
and it hurts worse
than i want to admit
and i'm not sure what
to do with
those words

waiting

you didnt look comfortable as you
sat there waiting for your turn
and it seemed like the comments of those
that passed by
hurt you more than the things you'd seen
and the memories crowded around
you served more fury than satisfaction
maybe if given a chance to redo then
you would not choose the same track
but as you sat there waiting
i was watching and i was
waiting for you