Skittles caught a Hawk!

Ok it’s probably just a woodpecker, but still, this thing was huge! It’s hard to tell from the picture, but for a bit of perspective, that beak is probably 3+ inches long. Melissa hid in the bedroom while I tried to catch him with a towel. He made it very clear he didn’t want anything to do with me or my towel. He circled my living room a couple times, slammed into a mirror and then flew out onto our patio. Looks like he chipped his beak on my mirror. Poor guy.

After a bit of googling Mel figured out that it was a Northern flicker Woodpecker.

Sooooo sick *cough*

Oh man, this is possibly the sickest I’ve ever been. I’m on my 4th day of high fevers, violent coughing, and horrible sinus congestion. I spent about four hours in the emergency room Saturday night when my temp hit 104.5. I was in bad shape for sure. When I got there my vitals were all over the place. My resting heart rate was in the 140s, my blood pressure was dangerously low, my blood oxygen saturation was poor, and I was extremely dehydrated. If they hadn’t been able to get my temperature down as quickly as they did I would have been in real danger of permanent brain damage.

When my vitals settled down a little bit they took blood samples, mucus samples, and chest x-rays to figure out what was making me so sick. Strangely enough, everything came back negative. I didn’t show pneumonia in my x-rays, and I tested negative for both the cold and flu virus, and they ruled out bronchitis as well. My doc was pretty stumped. He said he figured it would have to be a nasty bacterial infection to be able to push my temperature that high. Since my co-workers got sick as well, I’m blaming it on some crazy Indian bacteria that hitched a ride, but who knows.

After four hours hooked up to an IV dripping saline into my arm, 800mg of Motrin, two Tylenol, and four antibiotics I was able to go back home. Now I’m taking an additional five day course of antibiotics to kill whatever this thing is. Here’s to hoping this goes away without much more of a fight!

mah brain!

I haven’t gotten the results from my MRI yet, but in the meantime… here is my brain!

Still frames can be found here. It’s a little bit creepy being able to see inside my own head…

Skittles the photographer

This year Skittles got his very own camera for Christmas. It attaches to his collar and sees everything he does.

Skittles has been wearing his camera and taking pictures for a couple weeks now so I figured I would start showing off all of his hard work. Skittles has his own photoset on my flickr page that I will continue to update as he takes more and more great pictures. Check it out here.

!@#$!@%

My laptop died last week, and when I say died, I mean it really died. It’s a pretty little aluminum corpse…

So there I was just browsing the net when it randomly shut itself off. I figured it wasn’t a big deal, the battery had probably just run down and caused it to auto-shutdown. That’s happened before, no big deal, however this was not the case. When I tried to turn it back on all I heard was a couple of spinning fans and dead silence. No beep. No HD noises. Nothing. I called applecare and they had me try all the normal stuff, resetting the pRAM, trying to boot in verbose mode, trying to boot to the install CD, etc… nothing worked. So now I’m waiting for apple to send me a box so I can send my poor little laptop to the doctor.

This sucks.

Alaska-maps-newspapers, such as

…

… notice a similarity? Yea me too.

If you aren’t already registered to vote get on it! The deadline for registering new voters in New Mexico is Oct 6th.

Get registered here.

Trip to Cali! Pics! Finally!

I’m a gigantic slacker… I know. It took me 3 months to get around to it but I finally uploaded the pics from my trip to California.

Head on over to my flickr page for lots of Disney goodness!

Help, I’ve fallen and broken my Blog!

Oh man, what a pain in the ass this was. After 3 years I figured it was time to update to the newest version of wordpress. I made the jump from version 1.8 to version 2.6… what a horrible idea that was. I didn’t really need to upgrade, I mean the blog was working just fine, but noooo… I couldn’t leave well-enough alone. Long story short, absolutely everything that could possibly go wrong did.

Corrupted SQL tables, incompatible themes, incompatible plug-ins, unresponsive admin panels… it was pretty bad.

In the end, after banging my head against the laptop for two days, I had to completely reinstall the blog from scratch and transfer over all of my SQL tables one at a time.

So anyway, here I am with an ugly ass blog. I’ll have to get to work on prettifying it in the near future. *sigh*

My phone is sending me messages from the future

…seriously. Over the past 3 days I’ve received 6 separate text messages from “Unknown” that are all dated 12/31/31 @ 11:59.

Is my phone really trying to send me messages from New Years Eve 2031? One minute before 2032? I sure hope so! Clearly it’s trying to warn me of the end of days. Now all I need to do is decipher these cryptic messages and save the world from the apocalypse… no sweat! And, if by chance I fail to save the world, well, atleast I’ll be 48 by then. That’s a fairly long life I guess.

My first gray hair!

So the other day melissa and I were in the car when she pointed out that I had what looked to be a gray hair. I wasn’t really all that interested since I have had “fake” gray hairs sprouting for a while- the plastic looking hairs that are more-so a result of a hair follicle deciding to stop producing pigment and not really a sign of actual graying hair. Anyway, this was not one of those hairs. As you can see below, this is the real deal. You can even see exactly where in the hairs growth it decided to turn gray. Scary!

So here you have it- documentation of my first ever gray hair at the age of 24.