posted 2006/06/28 at 21:26
A few days after Rowan's passing it was hard not to notice both my mother and my sister doing a lot of coughing. Grief, like we all felt after Rowan passed away, does have a tendency to seriously weaken the immune system.
Here's the thing, though: a couple of days after the two of them started coughing so badly, I noticed a sore throat, and I figured that I was going to get sick too. The thing is that this sore throat has been going on for about a week now, and it gets better and worse, but nothing's accompanying it. (I did have some bad sinus headaches a couple of days ago, but those were more due to the weather than anything else.)
This is pretty much what happened after I got back from North Carolina in March; back then the entire family had gotten sick while I was away, and for about a good month there my throat was killing me and I figured I was on the verge of a full-fledged illness. I never got sick, perhaps because I was loading myself up on lemonade and salty snacks (I wasn't worrying about dieting back then) and stopped nearly all exercise, but it was a huge pain.
Ever since this thing hit it's been hard for me to do much of anything because I don't want to risk aggravating whatever this thing is and winding up getting sick after all. At the same time, though, I doubt that I can count on this thing going away on its own. Perhaps I need to get back in the swing of things here, and just take my chances ...
posted 2006/06/25 at 23:22
One week later and I'm still looking for Rowan in her old corner of the living room every time I go downstairs. For the most part I think my life has gone back to normal, but damn if I still don't miss her.
Don, what are we going to do if we get to October and we end up with a Tigers/Mets World Series? You know I'd rather have the Tigers lose the series to the Mets if they have to lose it, but ...
Another sports post will come shortly. I'd actually had this other one planned out for a while now, but it didn't seem right posting it this past week.
posted 2006/06/24 at 23:15
In yet another sign that the comforts of my childhood are slipping away from me, while out and about today I noticed that the K-Mart a mile from my house is going out of business. This comes as no shock, considering it's on the same corner where that Wal-Mart opened up a few years back, but it's still a disappointment for me.
See, back when I was real young and my only real mode of transportation was a bicycle, that K-Mart was pretty much the only store I could go to without having to cross a major road, and of course my parents didn't want me crossing major roads back then. I can remember back when that K-Mart had a decent-sized arcade back when arcades were the new big thing. I can remember picking up the four different coloured Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles squeeze bottles that K-Mart offered in their little food alcove. I can remember picking up Super Mario Bros. 3 there.
K-Mart isn't exactly a mom-and-pop store, and on that level I can't say that I'll miss them on that level, but I still have a lot of memories tied to that place, so it's still kind of sad to see it go. That, and the store being a victim of Wal-Mart engenders some sympathy in me.
posted 2006/06/22 at 13:59
CNN.com: Toledo hit with five inches of rain in five hours
According to local television news reports, some places near the Ohio/Michigan state line got closer to around a foot of rain in that time. Given that we're much closer to the state line than the main weather spot here (Toledo Express Airport), I'd venture that we got somewhere around eight to nine inches of rain last night. We're not in any danger in this part of town, but most of the rest of Toledo wasn't quite so lucky.
Oh, and guess what? Another line of storms just crossed the Indiana/Ohio state line and is headed right for us. Good grief ...
posted 2006/06/21 at 22:14
I figure that none of you are weather junkies, even on the small scale that I am. Sometimes I feel like I mention weather here too much, but right now every local television station is saying that we're in the midst of the worst thunderstorm in Toledo in at least the past thirty years. At about the two-hour mark of the storm my father went out to move one of our vans, and he checked the rain gauge on the way in and said it was at four-and-a-half inches. That was an hour and a half ago, and it's been raining ever since.
We're on high ground here so we're not in any real danger (we haven't even had a moment of power loss), but this has been quite a happening. I'll write more about it once we get the final numbers in, but for now, if by some chance you do hear about Toledo getting socked (I know we're a big story on The Weather Channel right now), we are not in any danger.
posted 2006/06/20 at 13:51
Yesterday in the early evening I started feeling super-tired, so tired that I thought I might actually go to sleep before sundown. Somehow I didn't end up going to sleep until five in the morning. I honestly don't know how much I've been sleeping or haven't been sleeping lately, but it probably hasn't been enough.
Now I'm going through that old dilemma of when it should feel right to go about my normal activities. The night Rowan died, I had to fix myself dinner (even though I had no appetite I had terrible hunger pains, and those combined with the sinking feeling in my stomach made me too much of a fainting risk), and even that somehow didn't feel right. I chatted with a couple of my closest friends on instant messenger last night, and that made me feel better but then I wondered, do I have a right to feel better now? Shouldn't I still be in mourning?
When did it become okay to go on after Alex died? When did it become okay to go on after my grandparents started passing away?
The worst part is that I know, this whole family knows that Rowan wouldn't want us to be sad for her, especially since she pretty much picked Skooter out as her replacement (and Skooter will finally get moved into the main house here soon). That doesn't mean we don't miss Rowan terribly, though. That doesn't mean the pain of missing her doesn't hurt like a motherfucker.
I've been through this before, so I should know the answers, but so help me I can't figure this out for the life of me. Can anyone help?
posted 2006/06/19 at 18:53
I just got back from Rowan's grave. We buried her in a little corner in the backyard by where Alex (our cat who died after a bout of senile dementia) is buried, and planted her catnip plant (in the foreground of the picture I posted last) on top.
I'm doing a lot better than I thought I would. Still, whenever I go downstairs and look in that corner of the living room that Rowan made her own after the house was rebuilt, it's hard not to feel the emptiness in there. I still catch myself repeating the words "Rowan is dead" over and over in my mind, as if part of me still doesn't believe it.
I may or may not have more to say about Rowan later. For now I think I just need some time to deal with my emotions and process them.
posted 2006/06/18 at 21:26
Rowan, our cat of over twenty years, passed away tonight from complications arising from her old age. She passed away peacefully here at home, surrounded by all the people who loved her these past twenty years.
If all of you could say a little wish or prayer to help guide Rowan on her journey to meet Herne the Hunter in the afterlife, I would appreciate it. Thank you.
posted 2006/06/17 at 22:12
New York Daily News -- Keith Olbermann forced to apologize for obscenity-laden e-mail responses to viewers
Ever since our local cable company finally started carrying MSNBC several months ago, I've been a fairly regular viewer of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, in part because I was a big fan of Keith's back in his ESPN days (and his first stint on MSNBC), and in part because I think Keith runs a pretty good show, getting to a lot of stories that the mainstream media doesn't get to, and not being afraid to point out when right-wing figureheads do stupid things. (Keith is pretty much the only nationally televised fact-checker for Bill O'Reilly.)
That being said, stories like this just show that Keith, too, can do stupid things himself. I can understand Keith's anger at the kind of vitriolic comments his statements engender, especially when the people making those comments are the kind of people who think that if you disagree with Dubya/Robertson/Falwell even in the slightest amount then you're a godless Communist traitor. Doubtlessly the comments Keith wrote those e-mails in response to were even dumber than Keith's responses, but that still doesn't excuse Keith for writing responses like he wrote. Especially in this day and age, given all the stories that have both been passed around offices and made national news, you'd think Keith would know better to write stuff like that when it's so easy for that kind of stuff to quickly make its way around the world.
posted 2006/06/16 at 17:59
Several weeks ago Mark got hired on full-time at the place he had been temping at. Earlier this week the company sent him on his first business trip, to Philadelphia, and he just came back about twenty minutes ago or so. Sadly, he has come back with a tale of financial woe that rivals the one that plagued me when I made my North Carolina trip in March.
See, what happened was that the company sent him out with a female co-worker and said that this trip was going to be all-expenses-paid. Once the two of them got to Philadelphia, though, they found out that the company hadn't paid for the hotel room, and that they were only going to be reimbursed for it later. The hotel room was around $150 a night, and Mark only had about $100 of cash or so on his debit card. (Apparently the other woman didn't even have that much money with her.)
What wound up happening was that yesterday my sister had to have my father go to Mark's workplace (remember, Heather doesn't drive), pick up his latest paycheque, then go to the bank and deposit it into his account. Needless to say, this isn't the best of situations right now, even though it looks like everything will get resolved much sooner than my situation was.
Still, for those of you who wonder why this family tends to stick together so much and not travel, both this incident and my problems in March should provide a good clue: Bad things happen to us when we try to leave this place. Seriously.
posted 2006/06/14 at 21:54
Between the bed I'm currently laying on and the keyboard I'm currently typing on, there is a gap of several inches on the floor. Since this space isn't big enough to get a regular vaccum in, and since I'm too lazy to get the Shop-Vac, an unbelievable amount of absolute CRAP builds up quite quickly here. It also doesn't help that for some reason, even though I usually keep my wastebasket in this very space, I still somehow manage to miss it on a semi-regular basis, resulting in even more crap piling up.
I have now started to tackle this area of my room (after busting my ass to take care of my closet yesterday), and while I was digging through old plastic sacks from various stores, I happened upon a very interesting book. I say "interesting" because it's a book from UT's library that I pulled for a paper I was doing last semester. Ooooops. Thankfully grad students at UT get extremely generous borrowing privileges, and even at this point in the summer I'll be able to return the book tomorrow and not owe more than three bucks on it, but still, my lack of cleaning skills/motivation is truly appalling. I think I need a maid or something.
posted 2006/06/12 at 17:57
We lost cable modem access at the house again overnight, and this time it's something on our end as opposed to the network outage from a few weeks ago. I had to come to campus just to check e-mail and stuff, since no one will be out to the house to take a look at things until tomorrow.
I can't get into too many details right now, but things are starting to look way up for me here, provided I don't blow the opportunities I've been presented with here.
One thing that's still got me down, though, is that over a year after asking Spectrum to return all of the various things of mine that people have, no one has even attempted to get in touch with me. If anyone from Spectrum is reading this (and I know at least two people who are), my patience is at an end. Either I get my stuff back, or I start sending the cops to your apartments and houses to look for the stuff, and we both know what else the cops will find if they go to your places. I want my stuff back, NOW.
posted 2006/06/09 at 22:55
Over the past week I've bought two separate plastic chests of drawers to put all my video game stuff in. The black wire pseudo-Yaffa blocks that had previously been holding that stuff (and allowing it to collect a nice blanket of dust) will soon be serving duty in my utterly disorganized closet.
Today I also picked up some cardboard filing boxes so I could move all of my old undergraduate papers and such down into the garage. I did this only because I was positively out of space in my filing cabinet, and I needed to move my graduate papers from the piles I was keeping them in on the floor into the cabinet. Now that this has been done, I actually have room for my yoga mat again, so hopefully I can start doing yoga again here soon.
This doesn't address the biggest storage issue in my room, of course, which is that I've needed more space for my books here for a year and a half, and I still don't know what I'm going to do. For now I'm probably going to buy a mini-tower since I have enough smaller books to fit in one of those, but I do not have enough space in here for another full-fledged bookshelf, and I have got to find a work-around for that soon.
Handling all of this, of course, is just a precursor to me getting a real computer desk in here so I can stop typing from my bed, which I'm hoping will help with my energy levels.
You'd think that after the fire I'd be better about hanging onto stuff, and in all honesty except for a few things (some CDs, some video games, my computer, my Popples), I think I'd be okay without that stuff. All things being equal, though, I'm still not in a rush to get rid of any of it. I swear, when I finally get my own place I'm going to need an extra bedroom just to keep all of this stuff in. Sigh.
posted 2006/06/08 at 23:58
I hope that all of you regular readers will do me the favour of using the .org to address several e-mails I've received over the course of the past couple of weeks.
Ahem.
WHAT PART OF "RETIREMENT" DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?!?
Thank you. We now return to our regularly scheduled weather discussion and whining.
posted 2006/06/06 at 18:14
To continue on yesterday's theme of why Toledo is such a stupid place, our local cable company -- you know, the one that cut everyone's Internet access for over twenty-four hours a couple of weeks ago or so -- has just started a new advertising campaign. The gist of the campaign seems to be, "We're so big we have to pay all these taxes, so you should be thankful because we fund your police and fire departments." Uh, yeah.
Oh, and you did hear about our mayor referring to our (African-American) fire chief as "King Kong," right? Then again, stuff like that is only to be expected from a man who took Gallagher's joke from the 1980s about giving houses by airports to deaf people, and during his first tenure as mayor in the 1990s actually tried to make that official city policy.
Don't get me wrong, I know that no matter where I live I'll be sure to find stupidity in one form on another. It's just that Toledo seems to have its own unique kind of stupidity that, try as I might, I can never wrap my brain around.
posted 2006/06/05 at 21:06
Earlier today I got an e-mail from the University of Toledo that started thusly:
Sean , this will be the last time we will communicate with you via your preferred e-mail address(es).
The e-mail went on to say that all e-mails pertaining to billing and financial aid and the like will now go to my UT e-mail account. It's not like I don't use my UT e-mail account, but I have to access it from a Webmail interface that I can only ever seem to get to work correctly on the campus computers. Previously UT let you specify an e-mail address to send such correspondence to, and I had them send it to my primary .org account, which is checked every ten minutes whenever I'm on my computer at home.
Given that UT is now stopping all snail-mail invoices and bill notices -- at the exact same time they're doing this big e-mail switch -- I guess this means I'll have to go over to UT to check my e-mail every once in a while. Since I'm not taking any classes this summer, this will also mean parking either at one of the metered parking slots, or in the pay lot.
Wonderful little racket they've got going there.
posted 2006/06/03 at 23:07
One of the things I'd wanted to do this summer was to get back into Karaoke Revolution, since I hadn't played it at all from when I got sick back at the start of January until after the semester ended.
I have been playing on and off here these past couple of weeks, but it's been kind of painful for me. I can't say that I didn't have an interest in Karaoke Revolution to start with, but honestly the main reason I started buying the games when I did was because I knew that Penny was really interested in it, and I wanted something more than just my DDR games to show her if I ever got down there again. Since then, of course, the Cincinatti situation blew up, and it's hard not to think of her when I do karaoke.
For the most part I feel like I'm over what happened with everyone in Cincinatti, but there are a number of parallels between what happened in Cincinatti and what happened with Spectrum, and given that these two situations have basically robbed me of all my friends within a reasonable driving distance (save Jessi), I get kind of sad and kind of angry when I'm confronted with just how lonely I am on nights like this. I can't even message most of my new friends in North Carolina tonight since most of them are over at a dance game tournament.
Like I said, this break is going to suck. Big-time.
posted 2006/06/02 at 21:56
Yesterday I meant to go down to Bowling Green to play dance games, but I took so long getting around to go out that I never could have gotten there in time to get a decent workout in, so I went to a coffeehouse and had a bottled water instead.
Tonight I was getting ready to go out to the garage to play at home, but just as soon as I started getting around after Countdown ended, the sky lit up with thunder, and I don't play when there are thunderstorms going on for fear of frying my stuff. (I don't even have a surge suppressor out in the garage.)
Even if there weren't still lightning in the sky, I've been fighting bad headaches all day.
Yeah, I'm still stretching for content here. Give me a little while longer here to recover from the last semester, and maybe I'll start coming up with profound things to say again.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon