The inhaled steroid, and the pill steroids do seem to be having a substantial and positive effect on my asthmatic bronchitis. It’s not all gone, but the frequency of my cough is a shadow of its former, constant self. I’ll probably go a couple hours between fits, and when I lie down, I still wheeze a little, and cough on occasion – but it’s a far cry from coughing every three minutes for two minutes straight, to the point where I can’t breathe and am choking, where every breath is a conscious effort, and I want to kill myself every night at 5am, when I’m exhausted, but can’t stop coughing long enough to sleep.

Muhc, much, much better.

Easily the most toxic stuff I’ve ever put in a drain, ever. Contact with water nearly caused this to boil in the toilet bowl, and proper ventilation was definitely in play – despite that, I feel like a got a mild chemical burn in my lungs (very, very minor, but definitely there), and basically, after 15 minutes, I flushed the shit out of the system with cold water, as per their recommendations and… flooded the system, spewing water into the crawl space. And, for the first time, it became very clear that the gasket on the toilet bowl needs changing.

So, because the gasket is quite obviously blown now, that toilet’s completely out of commission, and that gasket needs to be replaced. As such, since I’ve gotta take the bowl off the pipe anyway, I might as well just properly snake it with a monster snake, and clear the whole goddamn system the proper way. I guess that’s this Saturday, then. Delightful.

*sigh*

Ei-Nyung came home unfortunately, completely nauseous. She thinks it’s milk she drank this morning at work – ended up barfing at work a couple times this afternoon. So, she’s lying upstairs, trying to get some rest.

At least I got a couple minor things done that were positive and productive. I got batteries for the doorbell, so now we finally have a working doorbell, even though it’s kind of chintzy. I got proper beefy wood screws to screw the gate latch back together, so now it’s solid again, and not all wobbly. I planted the remaining plants into the garden area by the street. Joe came over earlier, after getting home from work, and later, Sean’s going to swing by for a couple minutes to chat. Tomorrow, Jose’s coming to paint the bedrooms, which means that tomorrow night, in theory, we can begin to move in to them. That would bring to a close two rooms, that have taken since late 2001/early 2002 to fully remodel, and leave only the public areas of the upstairs to remodel before the house looks proper.

Man.

What a day.

$50 scooter parking ticket for being in a red zone, when I *clearly* wasn’t. Fighting it will cost more than just paying, so a-paying I will go. Fucking extortion, though, because I *clearly* again, wasn’t in the red.

$100 phone replacement. My N-gage up and stopped reading SIM cards, and a replacement through Nokia will run upwards of $100, while a new QD will cost exactly that. Because I’ve got a library of N-gage games, I’m gonna suck it up and get a replacement. Sucks.

$50 for drain unclogging supplies, which still, have been for naught.

Ah, lovely. Whenever you’ve gotta save save save, no matter what you fucking do, something’s there to fuck you up.

I’ve got a really gut-level reaction I can’t get rid of. I was unable to sleep this morning (just amped up, I guess – still not really thinking clearly, but too jittery to sleep nevertheless), and so I decided, on my way back from picking up the Mini (whose repair job went *beautifully* – let me recommend Taymuree Foreign Auto Body to anyone who needs bodywork done in Oakland), I stopped at Longs to get batteries for the doorbell (the first time we’ve had a doorbell in four years), and picked up a little drain snake as well – it was $14, so I figured it’d be worth a shot. The problem is that we have a clog somewhere between the upstairs and the downstairs bathrooms. This clog went undiscovered for some time, due to the fact that it a.) isn’t a total water blockage, and b.) the pipes are… temporarily joined, so the system leaks under the house when it floods – it doesn’t “back up.”

I know what the problem is – the problem is that our ex-housemate flushed things that shouldn’t have been flushed. While the manufacturer of the product says that they’re flushable, common sense and all documentation from the municipal district say that they should *not* be flushed. So, she says she had no way of knowing, and thus it’s my responsibility, while I say that she shouldn’t have been flushing those things in the first place, and thus, it’s her responsibility. I ended up caving in, and I sincerely regret it to this day. It cost me $100 to fix the problem when the downstairs bathroom clogged on Christmas day, and my dad helped me unclog the thing with a power augur we rented from Home Depot. Unfortunately, we didn’t think to also snake the *upstairs* bathroom, and as a result, when Ei-Nyung & I moved back upstairs, only then did we realize that the upstairs bathroom is clogged as well.

The thing that sucks is that the clog isn’t in the pipes within the bathroom – it’s actually in the main – probably at a ~90 degree bend at the corner of the house, where the upstairs main heads down towards the downstairs. I spent this morning snaking the drain from underneath the house, where I removed the drain pipe from the upstairs bathroom sink, and fed the snake in through that opening. The problem is that the snake I bought is only .25″, and because the main’s so large, when it gets sufficiently torqued, it simply folds back on itself, and twist up into a useless ball. I think I *may* have hit the clog, but it’s genuinely hard to say, and I have no way of testing it without reassembling the drain pipe to the sink, which sucks, because I either have to glue it to do it properly, or go get some pipe tape, to temporarily stop it up enough to work.

The bathtub, which is the only thing that has the throughput to illustrate whether the clog is clear or not joins the main at 18o, on a sanitary cross, from the sink drain. As a result, if I just friction-fit the pipes together, when the water comes down from the bathroom, it has enough inertia that it just pops the sink pipe right off. The alternative is maybe to have someone else fill/empty the tub while I just hold the pipe in place, but I’m the only one home right now.

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NEW: Sometimes, it takes someone else to put your perspective back in order. I got the proper kick in the pants, and business between me and someone else is business between me and someone else – not between me, them, and the rest of the world. This isn’t a private ranting area (though sometimes I wish it was – that there were permissions you could set, a’la Flickr), and content will be adjusted accordingly. Apologies if anyone was offended.

I slept about five hours tonight. Maybe 4 1/2 – I tried to stay up until pretty much as late as my body would allow, so that the tiredness would help me overcome any more trouble breathing, but I successfully fell asleep somewhere around 1:30, and got up at just before 6. That’s not a great number, but I figure today I will be able to sleep more (I took the day off work, because I’m so exhausted I’m pretty out of it all the time right now), and the fact that the steroids the docs gave me yesterday even made it possible to fall asleep before 5am makes me incredibly, incredibly happy.

Now, I’m gonna start a load of laundry, and maybe try to get some more sleep. But yeah, I’m *ecstatic*.

Well, whatever that trip to the ER cost me before, that’s been doubled. On the advice of the advice nurse I called today, when my coughing was going like gangbusters, I went back to the ER, and saw another doc, who this time, prescribed a steroid in pill form, and a steroid inhaler, on top of the Albuterol the previous ER doc gave me, which is sort of an “emergency” bronchial dilator. So, now I’ve apparently got the proper meds to begin making progress against this thing, but apparently, the steroids will take about a day to kick in.

So… another night of more of the same. Color me unenthused.

I’ve had a persistent cough for about two weeks, now. I went to the emergency room sometime in the middle of last week, and they said it was allergy-induced asthmatic bronchitis. What I know is that a.) the inhaler they gave me does jack shit, and b.) I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in two weeks. I’m exhausted all the time, I *fear* the time I try to go to sleep, and this appears to have started with the move back upstairs, which has me worried that something in the house is actually triggering this ridiculously unpleasant reaction. I sort of doubt that last line, but there’s a lot of reasons that might be the case.

Regardless, two weeks of constant, oppressive misery is definitely having its toll on me. I can’t focus, I’m never really awake, and I’m just … beat. I need to see a doctor, but am going to have to wait to get a regular appointment, as I genuinely fear how much the visit to the emergency room is going to cost me.

… that headline, from CNN, is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/25/news_6126521.html
My response to this article: Fuck you, game voice actors. Fuck you. You come to work for a few fucking days, and want residuals on your work? Go to hell. You’ll get your residuals *after* I get mine, after everyone who worked as a developer gets theirs. You want residuals for a fucking day’s worth of line reading, when I’m busting my ass for years?

Eat shit and die, motherfuckers.

I admit to a bit of an anti-Sony bias. I love my PSP, and it’s my favorite handheld, but the PS2, despite having a library of stunning games, is a crappy piece of unreliable garbage. But that’s not the point. The point is that the press response to E3 has been unanimously to brand Sony the “winner,” and act like what they showed was “amazing” in some respect. While the Unreal Engine 3 demo was spectacular, the thing that gets my goat is that basically, Sony is lying.

There’s no way that the Killzone demo was “real-time,” despite what Sony’s rep said. No way at all. Similarly, almost all the other video they showed was prerendered “target” videos – the kind of thing that a developer puts together to show what they think a game will look like with the specs of the hardware, but it’s not actually representative of what can be done, because you’ve got to account for a lot of other processing, and how you have to direct the player in-game, etc. Most of those videos are there to try to capture the kind of emotional response that the developer wants to evoke, and a general visual “target” – but it’s not *real*.

And for Sony to say it was, they’re liars. And for the press to fall for this bullshit *AGAIN* after the PS2… well, they’re just fucking stupid.