I just sat down to check my mail, and then two hours are gone?!

I am NEVER going to finish my book at this rate.

There’s a new Sony Bravia Ad. (If you don’t know why this should make you happy, go watch the high bounce ball ad and the paint ad.

AND I found another Bravia ad I’d never seen before (thread).

There are also new videos up at EepyBird (otherwise known as the Mentos and Diet Coke guys).
But as if that wasn’t enough, today I found Lego Abominations. (Make sure you read on to see the Headless Horseman lit up.)

AND a site with color photos from World War I. (That’s not fun like the other things, but pretty amazing nevertheless.)

And if that isn’t enough to make your Monday better, I don’t think anything will help.

The search function for my database is done for now. Yay me!

Next up: how to add more books to the database, which means updating multiple records from a single form. Then I want to start linking the database to the book portion of my website. Unless I can figure something out, that may be a whole lot of drudge work.

We’ll see.

But for now, it is totally past my bedtime. If I want to keep my depression under control, I need at least 7 hours of sleep a night. I often feel like a toddler, going to bed so early, but it’s better than the alternative.

The database now has better search functions, and the search results are linked to a more complete listing for a selected book.

Woot!

Read PHP/MySQL Book.
Type Code.
Read PHP/MySQL Book.
Type Code.
View Code.
Curse Code.
Fix Code.
View Code.
Curse Code.
Read PHP/MySQL Book.
Turn Page.
Curse Self.
Type Code.
View Code.
Sigh.

I may have mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’ve been trying to learn php & mysql.

I decided that my project would be a book database, to go with my book website. Because I’m learning this on my own, all I’ve managed so far is to create the database, and create two different searches. Doesn’t seem like much for two weeks of work, but trust me, it was plenty of work!

I’m working on figuring out how to display multiple authors and genres, as opposed to what I’ve got right now, and I’ve got some ideas, but it looks like this is going to be a long term project.

My ultimate goal is to create better searches and have links to pages and reviews. But as I’ve got almost 2000 books in the database right now, it could be slow going.

On the other hand, I’m pretty excited about what I was able to do, and figure out on my own, with only four massive tomes, and brief assistance from one coworker and one husband.

I’ve decided that I needed to have taken a vacation about a year ago.

Despite all the crap of the previous week, there is something to be said for being somewhere nothing is expected and having absolutely no plans. Sure, I’ve taken vacations, but they often involve trying to do things while I’m at whatever location. It is a completely different feeling to have a schedule that reads for the entire day, “Meet for dinner at six.”

No cooking. No cleaning. No plans at all.

Apparently, I have to be forced to have absolutely no plans and no ability to sneak in work before I can actually relax.

And it was well worth it. I came back to work feeling better than I have in ages, having slept well for an entire week, and allowed myself to actually relax without feeling guilty, as if I should be doing something else more important. It’s also done wonders for my depression and anxiety. The only time my mood was off at all last week was when I got headaches from too much sun, and the one time I got busy and forgot to eat lunch. (Trust me. This is a bad thing. A very bad thing.) Even things being crazy at work today didn’t faze me in the slightest. I just grinned and dealt with it, and continued being relaxed and happy.

Now I just have to create the ability to do this without going to a foofy expensive resort.

Got back today from Orlando. Michael had two conferences there, and so I decided to take a week off to do absolutely nothing, where I couldn’t be tempted to actually, you know, do something around the house.

Discovered a couple things.

First, there is far more alcohol at a Disney resort than I would have imagined.

Two, Orlando and its environs have some very interesting flora and fauna. I particularly liked the little lizards.

c) Even living and growing up in a college town, I was still shocked by the amount of drinking and (although I didn’t see the end result so I can’t be certain) casual sex. I went to several events with Michael, and at some, alcohol was easier to get than soda or water. (The first conference only had drinking, the second conference had drinking and a surprising number of people looking like they were trying to hook up, regardless of whether they were married or not.) However, living and growing up in a college town, I wasn’t bothered by those things, just surprised to see grown-ups acting like teenagers.

4th, I decided that I really don’t like golf. The second conference was at a resort on a golf course. I went walking in the mornings, before things got hot, and was stunned by the amount of water and fertilizer and manpower used to maintain the courses.

Fifth, places that cater to the rich nickel and dime you like nobody’s business. The Disney resort didn’t have free wireless (WAH!), and the golf resort… jeesh. No fridge in the room (just the wet bar), anything you wanted had to be purchased from the hotel–water was $3 to $5 a bottle, in addition to the room charges, there were also charges for “supplies” that included internet, towels for the pool, etc. Thank goodness all this was covered as part of the conference fee. Unfortunately, meals for me were not, and there was nothing really within walking distances of the hotel (certainly not at noon when temperatures are in the 90s) and so meals were…. not cheap. But at least a the second resort the food was good.

F. I really do have problems with bright light. Most every afternoon I got a headache. And the same thing happened seventeen years ago when I visited my family in Hawaii. So the purchase of high end sunglasses was not a waste of money, and I really now have no desire to go to the beach, since being in the sun for any length of time during the day makes me sick.

Lastly, I had my first massage (being at a resort is good for something). By Jove that my certainly will not be my last massage. That was fantastic.

But for now, I am tired and really glad we’re not going to work tomorrow.

ADDENDUM the First:
Book reviews will go up later. Whenever I feel up to it. Because you know I read plenty while on vacation.

Well, despite the relative unpleasantness of the past week (and believe it or not, there were things I didn’t bother to write about) things seemed to have settled down to a relative calm.
We replaced the light on Monday–took about an hour and a half, and we didn’t have to rerun the wire (if we’d had to do that, the project might not have been done until spring.

Michael called the insurance company immediately after we discovered the windshield was broken, and the insurance company took his information, and immediately helped him get set up with an appointment to repair the window–even though it was 9:30 in the evening. We received a message the next day that our deductible was $200, and this morning we got the windshield replaced. The only problem was the the window collapsed on the way there, so there was a mess of broken class in the back of the car (luckily on the sheet we had put down when the glass first cracked.

And the frustrating week at work (mostly due to the fact that we are understaffed, and look to remain understaffed for some time to come) will be a faint memory as I take the next week off to travel with Michael to a conference. He goes to seminars and talks, I’m going to sit in the shade and read, and try to eat seafood for every meal but breakfasts.

Hopefully we won’t get any calls while we’re gone, telling us something else has happened to the house, or any other type of bad news.

I was wondering if anyone else had noticed the synchronicity of this post at Stuff on my Cat and the latest comic at XKCD.

This is apparently the week of really weird and destructive shit happening to us.

We were sitting both on our computers when we heard a very strange noise. Looked around the basement, didn’t see anything. Went upstairs, didn’t see anything. I went out the kitchen door and saw the yard beside the house was full of smoke. I called Michael to get a flashlight and come out to see if he could figure out what the hell was going on and whether it was dangerous.

I go back outside and try and figure out where the smoke is coming from. The answer was nowhere that I could see. Then I see Michael on the other side of the house looking at the car. The rear windshield was completely shattered.

Mind you, we back into the driveway, so it’s not like a rock from the road accidentally got thrown onto the car.

This is really weird.

ADDENDUM the First:
For all the good it’ll do us, we know what happened.

One of the students in the house across the street spun his wheels and kicked gravel across the length of the house and into the driveway where the car was sitting. The smoke was a combination of burned rubber and gravel dust.

When we went to the two houses across the alley to find out what happened, it was completely obvious that the guy who answered the door was lying, and was very uncomfortable about doing so. And we got independent but anonymous verification of this. So, although a police report was filed, I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it. I’m hoping it won’t be too expensive. Unfortunately, since it’s the rear windshield, it almost certainly will be expensive.  But I suppose that’s why we have insurance.

Ya know, I’m starting to think the world is doing it’s best to convince me that people suck.

I read a fascinating article this morning on the Amish and forgiveness.

Really, it’s interesting. Go read it.

Back? Good.

First of all, I find it astounding that they are able to forgive so quickly and seemingly easily. That has to be very, very hard. But it also gives me great hope, to know that human beings are actually capable of forgiveness, even under such terrible circumstances. Maybe the human race isn’t completely doomed after all.

I also note that they separate forgiveness from grief. Because you have forgive someone, it doesn’t seem to mean that you don’t still feel grief for the loss. That’s kinda important. You can still feel pain about a situation, but it doesn’t necessarily help to feel anger as well as pain.

But forgiveness is a very hard thing. It’s something that comes up sometimes when you’re dealing with depression. Even if your depression isn’t caused by something that someone did to you, it may be caused by an inability to forgive yourself.

My depression falls into the later category. For the most part, I can get beyond things that people do to me (I do tech support. If I took everything personally my head would have exploded years ago.) but I find it far harder to forgive similar lapses in myself. After all, I did some pretty stupid stuff when I was younger, so it’s easy for me to see where other people are coming from. It’s far harder to accept stupidity from myself, after all, I should have known better, right?

Not really. But that doesn’t always stop me.

So maybe I need to take a lesson from the Amish and forgive. Forgive those who have hurt me, but also forgive myself, because I am just as deserving of my own forgiveness as anyone else.

You may have seen this already, but if you haven’t, there’s an amusing article on the British Daily Mail of a small dog that discovered a part of a mammoth bone on the beach.

The picture of the dog in front of the bone is worth clicking over.

So, although in many ways we’ve been set for years for power outages (wood stove, oil lamp, alarm clock that works on batteries, lots of flashlights) after this latest outage we realized that we still had some needs that weren’t being met. A trip to Target and a purchase from Amazon has now taken care of those needs.

First up was a power pack. We ordered a Xantrex Powerpack 600 Watt Jumpstarter, Power Inverter and Backup Power Source. This turned out to be far more useful than the UPS we had been considering. A battery that can be recharged on an AC (house) current or using the DC current in the car.

Now we’ll have hot water (our gas water heater has a blower motor that runs on electricity. Stupid idea.) and can run the refrigerator short periods of time. It’s supposed to last for several hours, is supposed to quick charge on DC power, and has enough juice to jump start a car (something that would have been very useful this summer when the switch on the trunk light went bad.)

I’ve got high hopes for this product.

The other thing we got were two Coleman lights, the Coleman Rugged Battery Powered Lantern. The oil lamp we had was okay, but it was somewhat hot and smoky. These lamps are as bright as some of the lamps in our house. Bright enough that my grandmother and I could sit in the living room and read.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s the perfect lamp.

Of course I also spent a fair amount on batteries, but hey, that’s just something you have to live with when you have transformers arc and blow up on the power lines just out side your house twice in two years. (Let me tell you, if you want exciting, an arcing power line is all KINDS of exciting. When the first one blew Michael and I thought there was an insane amount of lightening (for at least a minute) because we couldn’t see anything but white light when we looked out the window. This one, my grandmother thought the house was on fire. That kind of exciting.)