Jun has gone home.
The basement is now painted “Weeping Wisteria”.
The cranberry (aka “Burnt Tile”) color for the living room worked out much better the second time.
Pulling staples out of the floor with needlenose pliers will give you hand cramps.

In other news, went to Anime Boston on Friday with Thea, Jun, and J. Jun and J were so kind as to register me when they went through the godawful line so when I got there, I didn’t have to do anything but put on my badge.

Bought a Sai clock in the Dealers’ room, then we attempted to find something to do. But the video rooms weren’t showing anything interesting and most of the panels seemed rather dull, so we headed off to Au Bon Pain because neither Thea nor I had eaten anything yet. [Caught a glimpse of several people, Bina included, but as there was a long line and as they were heading to other parts of the restaurant did not get a chance to say hi.] Ate. Went back to con. Sat in Karaoke room and listened to Thea take her turn. Collected E and Carl from conops and headed to Finale with them and Megazone.

Finale = v. good. Mmm. Molten chocolate. Would have been better if I’d remembered to tell them to give me almond rather than coffee ice cream, but only a minor quibble.

After returning to the con once more, we went up to the karaoke contest, where it seemed Thea had already had her turn. Waited while several other people went. Felt pity for the poor lone staffer running the thing. Felt more pity when the teenage fangirls who made up the bulk of the contestants started complaining that “the website said we got to sing TWO songs”. Left. Determined that 1) the AMV contest was going to be packed like sardines because nothing else good was scheduled opposite. 2) we did not care to be packed like sardines. 3) We did not care to sit around for an hour to see if the yaoi panel would be at all interesting (of which we had doubts.)

Left.

Got home. Watched R1 Spirited Away DVD. (verdict: not bad, but there were typos in the subtitles. Very strange.) Watched R1 Castle in the Sky DVD. (verdict: Now we know where the idiots who timed and scripted the Kizuna DVD have gone.)

Didn’t go back the other two days. Am iffy about next year; will have to see if their schedule improves. At least at most conventions there are panels that /sound/ interesting to me, even if I don’t go to them. AB verdict, based on Friday night: 5/10. The con was sufficiently well organized, but… it was kind of boring.

This weekend was insanely busy.

Lessons learned:
* When the guy at Home Depot says “do you want the washable kind of paint?” he means enamel, and the answer is NO.
* If you drive a mile, gas prices will vary by as much as 20cents a gallon.
* AeroBeds are cool.
* Do not ever expect to go into Home Depot and actually leave in under an hour. Something will always slow you down.

So this morning I was and am still really really tired, but it’s the start of a new week, so it’s not like I’m going to get a chance to rest any time soon.

Jun is visiting. We (I say we, but actually I mean Okina, J, E and my mother) managed to get part of a room painted on Saturday. Okina, J and Jun packed up some of the bookcases and Okina moved them up to Nashua. (I’m still amazed.) We watched Colin Firth cavorting in leather pants.

This morning I “overslept” (“overslept” = when you’re awake, but you simply do not have the motivation to actually stir from bed until you’re late) and so ran out of the house without weighing. (Damn weight watchers.) This means I can either do it when I get home, and avoid eating most of the day to avoid putting on food weight, or I can wait until tomorrow morning and have less days to lose anything this week. I’m still undecided.

I think it depends whether any food comes my way this afternoon. I am very hungry.

It’s Monday.

I guess I should update this thing with what’s been going on.

Friday the 28th, Okina and I closed on the condo. Hurrah! Then he and J and I went on a nice little shopping spree in the area. The location of choice was Best Buy, and we managed to pick up a washer, dryer, microwave and a new television for the basement. Then we stopped in at the mall to examine the food court, after which we raced home so I could run a class on game.

Class ended around 10:30, and after that I was fine until about midnight, when I started to get the same middle back pain that I’ve been getting on and off for well over a year now. I took some Ibuprofin and went to bed, and managed to fall asleep for a couple of hours. But when I woke up again, it wasn’t gone, it was worse, so I hauled out the heating pad. I dozed for a little while, but it just didn’t seem to improve, so at about 4:30 I went downstairs to look up the symptoms of appendicitis. I didn’t -seem- to have them, but they said you definitely shouldn’t use a heating pad, so I turned that off.

About an hour later, I decided to make Okina take me to the emergency room. Here I must pause to thank the MIT-Wellesley exchange bus, because otherwise I would not have known where a hospital was, and would have had to look up directions. (Directing Okina to a strange location while one is lying flat in the seat of the car and neither of us has had much sleep is a dicey proposition.) So we get to Newton-Wellesley hospital, and first I have to convince the nurse that I am in PAIN and dammit I NEED TO SEE A DOCTOR. But before that, I must, of course, provide a urine sample and fill out about 800 forms with yet another nurse. We manage that, and I go back to the waiting room, where I attempt to find a method of sitting that actually relieves the pain rather than making it worse.

(No luck.) A little while later, they finally send me off to a little cubicle, where I wait for a doctor. And wait and wait and wait. And finally he comes in. We talk for about 2 minutes and he determines that no, it’s not my appendix, but it probably is my gall bladder. I am, at this point, vastly relieved. They know what it is, which means they can bloody well do something about it. Which they do, though slowly. We arrived at about 5:40, and after several abortive attempts at painkillers that just didn’t work, they gave me Demerol at around 7:45ish, and that 1) made me sick, 2) made me high and 3) made the back pain tolerable.

After an ultrasound and some morphine (also made me sick… whee.) they confirmed the diagnosis.

A minor digression here. Why on earth don’t we hear more about people with gall bladder problems or with thyroid problems? Those are two diseases I never have heard much of anything about — everyone knows about appendixes, for instance — yet they are apparently remarkably common. The only time I’d ever really heard a gall bladder mentioned was in relation to my great-grandmother when I was very young, and so naturally my thought processes went like this: gall bladder = really old people. But…!

Anyhow. Moved to a room. Managed to get hold of mom. They refused to let me have anything to eat or drink, because they *might* do surgery that day, but they weren’t sure. Finally it got to be like 6pm and my mom went and bothered the nurse to make them give me some food. After a fairly uncomfortable night, they took me down pretty much first thing in the morning. Was back up in the room by about eleven, and after Okina had a short nap, he headed home to pick up J and the two of us spent part of the day playing Lord of the Rings Risk. (The forces of Evil swept over Middle Earth. Ha.)

Interestingly, almost immediately after the surgery was over, they decided to give me lots of food, then promptly forgot about me again until they delivered a dinner I didn’t really care for. Monday morning, I didn’t get any breakfast, and then at noon, as I prepared to depart the hospital, someone finally showed up to take my order for lunch.

It was an odd weekend. When I got home on Monday I felt displaced from time; Saturday and Sunday were just so outside the realm of my experience that I wasn’t sure how to include them in my count of days. I spent the week at home doing precisely nothing, for which I will pay dearly this week. But I can’t help but feel that the lethargy, which followed the two days of actually feeling very ill, was justified.

Am at work now, not pleased to be here, and feeling rather out of it.

Video games you control by breathing. That’s the kind of thing we all know and love the Media Lab for.