Funniest thing ever!

More cool than funny, actually, but:

My dad and my husband are playing the Wii together. It's not funny in the conventional sense, I mean they're playing well...it's just funny because of all the things for those two to do together (paintball, trap-shooting maybe), I'd never imagine the Wii. It's so completely awesome. I love that my husband and my family get along, and even more than get along, that they accept each other. That's so incredibly rare these days.

The pain isn't new...

It's not so much the puncture wound in my tongue that's killing me, it's the areas in my mouth where the balls are hitting. I have a regular ball on the underside of my tongue smashing into my tongue anchor and another ball with a slave-ring grating against the roof of my mouth. I love the slave-ring, and I don't think that's the problem. I think the issue here is that my barbell is too long. I'm buying a half-inch one, hopefully it'll make it more bearable.

Pierced!

Finally, after three years without body adornment, I got my tongue re-pierced. And yay for no blood, even with blood-thinners!! Maybe nipples are next...

I went to Diversity with Tannah, Mada and Sanj for support. And so they could laugh at me afterwards. First thing I did was buy a stud with a slave ring, I've wanted one for years. And then after paying, I went in.

The girl was freaked out. She said my tongue was too small, and I'd been told that before when I got it done originally at Body Adornment. In fact, the piercer there took photos and had his apprentices come in and watch, as my tongue was "unusually small". Diversity's piercer initially said she wouldn't do it, but I told her it had been done before, and I could tell she didn't really want to but hell, I'd already paid for it.

The odd feeling about being pierced is feeling the needle actually make it's way through. Something similar is an epidural (feeling that edge into the spinal column or whatever) and getting sutured without anesthetic (feeling the thread slide through the holes the needle makes). It's painful, sure, but definitely interesting. But anyway...yeah, she forced the needle through my tongue and placed the stud. It hurt so much less than my time at Body Adornment. I was sincerely shocked. A little swelling but I could talk. (My supporters didn't think so; they made fun of me.) I was given aftercare instructions and off we went.

In the parking lot, someone noticed a pizza place right next door, and even though I was supposed to be buying my Gly-Oxide and such, they decided to eat lunch while I sucked on ice chips. Thanks guys.

My dream car.

Oddly, we were talking about this at work yesterday...yes, I have friends just as geeky as me in the trade when it comes to alternative energy.

It's awesome. 0 to 60 in four seconds, and top speed is about 130 mph. It's not a hydrid, or even a tribrid...in fact, it doesn't need gasoline--at all--as it's 100% percent electric. It's not geeky-looking like the SMARTcar or Corbin Sparrow.
Best of all, the electricity can come from anywhere: the receptacles in your garage, hydro, geothermal, and yes: even solar.
I love Nikola Tesla. I love renewable energies. I love not paying for gas.

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/GlobalWarming/story?id=3173316&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

Lebkuchen und apfelsaftschorle!

I went to the International Market and totally stocked up on German goodies. Haribo of course, milchreis, (not to mention the lebkuchen and apfelsaftschorle, of course), spaetzle...I decided that I miss Germany. I didn't think I would. Kandern more than Berlin, I think. Berlin was excellent because of the history, but Kandern was so beautiful, quiet. The Schwarzwald bordering everywhere we looked, it was something I really wish I could see again.

But anyway, no more sadnesses, I'm just going to instead eat myself into a state of joy with these goodies. I love the International Market.

You know, again, the feeling of betrayal. In November my parents and I came to an understanding: being adopted doesn't make me any less German. I can't erase my past (as much as I'd like to sometimes), and so there's no point pretending it didn't exist. So in the past few months I've been indulging in German heritage, I'm not sure why. Language, food, culture. Is that a bad thing? Is it a betrayal? Being adopted doesn't make me less German but embracing that aspect of my heritage doesn't make me any less a part of my family. I was chosen. That means something. It's deeper than blood.

Retrospective.

Interesting day. Hell, interesting month.

I'm not sure where I stand on many things right now. (This is going to ramble on a bit so feel free to skip to the end. There's your warning.)

I hate when I can't read people. I've found I'm the worst judge in character and I tend to gravitate toward unrealistic extremes: either I trust too much, or not enough, and I always seem to place the wrong trust in the wrong ones. I've been looking over my history on that for a week or so at least, now; this, after learning that some keep their dark sides more hidden than others. (Yeah, I'm guilty of it, too. But that doesn't keep me from hesitating now.) The completely psychotic part is the fact that I see this, I know it, and yet I don't stop or change it.

Wanting very much to stop seeing my docs again. I'm one of the awful patients that docs hate: when i start feeling better, I kind of stop taking meds and showing up to appointments. Granted, Coumadin is a long-term (if not permenant) medication, so I won't quit that, but my INR is more or less stable and so I want to put it to the back of my mind. Having it all constantly at the forefront, it's frustrating and overwhelming and I really did like that 4-month stint when I didn't see any of them. For all you exceedingly healthy people out there, I assure you that it was awesome, and not something to be taken lightly.
Mother's Day on Sunday. Not even going to get into that really. I'm half-hoping to come down with a 24-hour pneumonia just to avoid it. But really, that's not healthy, or decent, or cool. Yes, Denial and I are in a long-term relationship. And then work, and school, and exams, and new skills, and life on top of that. I'm not saying life is shit right now. I'm not even saying I'm stretched to my limit because honestly, I'm not. There's just alot going on right now, I guess.

"Aujourd'hui j'ai trop d'amis"...mais c'est ne change rien, et je suis encore seule.

Worn down.

I have been having chest pain off and on for over a year. ER docs dismiss it. Most tests show up negative. But I had that stroke in April and they found a patent foramen ovale, and the director of the stroke center said I needed to see a cardiologist about these pains, as they could be clots passing through that hole.

So I went.

The cardiologist didn't run any tests or draw any blood. He said I can't take the word of the hospital about my irregular heartbeat since all hearts beat differently, and so all are technically irregular. He also said since the director of the stroke center diagnosed my PFO, he's sure it's tiny since it wasn't a cardiologist who diagnosed it, and neurologists just wouldn't know any better. And that the EMT's who said my symptoms sounded like a blockage were obviously wrong, because EMT's are poorly trained and one can't expect much from them. So once he found out I worked construction, he decided I tore a muscle. He saw some scarring on my wrists for my childhood and tried turning my chest pain into a "cry for help". Plus, he wants me off the Coumadin, so he's calling my hemo to discuss that. My hemo made it clear that he doesn't like me on it either so I'm sure that's a done deal.

He swears the little umbrella or plug or whatever will "cure" everything. Except the director of the stroke center said blood thinners are necessary too, not just the procedure. Part of me wants to say fuck it and just quit seeing docs altogether. But I know I'm too stubborn for that, and I'll keep searching. It can just be so frustrating and overwhelming. Seriously I wanted to cry.

Home improvement adventure, Part 2

So...after all the electrical excitement, we had to actually finish the rest of the deal. At that point, I was really quite done with it all.

We learned dry-walling through guys at the jobsite and research on the internet. I'm quite surprised how well it came out. We didn't rush the patch job. At that point, we were on the fourth week, and I just really wanted the house back to normal. You see, week one was running speaker wires. Week two was installing the light fixtures and switch. Week three was trying to fix the panel and figure out what the hell. Week four was rocking half of two walls. We did that after work over four days, and finally by that Saturday, Tannah woke up at 06h00 and started to paint. we didn't want white walls, so he painted just the wall behind the TV a light blue. Came out real nice. I'm very proud of our home, and with every little project, we're making more and more unique.

We're still trying to figure out what to do with the extra wire we ran into the kitchen. (Which again was a mistake: I was in the attic, couldn't see, and accidentally drilled a hole with a paddle-bit two inches to the wrong side of the stud. So we decided a speaker can go there, and we ran a wire for it and went ahead and connected one. Still pisses me off.) The speaker connectors were the biggest pain. Go figure. I almost cried, because we needed to buy new speakers, because the old speakers were JBL box speakers and the brackets would cost me almost $130 -$200 so instead Tannah went and bought new Klipsch satellite speakers. Let me say this,we were eating Ramen for the rest of the week because we did not budget the price of the new speakers. But it was so worth it.

All things said and done, the living room looks and sounds amazing and Tannah's finally back to playing Xbox 360 on the HDTV. Which believe me, I actually missed that. I feel like I've transcended the stone age and finally brought back into modern world. And yet, we're not 100% finished, we still need to reconnect the kitchen fan (I re-routed the wire that was for a half-hot to the fan and deleted the original switch for it, while turning the half-hot into a normal receptacle) and Tannah wants to paint the arcade wall, but we're happy and both of our confidence(s) have been greatly increased. Honestly, the feeling of fucking up your house and having no one to blame but yourself is sure a feeling I never want to feel again.

Home improvement adventure, Part 1

You'll see somewhere in the middle why I wasn't able to blog about all this as it happened:

[Paraphrased from Tannah's post]

Basically a few weeks ago, Tannah and I started on our house projects. We both learned a small but important lesson: sometimes it's better to leave well enough alone. Tannah wanted to run 14-gauge speaker wires in the living room for the surround sound system. That was totally okay, but I never realized how many huge holes would be made throughout our little project. It took most of the day to run the front speaker wires and I had to crawl in the attic to run the wires for the back speakers. Most of you know how much I hate that: I'm both claustrophobic and fear bugs. Tannah felt so bad, since he was supposed to be in the attic, but he just couldn't fit through the beams. He told me that he's done his time in attics doing alarm and camera systems at work, but he'd never seen beams so damn close together. Honestly, I could barely fit through. Sadly, I was up there for most of the afternoon, and I was so so happy to be done with it. He had to feed the speaker wires to me because the roof and ceiling were way too close together for me to reach. All in all, the wires were run and the living room was one step closer to being finished.

So in the middle of the project, we convinced each other that we can easily add some track lighting into the living room. The only problem was, there's no light switch in there, and really, I'd never done anything like this at home. On a jobsite, there was always a journeyman to go to if I got confused; at home, I'm on my own. We would have to do everything from scratch, add a switch, tap into a power source and run all new lines. I'm somewhat confident in my abilities but still...I don't feel I've got the training I need up to this point.

Track lighting soon became recessed fixtures which soon became recessed fixtures with adjustable lenses. So within two weeks of our project(s), there were a freaking huge hole behind where the TV would be and several holes by a receptacle where we stole power for our living room lights. The problem was, we ran into a "little snag". Around 22h00, 14 April, we were finishing up and Tannah turned power back on for the rest of the house. Everything looked amazing. We marvelled at the new brightness and Tannah got ballsy and flipped the switch to turn off the lights and there was an arc, and that scared the living hell out of both of us. Next thing we knew, the house was dark. I mean the whole house, and it was like, "Oh fuck, we blew out the breaker". Something was wrong, when I turned the breaker back on the entire panel shook like it was going to explode and it was seriously arcing. Arcing like I hadn't seen since my joys of working temp power. We elected to turn off that specific breaker, and the house looked fine but when we turned on a light switch from anywhere in the house, the lights flicker then turned off. I thought something was cross-phased and neither one of us knew what to do in a situation like that. The sad and pathetic truth hit me: I may be learning to be an electrician, but I wasn't one just yet. Tannah sure as hell didn't know what to do, as he only worked with low voltage. Phone calls were made: I called Snow...which I felt horrible for doing, but I was positive that he would know a good service truck driver. I also talked to Sanj, who in turn called Sinisha, who was over in less than an hour.

Long story short, we had lived in our crippled home for about a week and a half and after hearing a creepy hissing from the panel, we finally called Nevada Power and because Jack found out that I was with the IBEW, he busted his ass to fix everything. It took him four hours before he finally got it going again. And as a souvenir, Jack gave me the half-melted lug that had originally held the rogue #2 wire, and we found out then that one of the line-side leads to our house was fragged. (In Tannah's words: "Basically, the big-ass wire from the street was never bolted down in our panel.") When the surge occured, the breaker should have just tripped, but because the line-side feed was loose, it damaged the panel.

The following weekend, Snow and Sanj came over to help me investigate, and oh my God, I was so seriously embarassed: the "cross-phase" wasn't that at all, but a really idiotic mistake I won't even admit to. Snow checked all the connections for me and walked me though the process of fixing my shameful mistake with unbelievable patience. Sanj, being the good friend that she is, hung out with us during this crisis. Tannah had just bought his Wii and both Sanj and Lys had a blast playing Wii Sports. That kind of normalcy kept us from freaking out.

So for those how are pissed because I didn't return your calls and emails and didn't update the blog, this was my excuse.