For the past year or so I've been troubled with an affliction involving my eye. I'll be sleeping and wake up suddenly in the middle of the night when my eye feels like someone's stabbing it with a burning poker.
I went to a doctor about it and he said it's called Corneal Erosion. This means that the top layer of my cornea sticks to my eyelid, and when I wake up, it rips that top layer like a flap of skin off my eye. It hurts for hours until that flap re-attaches itself to the eyeball.
Sounds nasty, doesn't it?
Well it is. I usually find myself doubled over in pain with my fist or an ice pack compressed into my eye socket to try to relieve the pain. I mention it because it happened again yesterday. I actually tried to go to work, I dropped the kids off and went in for a couple hours, but I'm pretty well useless (and shouldn't have been driving anyway), so I came home and went to bed.
Normally my head starts hurting and my vision in that eye is blurred, but it's always been better the next day. But today it's still blurry and even though my headache is gone, it always comes back after a few hours of this blurred vision.
I'm going to see a specialist this afternoon to find out if there's anything to be done to fix it.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Hot Pockets
I admit I have been eating Hot Pockets for many, many years now. This guy is hilariously right-on about the truth behind them.
By the way, if you get a chance to check out the Chicken Bakes from Costco, I heartily recommend them, they're wonderful.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Jesus loves me
To: Macsmith230
From: Jesus
Subject: Re
I got an email today from Jesus. I didn't read it since it was in my spam box, but it looks like he finally got around to answering me.
The problem is, I've forgotten what I wrote him about in the first place. I could have been e-viting him to my birthday party, or maybe it was forwarding the message about saving the children. In any case, it was nice of him to write back.
From: Jesus
Subject: Re
I got an email today from Jesus. I didn't read it since it was in my spam box, but it looks like he finally got around to answering me.
The problem is, I've forgotten what I wrote him about in the first place. I could have been e-viting him to my birthday party, or maybe it was forwarding the message about saving the children. In any case, it was nice of him to write back.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Best Job
Ok, may as well tell about my favorite job ever. I spent a summer working for Washington State University's Tree fruit research center in my hometown. It was totally awesome. Spent most the summer outside, often driving around in government cars with their bad paint jobs and am radios. I actually listened to a lot of Rush Limbaugh because I've never liked listening to Top 40 radio.
The worst job we did that summer was to spray the fruit trees with chemicals to test them out and see how effective they were at killing the pests. At first this wasn't so bad, because I just drove the truck slowly down the row of trees while someone else had to trail along spraying the trees. Then they got smart and taught me how to do the spraying. It's not that spraying was so bad, it's that you had to wear a jumpsuit (not the bad part) and big rubber boots and a big, floppy rubber hat and big ol' rubber gloves and a respirator, and it was usually 110 degrees out, while the driver got to sit up front in the air conditioned cab and listen to cds. I'm not sure why the spray truck got air conditioning and a cd player, but we didn't take it for granted.
It was mainly a group of college kids working there, so we sat around a lot and shot the shit while doing menial labor. One of the most boring jobs was to take a box of leaves we'd plucked from the test trees and run them through a little machine that had two brushes on it, which would brush off any tree pests onto a microscope slide, which we'd then count under a magnifying glass to see how many had survived the sprays.
Another job I had to do was to go into a test orchard and pluck little worms from the leaves there. These worms would get in the middle of a leaf and wrap the leaf around them, so I had to unwrap the leaf and put the worm into a container. I had to collect 200 of them so it took me several days to accomplish this task. Once I had my 200, I had to put each one in a little plastic cup with a lid and a few fresh leaves for them to eat. Over the summer we would do tests on these worms, so I had to make sure they had fresh leaves and then I'd have to clean out their little worm poop from their cups every couple days. These worms had a surprisingly large amount of poop coming out of them. After a few months they turned into moths and we pretty much killed them all with hazardous chemicals.
The very best part of the job was that sometimes I had to go out to the remote orchards to collect samples, so you'd grab a car and drive a couple hours with the windows down and a soda in your lap. Once you got to the orchard you didn't even have to leave the car. You'd just drive down the rows and pluck some leaves from the trees as you drove past. This was totally awesome and I'm not sure now why I didn't stick with this job.
Once we were done with all our tests and had our data compiled, the supervising bosses would write up their results and publish them so that the orchardists knew which sprays to put on their crops to kill the invasive pests. I know it's a long ways from the organic food which is getting to be popular these days, but I sure did love that job.
The worst job we did that summer was to spray the fruit trees with chemicals to test them out and see how effective they were at killing the pests. At first this wasn't so bad, because I just drove the truck slowly down the row of trees while someone else had to trail along spraying the trees. Then they got smart and taught me how to do the spraying. It's not that spraying was so bad, it's that you had to wear a jumpsuit (not the bad part) and big rubber boots and a big, floppy rubber hat and big ol' rubber gloves and a respirator, and it was usually 110 degrees out, while the driver got to sit up front in the air conditioned cab and listen to cds. I'm not sure why the spray truck got air conditioning and a cd player, but we didn't take it for granted.
It was mainly a group of college kids working there, so we sat around a lot and shot the shit while doing menial labor. One of the most boring jobs was to take a box of leaves we'd plucked from the test trees and run them through a little machine that had two brushes on it, which would brush off any tree pests onto a microscope slide, which we'd then count under a magnifying glass to see how many had survived the sprays.
Another job I had to do was to go into a test orchard and pluck little worms from the leaves there. These worms would get in the middle of a leaf and wrap the leaf around them, so I had to unwrap the leaf and put the worm into a container. I had to collect 200 of them so it took me several days to accomplish this task. Once I had my 200, I had to put each one in a little plastic cup with a lid and a few fresh leaves for them to eat. Over the summer we would do tests on these worms, so I had to make sure they had fresh leaves and then I'd have to clean out their little worm poop from their cups every couple days. These worms had a surprisingly large amount of poop coming out of them. After a few months they turned into moths and we pretty much killed them all with hazardous chemicals.
The very best part of the job was that sometimes I had to go out to the remote orchards to collect samples, so you'd grab a car and drive a couple hours with the windows down and a soda in your lap. Once you got to the orchard you didn't even have to leave the car. You'd just drive down the rows and pluck some leaves from the trees as you drove past. This was totally awesome and I'm not sure now why I didn't stick with this job.
Once we were done with all our tests and had our data compiled, the supervising bosses would write up their results and publish them so that the orchardists knew which sprays to put on their crops to kill the invasive pests. I know it's a long ways from the organic food which is getting to be popular these days, but I sure did love that job.
My worst job
I had one job that I worked for just one day because it was so horrible.
I was in college and my uncle offered to get me a job through a friend working for RPS, a delivery company similar to UPS. I was going to school at BYU and the job was in Salt Lake City, 45 minutes away. Somehow I thought that wouldn't pose a problem. The worst part about it was that the hours were from midnight to 7 am. Since I had just learned about No Doz and Mini Thins, I figured I could go to work, come home in time for classes, then sleep in the afternoon and start all over again.
On the night I was supposed to start my new job, there was a blizzard. Maybe not a full blown blizzard, but one of those where you're the only car on the road and the plows haven't come out yet and you're wondering what you're doing outside. I knew what I was doing, I was starting my new job! I left around 10.30 to make sure I'd make the 45 minute drive in time, and I got there just before midnight. I had a quick smoke, then went inside and introduced myself.
The rest of the night was so horrible. Basically they would back a semi truck up to a conveyor belt and unload the packages onto that. Delivery trucks were parked in rows on each side of the belt, and you were supposed to pull the packages that were on your truck's route. Except since I wasn't from there I didn't really know whether a package went on my truck or not, and the big information sheet they had posted near me didn't help much either.
I guess I was being trained, in that they explained to me what to do for 10 minutes then let me go. I had my own truck, and a woman came by every 15 minutes or so to see how I was doing. I was doing terribly. The inside of the truck was divided into six sections, then each section subdivided by 3. Once a section (or subsection) filled up, you weren't supposed to put the next packages in the nearest section, as you'd suppose, instead you were supposed to magically make the packages fit into their correct section that was already too full. Somehow this seemed pretty fucked up, because 5 of the sections were empty and only one section was getting packages and it was overflowing.
Anyway, this job sucked. And next time you're wondering why your package is broken, it's because those little bastards at the warehouse are throwing your shit around from one end to the other.
I was in college and my uncle offered to get me a job through a friend working for RPS, a delivery company similar to UPS. I was going to school at BYU and the job was in Salt Lake City, 45 minutes away. Somehow I thought that wouldn't pose a problem. The worst part about it was that the hours were from midnight to 7 am. Since I had just learned about No Doz and Mini Thins, I figured I could go to work, come home in time for classes, then sleep in the afternoon and start all over again.
On the night I was supposed to start my new job, there was a blizzard. Maybe not a full blown blizzard, but one of those where you're the only car on the road and the plows haven't come out yet and you're wondering what you're doing outside. I knew what I was doing, I was starting my new job! I left around 10.30 to make sure I'd make the 45 minute drive in time, and I got there just before midnight. I had a quick smoke, then went inside and introduced myself.
The rest of the night was so horrible. Basically they would back a semi truck up to a conveyor belt and unload the packages onto that. Delivery trucks were parked in rows on each side of the belt, and you were supposed to pull the packages that were on your truck's route. Except since I wasn't from there I didn't really know whether a package went on my truck or not, and the big information sheet they had posted near me didn't help much either.
I guess I was being trained, in that they explained to me what to do for 10 minutes then let me go. I had my own truck, and a woman came by every 15 minutes or so to see how I was doing. I was doing terribly. The inside of the truck was divided into six sections, then each section subdivided by 3. Once a section (or subsection) filled up, you weren't supposed to put the next packages in the nearest section, as you'd suppose, instead you were supposed to magically make the packages fit into their correct section that was already too full. Somehow this seemed pretty fucked up, because 5 of the sections were empty and only one section was getting packages and it was overflowing.
Anyway, this job sucked. And next time you're wondering why your package is broken, it's because those little bastards at the warehouse are throwing your shit around from one end to the other.
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