June 2005 Archives

Unbelieveable. As many of you dear readers know, I don't sleep well. I haven't slept well in years. I'm not talking a bit of stress and I can't fall asleep for awhile. Or some days I wake up too early. I'm talking about every single fucking night, I don't sleep. I fall asleep, wake up around 1 and then toss and turn, stuck between awake and asleep until 6ish. On the bad days I'm wide awake from 1 AM on. And then the alarm goes off at 7:15. I have been massively sleep deprived for at least the past 3 years, if not longer.

I AM SICK OF THIS!

In January I called the Stanford Sleep Clinic to make an appointment to see one of their sleep doctors. The soonest appointment I could get was April 7th. The luck of the gods was with me, because I had my sleep study the following week, on April 13 (photos to prove it). My follow-up appointment was scheduled for July 5. Yes, more than 2 fucking months AFTER the study before I can learn the results.

In those 2+ months my health insurance has changed 3 times. The newest coverage starts tomorrow, July 1, and it's with Kaiser. Oh aren't I lucky. Which means, they won't cover me if I go to the Stanford doctor without an accepted continuation of coverage form. Which takes 72 hours to process. And it's a holiday weekend.

So... my options are to:
A) Go to the appointment and pay the $400 to see the doctor myself.
B) Keep the appointment and hope I get clearance to go beforehand.
C) Keep the appointment and find out just beforehand that it won't be covered and then be charged a cancelation fee by Stanford.
D) Cancel the appointment and start all over again with the Kaiser sleep clinic at somepoint.
E) Reschedule the appointment, assuming that I'll get the continuation of coverage at somepoint, and if not, have plenty of time to cancel without penality and start over with the Kaiser sleep clinic.

I chose to do E. Can you guess when my appointment has been rescheduled for? October 20, 2005. That will be 6 months AFTER the study. Six months that I have been waiting to hear why I can't sleep.

Oh, and yes. I'm sure the stress over all this will do wonders for my sleeping tonight. Maybe tonight I'll be lucky enough to toss and turn for a few hours before falling into my fitful, restless slumber.

I am so tired today. But this time, I have a good excuse for being tired. I spent the weekend here:

We camped outside of the park and wandered inside Sat and Sun for hiking, and photographing, and general wandering around. There were so many people in the Valley (no surprise, I know). But since it was the first time that B and I had been there, we wanted to be sure to see it. We then wandered out of the valley, up to Tuolumne Meadows. It was farther away than I realized, but it was so gorgeous.

There was still snow on the ground, and it was much colder up there than in the Valley. Of course, we were then 8,000+ feet in elevation. Hiking was a bit more of a challenge up there. We saw a few deer running across the meadow which was quite beautiful.

I can't wait to go back.

"This is a general social survey of the greater weblog community being conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other. Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere."

If you have a blog, you should take the survey. It's fun!

Adaptive Path is headed to Washington D.C. August 22-25 for our annual User Experience Week. This year, we've put together all new material including several in-depth case studies and invited guest speakers such as Jared Spool and Marc Rettig to join us.

Please feel free to use, or pass along to friends, colleagues, or clients, my 15% discount promotional code: FOCF. If your friends or colleagues register for the workshop, tell them to let us know during registration and we'll buy you an iTunes album to say thanks for the referral.

Here's the link to the workshop info:
http://www.adaptivepath.com/events/2005/august

We're still offering a limited number of scholarships to the workshops for full time employees of non-profits (government, charities, universities, etc). Here's the link to that, http://www.adaptivepath.com/events/workshops/scholarships.php

Our marketer, Patricia Marchetti, is arranging deeper discounts for groups & non-profit organizations. She can be reached at patricia at adaptivepath dot com.

Like a lot of people, I played around with A9.com, the search engine from Amazon.com, when it first came out. It was neat, but I quickly forgot about it since I use Google pretty exclusively for web searching.

Then Goggle Maps came out, and wow! I played with that one too. But I keep using Google Maps, unlike A9. Though, I must admit, I think I confused the fuctionality in A9 with what is available on Google Maps.

Well, I was just looking at my Amazon.com shopping cart, and I see that they have started a clever little marketing ploy to increase the use of A9. I can save $1.37 on my Amazon.com orders if I use A9 on a regular basis. WOW! Now, I am just enough of a cheapskate to do that. (Goodness knows how long it's been up there.)

But, I don't know that I really would use it enough to qualify for the continued discount. And like, what kind of searches do I need to do? I'm sure someone out there has written a script to search on A9 at regular intervals for random words in the dictionary. How would they tell? Will there be Amazon Hacking now? People trying to pump up their discounts "artificially?" I can't be the first person to think about this.

Hrm... I wonder how long this will last? It did get me to install the A9 toolbar on Firefox though. Maybe I'll finally be able to keep straight the difference between A9 and Google Maps. Or maybe I'll just go back to my Google-only habits. *shrug*

Cane River

I'm home. Again. I was in Vancouver, Canada from late Tuesday night until late last night. I didn't get home from the airport until 12:30 AM. I was in Vancouver working with a client. The project was great fun and I think we did some really good work. I hope they are able to implement it as easily as they think they can. It will be so wonderfully cool if they do.

It was so nice to sleep in my bed last night. Not that the hotel bed wasn't nice - it was. But I had Freeisa curled up next to my legs all night and Smudge actually slept with me part of the night. YAY! Smudgie hasn't done that in a while. Being surrounded by purring furballs always trumps king-sized spaciousness in my book.

I was awake until 1:30 or so last night (or should I say this morning) though. Bleah. I was tired, but wound up at the same time. It was so hard to get out of bed this morning. I can't wait until tomorrow when I can sleep in. And I'll get to see my Sweetie tomorrow, which will be heaven.

Folks are coming over for a bit of a housewarming tomorrow evening. It looks like it will be a small group (it's so hard to plan events in the summer with all the weddings and graduations and whatnot going on), but that will be quite nice. Chillin' with the homeys is just what I need right now.

This swarm of flies has taken up residence in the Adaptive Path kitchen. You walk in and there they are, swirling above you as you fill your water bottle. They make my skin crawl. And my hair itch. It reminds me of when I was in Egypt, and how the flies were everywhere.

ICK!

Well, today I decided to take matters into my own hands. As I waited for my potato to be baked in the microwave, I got out a broom and began swatting flies. I rather felt like the brave little tailor. And I managed to take out 3 of the suckers.

Their days are numbered.

I have a living room! A very nice couple came by last night and relieved me of the 65+ moving boxes and piles of packing paper that have been occupying the corner of my living room since mid-April. Smudge is rather disappointed to have the boxes gone - he keeps walking over there and crying - since he really liked climbing and scratching on them.

I can't believe how much bigger the room looks now. There's still something not quite right with the flow. But it could just be that my furniture is just too honking big for the size of the room.

Now, the only last "move in" things left to do is create some order in the spare bedroom, get shelving to make a linen closet, and work on the yard. I at least want to have the weeds and grasses pulled out when folks come over in a few weeks. I'm rather excited to be able to plant. Mmm... growing things.

I spent the long Memorial Day holiday weekend in Sun City Center, FL with my grandmother, Aunt Anita, and her boyfriend Frank. It was a good trip. I got there late Thursday afternoon and didn't leave until Monday morning.

My grandmother cracks me up. She is so cute and so funny. Everytime I see her she is tinier and tinier. But she's still a pistol, even though she has Alzheimers. She'll curse at you in Italian "fata fata tuie" (I know that's not how you spell it, but that's how it sounds) which is essentially "mind your own business." She"ll come out with a "holy Moses" or "Atlantic Ocean" when others would say "oh geez." Yet she'll then come out with a zinger like the Italian form of "don't shit where you eat." Most of these comments are followed by her giggling cackle, her whole shoulders moving as she laughs.

She kept talking about needing to find a man. Everyone needed to find a man. To make a loop. I finally asked her what exactly "making a loop meant." She told me it was holding hands. It came out later that no, that's the PG definition. "Making a loop" requires other, um, body parts, to complete the circle. Anita and I took great care pointing out men that Nana could "make a loop" with. She didn't like any of the ones we found though. She said they were all too old. She wants a young one. Woo! Go Nana!

The loss of her memory has been really hard on my Nana. I wasn't sure what to expect when I got down there. She remembers a lot from the past, and still tells stories from when we were all younger. But she doesn't remember that I live in San Francisco or that my brother is married with two kids. You'll have the same converstaion multiple times in an hour. Looking at pictures helps to jog her memory though.

There was one night where Nana and I spent the evening together. We had dinner and then she decided that she wanted to go out. We went to radio shack so I could get a replacement cell phone charger, and then walked around the shopping center a bit. I kept teasing her that we could go to Home Depot and get her a drill, it was right there. As we were leaving the center we saw a couple of fire trucks drive down the road past us. It was her idea to follow them. So I did a u-turn and we tracked down the fire trucks. It was a brush fire near a golf course, on the edge of a ritzy housing development. We had fun watching the trucks and looking at the houses, and trying to find the source of the smoke.

We also spent some time talking, which was really nice. She misses my grandfather so much. The two of them were like peas in a pod. She knows that she forgets things and is frustrated that she can't remember. She also feels that she is losing control over her life - she's dependent upon others and while I think she is grateful to have them and their help, she bucks against them, throwing her anger at her situation at them. My poor aunt is often gets the brunt of it.

It's hard. I know that my grandmother's situation is not unusual. What she is going through happens to many of us, and will very likely happen to me. It hurts to see her so confused and frustrated though. I don't want her to age. I don't want her to hurt (both emotionally and physically).

I understand why in this youth-focused culture of America people push the elderly aside, trying to forget. But I don't like that model. I wish I could be closer to her. I wish Nicholas and Gracie could spend more time with her. Families used to live in big units - all the aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents living close together. I know it wasn't as fun and easy as it is to imagine. But I do believe that we've lost something by separating the extended family.