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This is kinda creepy. We’re getting another winter storm starting tonight and going straight through until Monday. In fact, we are in a winter storm watch until Monday. Now, here is the creepy part. Here is our official forecast from The Weather Channel:

And now read my blog post from exactly 2 years ago. Pay close attention to the first paragraph.

Yeah, the same exact storm as 2 years ago. Creepy, eh?

In other non-creepy but great news, there were some new posters released for The Dark Knight released yesterday. Here they are:

The Batman on is my current desktop background. In fact, if anyone wants to buy me the Batman version for my living room I would love them. I really can’t wait until this movie comes out. Batman Begins was quite literally an almost perfect Batman movie and the way they are doing the Joker makes me believe that this one will be just as good. In fact, I may have to throw Batman Begins into my computer while I re-do my servers later. It has been a while since I have seen it.

In other news, Jess and I tried out the new thai restaurant in town last night, Thai Thai. I’ve only had thai once before and that was with Jess and Kelly in this little place in Easton, Pa. To be honest, I wasn’t that impressed with the food then. But after sampling their cuisine last night, I am a believer in thai food. It was most delicious. I had some fried calamari with a delicious spicy sauce as an appetizer, then some drunken noodles as my entree, and finished it up with some green tea ice cream for desert. It was all very delicious. In fact, I just had the rest of my drunken noodles for lunch before I started writing this. And for the quality of food, it was very reasonably priced. The decor is very nice as well. Jess and I had a nice small table in the front windows, and was watching all the Holiday traffic go by as we ate. Although, I think we did make some enemies last night. See, this was their opening weekend and they were beyond packed. When we walked in, there was about 15 people waiting in line for a table. I walked up to put our name down, and the girl asked if I had reservations. I told her we did not, and she asked if it was just the 2 of us. I told her it was, and then she looked directly over my left shoulder. She pointed to a small table in the window and said, "Go ahead and take that table over there." Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, we ran and grabbed the table, much to the cursing and dirty looks of all those waiting in line. Apparently it’s good to be only 2 people some times. Then, something really cool happened. We were sitting there waiting for our entrees, and all of the sudden the lights dimmed down. Then all these multi-colored disco lights started flashing form the middle of the restaurant. Then this dance music started blasting. Next, all the wait staff came out clapping with some flaming fried ice cream. Then the dance music turned into "Happy Birthday", and they all danced around the table and clapped as they sang along. It was very cool to see. After they were done done, the guy whose birthday it was yelled "ONE MORE TIME!", no they did it all again, this time with him grabbing a waitress and creating an impromptu rave. It was quite cool. When the music stopped, the disco lights died, and the regular lights came back up. I was kind of jealous that it wasn’t my birthday.

Today I’m headed down to the cemetery to disassemble the IT department I created there, and then it’s back here and deal with my own IT problems. Mostly, just moving around and condensing some of my servers that I have running here. Just trying to streamline things a bit.

So I’m off to a shower and then down to the cemetery. Later…

Life has really sucked lately.

Christmas is almost upon us, and I totally want to skip it this year. My tree has been literally destroyed by 2 demon possessed kittens, and no other decorations have even made it out of their respective boxes. My Christmas shopping is far from complete and I am just about out of fundage, and to top it all off, the house is a literal wreck. I told Jess during dinner last night that I don’t even want to go home at night anymore.

And that’s another weird issue. I haven’t been eating lately. At work, I just don’t have the time to eat so I usually work 8 or 9 hours straight without a break, and then when I get home, I’m either too tired to eat or start working on something and before I know it, it’s 11pm and time for bed. Last night I ate dinner with Jess, and that was the first meal I had in close to 30 hours. In fact, that was the last time I had anything to eat or drink, and that was over 16 hours ago. Sadly, and strangely, I’m not hungry or thirsty. Most weird.

So, I took the day off from work today for a few reasons. First, most people took yesterday off because of the snow, but I did not. True, I did leave 2 hours early to go pick up Jess, but I did put 6 hours in. Secondly, I have the weekend off, and I have a shit ton that I want to get accomplished. So, I figured that 3 days would be better than 2 to get everything done. So what do I want to get done between now and Monday morning? Here’s my short list: re-arrange the computer room (take down tech bench, condense servers, remove unused computers, monitors and parts.) to make enough room to put Jess’s desk and computer in here, being some new furniture from Nanny’s house over to make the living room more of a living room, put up my outside Christmas lights before the storm hits tomorrow night, completely redo my tree once the devil kittens have been taken to the SPCA on Sunday, put up the rest of the Christmas decorations, kill of that hulking mound of dirty laundry, and go down to the cemetery and completely move/gut the office before Monday morning.

Yeah, just a few things to do. Just looking over that list makes me want to runaway. But, I’m committed (or just insane) to stay and get all of this done one way or another. Since Sunday is going to be bad weather wise, I am hoping to have a few hours sometime on Sunday to maybe relax and do a few things that maybe I want to do. It’s probably not going to happen, but a guy can dream, right??

Yesterday was a good day, even though it got off to a weird, slow start.

See, Jess woke me up around 7:45am to let the dog out. While he was outside doing his business (not stock trading mind you) I hoped on the computer for a bit. At about 9am, I was awake, but still tired. So, since Jess was still sleeping, I decided to hop back into bed with her and take a nice morning nap.

Yeah…I ended up waking up around 3pm.

On the bright side, I felt totally refreshed!

So, by the time I woke up Kelly and Katie were already here to celebrate Jess’s birthday. So, after Jess got out of the shower, I quickly hoped in, and we headed to Tommy’s Pizza for some wings. The funny thing is that I took the girls to Tommy’s last year after we went snow tubing, and ever since they, all they talk about is going there for wings. Not that I blame them — they do have mighty awesome wings. Anyway, after the wings, we decided to check out a movie. After little debate, we all agreed what movie to go see.

I honestly didn’t know what to expect save for what I have seen in the trailer and previews.

I was blow away. It was like watching ‘The Fellowship of The Ring’ for the first time. I was totally drawn in by the story, the characters, and the visuals. Lately, I have been going through a bit of a steampunk phase, and this movie had very nice steampunk elements to it that I quite enjoyed. Add to the fact the movie ends very much like ‘The Fellowship of The Ring’ in that there are 2 more movies to come, it brings back great memories of going to see the new Lord of The Rings movie every December. I have to say that this is the first fantasy movie since LOTR that has really roped me in like this.

After the movie, Jess wanted to buy the book, so we headed to Barnes & Noble. Katie and Kelly had no complaints since they were craving some Starbucks. So, once we got there I was going to pick up my annual copy of FHM for the free calendar for the coming year. It was much to my surprise that they did not offer a calendar this year. I was honestly shocked since I have been doing this the better part of 5 years. Although after looking online, it was appear that they are offering said calendar, and Barnes & Noble just hasn’t gotten it yet. I’ll have to check back this week.

So, after walking through the store, I wondered into the sci-fi section like I often do. I started looking around and checking out some books, when 2 of them caught my attention. I looked at them quite a bit, and finally decided to purchase them. What the big deal about these book?? They’re Star Trek books. I haven’t bought a Star Trek book in probably close to 6 years. Why, I’m not sure. All I know is that I was thinking the other night how much I miss reading a good Star Trek book, and how I haven’t picked one up in ages. So, here are the books I picked up.

I started ‘Resistance’ last night since that comes first in the timeline, but sadly fells asleep after 25 pages. Jess was nice enough to cover me up and let me sleep on the couch with the cats for the night though. I didn’t fall asleep because the book was boring mind you. I have just been really tired lately. I think a lot of it has to do with my body trying to regenerate a finger. If only I had the power of Wolverine…

So, today is going to be filled with a little bit of laundry and some reading. I have a Christmas party yo go to tonight, but for the moments, that will be weather pending since this is how it’s looking right now.

It’s still difficult to drive with my right hand, so if it looks like it’s getting really slippery out there, I’m going to play it safe and stay home. Yes, it will be the first time missing our annual party, but it’s better than getting into an accident. Losing 1 body part a month is my personal limit.

So…yeah.

I took my bandage off and exposed the gelfoam. Here is a pic.

You can kinda see how much of my finger tip is missing. Anyway, I was told to run the gelfoam under warm water and to take it off.

Yeah, right.

We ran it under warm water, and got all the gelfoam off of the surrounding area. As soon as we tried to take off the wound area, I started bleeding just like I was last night. In other word, blood was just flowing out. So, I managed to quickly trim the gelfoam, wrap the tip in new gauze, and then tape it all down with an outside gauze bandage.

Oh yeah, I was also in so much pain after this that I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering and was chilled to the bone. 90 minutes and 2 naproxen later, I’m still in pain. The gelfoam is just going to have to wait until my follow-up visit with my family doctor on Wednesday.

After this ordeal, I decided to finally take a shower. Need help, I enlisted Jess. Anyone looking in through the windows (yes, we have a window in our shower) was probably a little confused. They would have seen Jess in the shower help me clean, me just standing there with my right hand in a blue latex glove being held in the air. If we had a little bad 70s music, it would have been a good opening for a bad porno. But that’s another post…

For now, I’m going to try and get a few hours of sleep before work in the morning.

Last night I did something stupid. Something very stupid.

I wanted to have a nice dinner for Jess. So, I decided since it snowed, it would be a nice contrast to have burgers on the grill. So I went to the grocery store and got what I needed. I waited for Jess to come home, and when she did, she wanted to go shopping for a new winter coat. I had no problem with this and we set off the the store. About 2 hours later, we came home with a new coat in hand. We were both starving, and could not wait to eat. I went out and fired up the grill while Jess pre-heated the oven for the french fries. I told her that I would cook dinner and to go start her homework. I when and got the mandolin slicer out and started to slice up some tomatoes. By this time, Jess had come out to see what was going on. I was just getting done peeling the onion and about to start slicing. I started going to town with the onion on the mandolin slicer when I felt something cold, followed by a loud gasp by Jess. I looked down and all I saw was blood. I quickly turned around and put my finger under cold water. Yep, I had done it this time. I took the top of my right ring finger off in the slicer.

For those of you who don’t know, this is a mandolin slicer.

That long gray part is the razor sharp blade. Now imagine running and onion up and down there as fast as you can to get nice clean slices. Now image you finger in the blade instead of the onion. Yeah…that hurts! There is a hand guard that came with it, but to be honest, I only use that with potatoes. Not anymore. I will be using that little guy from now on no matter what I am cutting.

So, seeing that my finger would not stop bleeding, we wrapped it in a wash cloth and headed to the emergency room. We of course had to wait a few hours to get seen, but in the end there was really nothing they could do. The piece I cut off was all flesh (and Jess threw it away) so they couldn’t stitch anything back on. All they could do was put something call gelfoam on what was the tip of my finger to try and stop the bleeding, wrapped it up in gauze, and gave me a tetanus shot. I was told to keep the gauze on for 24hrs, and not to use my hand during that time. Also, that this was gong to take a long time to heal.

Great.

Oh yeah, there was also a shit-ton of pain involved in all of this.

So, here is what my finger looks like right now.

I take the bandage off at 9pm tonight. After that, I have a nice box of medical supplies Jess and I went out and picked up.

I’ll be using everything in this box for the foreseeable future.

I’m actually kinds fascinated about all of this. I have to wonder how much of my finger will grow back. I’m going to take some pictures tonight of my finger without the bandage so you can see how much I really took off. They may not be the best pics tough since they said the gelfoam will create a ’skin’ over the wound to keep it from bleeding. We’ll see what happens in about 90 minutes or so.

Yesterday things started to get a little better. Jess finally started to feel the Christmas Spirit (up until yesterday, she wanted to skip Christmas all together) and she went Christmas shopping after work. Her side of the family is now about 50% done. She came home, and I was cleaning the house since her family was coming up. I was also trying to finish up the Christmas tree since she wanted everyone to see that as well. I got most of my ornaments up there (about 20 sci-fi ornaments) and the rest is now up to her. While waiting for her to finish up the dishes, I took a short nap on the couch. When I woke up, most of her family was there. I got dressed, and we waiting for the other half to arrive. They ended up getting here around 6pm, and set off for dinner.

Jess wanted everyone to go to her favorite restaurant up here, so we set a course for the Cooper’s in Scranton. Let’s just say the food was top notch as always and a good time was had by all. It was really nice to get out and have a good time, forgetting about all the problems we have right now. I had a really good talk with my brother-in-law, and I think things are going to work out nicely in the next year. If/when we do move, he said he can get me a job with his company (starting out at a very nice salary too!) and wants to partner up and expand his commercial computer business. He wants to branch into residential, but doesn’t really have the time to do so. So, if/when this happens, we talked about having me handle all the residential work and have him stick with the commercial. Considering this was our bread and butter at i/o Computers, that sounds like a fair shake to me.

We ended up leaving the restaurant around 9:30pm, and we headed home. We were both tired and Jess had some homework to do. We were both in bed before midnight. All in all, it was a pretty awesome night. We really needed a night like that.