Timothy - I haven't written in over a week and I have good reasons. First, I did work between Christmas and New Years. While AMD has a nice holiday schedule for this time of year, we were still finishing up the old ATI schedule of 2006 holidays. They only included Christmas, the day after, and New Years Day.
But the major cause of web silence was Timothy. Somehow cryptonite was secretly released by Santa because the day after Christmas (Tuesday), Timothy lost his reputation as Turbo Timbo and became a sick zombie-like little boy. On Wednesday Michelle took him to the local clinic where they just diagnosed a typical virus and prescribed fluids, rest, and acetaminophen/ibuprofen where necessary. By the weekend the temperatures were starting to spike into the scary range. Early Sunday morning I took him to a local hospital in Nashua. After blood tests and x-rays he was diagnosed as having progressed into pneumonia and being low on electrolytes.
Michelle and I alternated in watching him at the hospital and Monday night I got to take him home. He's still on Azithromycin for a couple more days, but his temperatures have been stable now. He'll be coughing for several days as his right lung clears out. He has a followup doctor's appointment tomorrow. I took it as encouraging when I heard him laugh today (first time in a week) and when he followed me up and down the stairs as I packed my cars' all-season tires away for the winter. Which brings me to my next item…
Jetta - My car, purchased around Easter '06, went in today for its 20K maintenance. Among the things I had them do was to replace a front-rear tire rotation with rotating in a set of winter tires. I'd purchased a wheel/tire combination at TireRack.com so that swapping winter tires in and out would be trivial. On the down side, I bought an extremely plain set of wheels: black painted steel rims. Goodbye stylish alloy rims with VW logos. Hello "look! my car was assaulted in downtown Chicago!" rims. My car looks so emasculated! It looks like someone stole my hubcaps (not that the car has hubcaps...). My thoughts at the time were, "hey, the car is so filthy during the winter months, who cares?!" But we haven't had winter yet so the car still looks relatively clean, shiny, and now robbed.
Michelle thinks that by some perversion of Murphy's Law, winter will be extremely mild because I put snow tires on my car. I believe in the law of averages. God will make sure Mother Nature evens things out sooner or later…
I mentioned that Timothy followed me up and down the stairs. He was fascinated as I brought in the old tires one by one and stored them in the basement. Two days ago I had to carry him just to get him to use a toilet. Now he was scaling flights of stairs. I couldn't be happier. When mentioning Timothy's pneumonia to my spiritual director, he'd mentioned that in 1935 his brother died of pneumonia. Isn't it sad that penicillin was developed around that same time? A decade later and he might have lived. There are so many "common" medical practices that only evolved in the last century that make such a difference. I say a prayer of thanksgiving to God whenever I contemplate them. Caesarians, appendectomies, antibiotics, disinfectants, etc. Thank you God! My family would be a lot smaller without them!
Work - So I worked from home today. It had been scheduled in advance because I'd be automobile-less today, but it also helped for me to be around the house so that Michelle wouldn't have to shuttle Timothy in her errands. My home computer spent most of the day with a VPN link into our Marlborough network. This leads me to my "Doh!" moment of the day.
Michelle and I remembered that I needed to print up temporary health insurance cards for our new 2007 health insurer since Timothy has an appointment tomorrow. I looked at my company email and got directions for printing temp cards. I followed them and got to the point where I could print 'em, but then, mysteriously it didn't work. I was going crazy. I checked wiring, rebooted the network, checked the printer, etc. but print jobs were going nowhere. When I was at my wits end, it suddenly hit me: I'm logged into the Marlborough office network. My computer has no idea at that point how to bypass it and route the data directly to our local home network. All network traffic was being routed to the office. As soon as I disconnected from the office, printing at home magically worked again. Move over Homer Simpson! "Doh!" "Why yes, I are a computer engineer." For heaven's sake, I've had whole courses on networking, studied C implementations of the TCP/IP network protocol at the driver level even! The VPN feature was so transparent I forgot it was even enabled, quietly sending every data packet out through the office's network. I guess in some respects, that's a good thing.
Hey Scott, SOooooooo glad to hear Tim is well! I guess all of our prayers worked! Amen!
Posted by: Suzy at January 3, 2007 11:13 AMHi Suzy,
Mighty Timbo seems to be close to firing on all cylinders now. He had a follow up doctors visit on Wednesday and was doing much better. The doctor still heard some residual fluid in his right lung that is working its way out. *cough* *cough* He'll continue to take his antibiotics for several more days and we do periodic temperature checks just to be sure everything is still on the right track...
Posted by: Scott at January 4, 2007 02:57 PM