zen.org Communal Weblog

I landed back in Ireland from California on Monday evening. We left San Francisco at a bit past 7pm PST on Sunday, and finally came into Dublin at 5:30pm GMT on Monday, making the first day of the week effectively vanish. I slept really well on the 10-hour flight, went to bed Monday night at a reasonable hour, and woke up Tuesday morning with a brief sleep-in from E. I had a full day Tuesday, and went to bed around 10pm….and found myself wide awake at 2am after only a bit of sleep.

Gahhhhhhhhhh. Now it’s 5am, and I might be tired enough to be able to fall back to sleep—for a couple of hours maybe. Perhaps I wasn’t quite as well-adjusted (open to interpretation) as I thought. The flight went so well, and Tuesday was on a good schedule, that I thought I was all set. Maybe it was arrogant of me to think it would be quite that easy. Another guy on the trip slept for 11 hours straight once he was home after resting for only one hour on the flight. Even though he suffered a lot by being awake for so long, I bet he’s not awake right now… 🙂

Just to let you know: One week, six days, 17 hours, 30 minutes and 52 seconds. 164 cigarettes not smoked, saving €51.48. Life saved: 13 hours, 40 minutes.

So. B’s in San Fran. And I’m home with P. And…the DSL box dies. A quick, sudden death. No lights, not even power. Can you say PANIC?! I mean, what am I supposed to do with NO INTERNET?!

Talking to B, it turns out that Declan, our friend up the road, has his brother-in-law’s old dsl box. I RUN up the road. Plug it in. And start geeking. Man, this is frustrating. It took a day and a half, 4 phone calls to Eircom (“We’ve never had that DSL box model…are you sure that’s the right model?” Yes, I’m sure, and we’ve had it for 3 freaking years, and you got it for us!!) Finally got Eamonn’s box working, and I have access. And at the same time, eircom (fondly called eircon by most of the net community in Ireland) finally realized that they were supposed to replace our dsl box a while ago with a Netopia. So that’s in the post now (supposedly…). Using the word supposedly is a requirement when speaking about eircom.

So I’m back up. 77 messages waiting for me. And I still don’t have all the normal features that I did with the other box. But I just have to wait for B to get back and finish the full install of the box.

If I can just get eircom out here to fix their shoddy wiring where the dsl comes into the house, then we’ll be all set. Oh, don’t hold your breath….

Though I have nothing interesting to say, I just could not let a Wiccan holiday I remembered go by without saying something. So Merry Imbolc.

I tried to round up a group of people at work to go to a local pub for lunch and toast Punxsutawney Phil, but I had no takers. Sigh.

I cared nothing about the Simpson trial, and I care less about the Jackson trial. Please, somebody make the coverage go away!

I’ve been in California now for almost a day, back in the old stomping ground after we left nearly 5 years aso. The Silicon Valley town where we lived, married, and finally decided to leave for Ireland because we didn’t think it was our final stopping point. It’s all quite the same, but only to the extent that familiar sights try to cling onto strangely-faded memories. Streets look similar, but the smaller veins running through Ireland make these roads now seem monsterous. Freeways are unimaginable, yet flying along 101 in the evening sure does feel like more fun than the crowded stumbling of the M50.

We went out to dinner in last night (out being away from the hotel), still awake after getting up in Ireland on the same day 19 hours earlier. The group of seven who came to CA for a week’s serving of meetings all sat down at a restaurant in Mountain View for dinner. Sushi Tei is a very fond memory of living here, and the source of the best sushi we’ve had anywhere. Run by a Japanese fellow named Isaka and the woman who worked with him for years at another sushi restaurant, Sushi Tei was their effort to put into reality their own idea of the perfect sushi experience.

Tonight back at the hotel, I discovered that Wi-Fi works in the bar letting me write this on my Zaurus. Hee hee. Tomorrow morning is early breakfast, then lots of meetings being introduced to hordes of names I’m not expecting to retain just yet. (Name memory in that situation: double-plus un-good.)

Went to Fry’s today (more later about that) and got a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000 which I found is (again) supported under Linux. The big project is to make it happily communicate with E’s iSight and see/talk to both of them at home for less than a long-distance phone call. 🙂

Off to sleep, just as everyone in Ireland is waking up. How weird.

I just got my Irish passport in the post! Whoo hoo! It has these neat security features in it…no, not drop of blood for DNA testing. My pic and signature have been digitally engraved into a hard plastic page. And then, the clear plastic coating on top of it has my pic digitally engraved into that (just seen from an angle-type), and the other side has it too. It’s really neat.

Now fingers crossed that P’s passport arrives before we leave….

Things are just…being. We did, however, get the results of P’s allergy blood tests back. Apparently, we’re doing everything right. His IgE levels for milk and egg have gone down. Not huge amounts of down, like outgrowing it, but enough to give us hope. Our avoid list is still the same. But…since we were the ones who mentioned the tomatoes thing to the doc, he didn’t test tomatoes. So we’re testing them at home today. First step: cut tomato in half (okay, first step was running up to friend’s house up the road to see if we could borrow a tomato.) Second step: rub a little of the cut side on P’s arm. Third step: give it a few minutes. If any reaction, stop there, and keep avoiding toms. If no reaction, tomorrow rub a little on his bottom lip, and see if there’s a reaction. Again, if reaction, stop. If no reaction, move on to the next day, and let him lick the tomato. (You get the drift.)

Do it slow and easy, and see where were are. I would literally KILL to get tomatoes back.

There might be reactions with wheat and potato and beef, but not enough for the doc to make us restrict those. So, with all that, we’re still in a holding pattern. But there’s a good chance that he’ll outgrow it all. Phew. Nice to know that we did the right thing.

Food allergies suck.

Okay, so day 3, using patches, gotta start somewhere. Moral support accepted. Two days, 17 hours, 42 minutes and 33 seconds. 32 cigarettes not smoked, saving €10.27. Life saved: 2 hours, 40 minutes.

I’ve been drowning myself in Quicken trying to get our records up-to-date. (I looked at GnuCash a couple of years ago but there were some things it didn’t do for me to get me off of Quicken.) Everything up til now has been fine. I’m nearly done with entering and balancing stuff, with only a couple of accounts left. The first is on hold until the credit card company sends me statements that I never downloaded (and thus cannot reach, since they only let you get the last five). Oh well.

The second account is by far the most complex of all of them, and of course I let balancing slide for months on end. The result wouldn’t be that big of a deal, just some time, except for the “original statement value” number I’m supposed to see when I next reconcile the account. It says the previous statement balance was a number that has actually never existed on any statement. Hmm. Then I looked at one part of the account, and a number was way wrong—instead of something like 1,234, it was 0.007148393. A bit more than a year ago I moved from using Quicken under WinXP to using it under Linux with Wine. It’s been really strong and good, but somewhere in the move something (and perhaps it was be copying the wrong qdata.qdf file) got messed up. I can’t revert back to a previous version, since I’ve just finished entering and balancing all of the other accounts.

Now I’ve got to go back about 2-1/2 years in statements and find where the discrepancy starts.

Fuck.