A Bunch of Stuff

I haven't been very good at posting lately. I will use my less the robust health as an excuse. First the health update.

Last Wednesday was my first much better day in a long, long time. Then that night was horrible. No sleep. So our Thanksgiving Thursday was mostly me being a zombie. But then on Friday I noticeably improved and I've felt much better ever since. I'm sleeping better but I'm still cold and have little appetite. The latest batch of tests came in and they are all negative. I supposed to get a chest x-ray because of the persistent cough but my MD is happy that I'm on a generally positive trend. I can tell you that for the most part I'm substantially better than I've been. I even started some light exercise and have gradually been walking for longer time periods.

Thanksgiving itself we had Cabinet Lady, her sister and Dr. Debbie over. All I did was make the turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy and cranberry sauce. I tried a new technique for the turkey. The last couple of years I brined the turkey. This year I saw a recipe for salting it that was suppose to produce a similar result with much less work. It came off as advertised and was such a good technique that in spite of an oven temperature problem whereby it got cooked much more than it was supposed to, the turkey was still very moist.



It turns out (after doing a measurement with an external thermometer) that our oven is running 30 degrees hotter than what it is set for!

Another exciting event was the transfer of our business website to a new hosting company. I have to take my hat off to son-in-law John the Armenian (1A) who did this. Like so many tech things it was supposed to be pretty straight forward. But the software that our website uses is an open-source software so there really is no help line to call if you have a problem. After many hours of panic (he's in the Bay are so I'm just sitting here hoping for the best) and not being able to figure out why the data base wouldn't populate the new host, he just started over and somehow it all worked out.

Then I had a panic with the new email set up. John had sent me the new instructions and I set up a new account in my contact management program. Unfortunately I let the old account up. So when the contact manager tried to connect it had two accounts trying to do this simultaneously and just froze (I figured this out later). What made it worse was that my contact manager is set up to automatically connect to the internet as soon as it opens. So no matter how often I force quit the program and restarted it, I ended up with the same problem so I couldn't even change my settings!

Then came my brainstorm (you'd be so proud of me St. Louis Mike), I deduced that the problem was occurring during the attempt to connect to the internet. So I disabled the wireless modem in the computer. When I opened the contact manager there was nothing to connect to so the program didn't freeze. I deleted the old account and then everything worked fine.