Friday, January 03, 2003

Lost a year somewhere

One of those thoughts that crossed my mind today... I feel like I lost a year. Call it a side-effect, a symtom, or a direct result of major depression that you just stop moving. A year ago I was thinking about buying a house, which may or may not have hastened or slowed hitting bottom 5 months later. I feel like I've fallen completely out of the info-loop (true) with regards to who now has kids, who's married, and other stuff like that. Fortunately, I have friends who understand why I dropped out of the loop.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 11:20 PM

Stop the world

... I want to get off

At least, that's the way the phrase usually goes. One of the things that is different between how I was back in June versus now is how I react to messages on the answering machine. (I know, small silly thing, ne?) Now, I've always screened my calls (now I use Caller ID instead of always letting the machine pick it up) for about 10 years now. (I don't even know if I can explain this.) So, when I was in the pits, I just let the machine pickup every call. This means of course, that if there is a message that needs replying to I'll need to call the person back.

Except, that I'd put it off... I wouldn't play back the messages, but rather just let the machine sit there and blink. Why I wouldn't play them back? Hard to explain unless you've been there. Basically, you're operating at what feels like zero emotional capacity. You just don't feel like you can absorb / handle / deal with the uncertainties involved with returning the call (will they be in, will I have to deal with a receptionist, am I going to be turned down, some fear of rejection, or other social phobias will take root). But the key thing to remember is that you feel like you're already past your capacity to deal with life, so the operating mode that you're under is designed to protect you from the unfamiliar, the not certain.

So, every few weeks I'd suddenly just delete all the messages on the answering machine without even listening to them.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 11:11 PM

USB 2.0 Drives

If you've never used an external USB hard drive, you're missing out on a treat. Especially if your computer has the new USB v2 port(s) which is much, much faster then the original USB v1.1 ports (with USB v2 I can copy 10Gb to the drive in about 90-120 minutes, maybe faster). That's fast enough to be primary data storage, while the old USB v1.1 ports were only fast enough for backup storage (preferably after-hours).

One of the things that I like to do with old 3.5" HDs that I have laying around is to put them in a USB hard drive enclosure (IOGear ION 2.0) and use them at the office for folks to backup their laptop files to (using Second Copy 2000). The USB enclosure only costs about $100 and is an inexpensive way to put those older 10-40Gb HDs to work. Second Copy 2000 is also very easy to configure, if the USB drive is connected then the backup happens, otherwise Second Copy 2000 just sits quiety in the system tray.

The other thing that I've done is put all of my music on one so that I can shift it around from system to system as I need (I own a good number of music CDs and still have a bunch that need to be ripped to MP3). The only time I use CDs is in the car, and even there I have a MP3 player (reads the MP3s off of a CD or plays audio CDs) - so most of the time my CDs stay in a storage box in the closet.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 10:55 AM

Yawn

So I'm not sleeping well the past few days... I'm drop dead tired, so I go to lay down and either can't fall asleep or I get a case of the twitches. (I think it's a side effect of the EffexorXR. The involuntary muscle spasms that your body does when falling asleep end up "cascading" into a full body twitch. Which, of course, tends to wake me back up instead of letting me fall asleep.) I may have to change rooms, or change up something else, because at night I'm either too hot or I'm too cold (and I tend to get the twitches more often when a part of me is cold). It's very hard to find the happy medium at the moment, especially when I'm already not sleeping well.

So this is the beginning (middle?) of the expected downswing after almost 3 weeks of spinning like a top, demolishing things on my task list that have been there forever. I need to call my doctor and see if he can call in a refill for my Ambien (10mg) prescription so I can sleep at night during these downswings. (sigh) And just earlier this week I was considering asking him to start lowering my EffexorXR dosage to start the process of weaning off (I have a doctor appt at the end of January). Now I'm not so sure that I'm ready to go off the meds yet. I know I'm much better then I was back in May, but where I would score myself in the high 90s last week (out of 100), the past few days I feel more like 60s. Hopefully this downswing only lasts a week or two.

Downside of the Ambien is that I'm a slug for 8-10 hours after taking it (which means I have to take it around 9pm or 10pm if I want to be semi-lucid by 8am the next day).

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 9:19 AM

Thursday, January 02, 2003

Mundania

Happy New Year! (there, that's said and done...)

So I went to the grocery store and was browsing around instead of just doing my insta-shop (buying the things that I buy every time that I go) and found out that they now package rice in little bags that you can boil. Well, at least I don't remember seeing that 5 or 10 years ago when I used to do more cooking then I do now. I thought it was pretty nifty that you could just drop this bag of rice in a pot and boil it for 10 minutes, making for a fast snack or meal and without the involved process of making rice the old way (not to mention the mess). Makes 2 cups at a go. Price per bag works out to be about 50 cents or so? Not exactly cheap, but really not that expensive either unless you buy the 5lb bag of rice. Big benefit is that it's easy to make, which is a major consideration if I'm having an off-week (when all I want to do is eat ice cream, chips, chocolate mini-donuts and the ilk).

So, rice as re-entered my life as a staple food... and it agrees with my internals much better then the junk food and other low-quality foods that I've been eating. I now have 5 boxes of the stuff sitting in the pantry. I also ordered a microwave rice cooker from The House of Rice store, which would let me make up to 8 cups at a time (I'll have to go out and buy the 5lb bag of rice for that). My hope is that I can make a bunch of rice in one go, and package it up in the fridge for later.

So now the trick is to figure out what I can add on top of the rice to change up the taste... Leading contenders so far are curry powder (works well), sweet-and-sour duck sauce, some sort of sweet-and-sour mixture in a jar with pineapples and other stuff, garlic salt. Just don't mix curry powder and the sweet-and-sour sauce with pineapples - the two different flavours did not combine at all, but rather were at complete odds with each other. I used to just make rice with salt and butter back in my early days, and to this day I'm not real fond of butter on my rice (bleh) but that was how the recipe said to make it. And actually, just plain boiled/steamed rice tastes good to me - the other items that I toss on top are just to try and bring some variation on the theme.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 8:49 AM

Sunday, December 29, 2002

Chopsticks

Oh boy... a topic!

Facts about Japan, Caroline's Web Page - speaks about why Japanese will break disposable chopsticks after using them.

Chopsticks Technique - um, how-to-use chopsticks... also dos-and-don'ts

Erik's Chopsticks Gallery - Erik collects chopsticks.

from-hanna - Learning Japanese - Presented by Sony Marketing (Japan) Inc., Yamaguchi Sawshun presents a tidbit of amazingly useless information about life in Japan.

Seiryo Festival - It mentions disposable chopsticks (waribashi)

Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View - Chopsticks: The Perfect Utensil - a good introduction to chopsticks and how they came into use.

Using Chopsticks by Nuanjan Vang

Places to buy chopsticks... (your mileage may vary as I have not bought from these places, yet)

The House of Rice Store (I went back and bought chopsticks from here... they had a good selection and good prices)

Dalian Huaying Yada Wood Co., Ltd

Quickspice.com

Sushi Foods

Japanese Tea Parties


posted by Wuphon's Reach at 9:35 PM

Homepage Updates

Well, it's starting to shape up into a semblance of a web site. Added some pictures of my Ford Focus ZX3, my EverQuest screen shots that make nice backgrounds, and started on linking in pictures and stuff from my Netherlands 1990 and Fall 2001 vacations. I still want to add some sections for hobbies, anime that I've watched, books that I've read, other trips that I've taken, computer images of stuff that I've built.

Bad sleep patterns now... sleep for a few hours, get up and do stuff for a few hours before crashing again... when I woke up around midnight last night, I realized (at least I'm pretty sure) that I had forgotten to take my 225mg of EffexorXR last night at 9pm. I took a single 75mg capsule at midnight last night, but I expect today to feel a little strung-out (risk was to take 450mg by mistake if I *had* taken my 9pm pills, so I went the middle road) from not taking the full dosage (or slightly over-dosage) today. Granted, from the way I feel at the moment, I'd have to say that I completely forgot to take my pills last night... (feels like partial withdrawal).

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 1:08 PM