I got the results of my HIV test back this morning. They came back non-reactive to the HIV virus. In other words, I don’t have the HIV virus.

This is frightening. We complain about some of the systems where I work, but none of them are THIS bad.

I got a voice mail message the other day from one of the nurses at Curascript. That’s the pharmacy that handles my Rebif prescription. I called back today.

Every few months, they follow up to see how I’m doing. Zero side effects, no recent relapses, and I’m still injecting myself. I always throw in the fact that this is SO much easier to inject than my previous therapy, too.

Tomorrow, I have to drop in on my primary care doctor to go over some test results. They’re not MS-related.

I have really awesome parents. Even as kids, my parents were adament about being fair to my sister and I. For Christmas, our gifts were always of the same dollar value, making sure that one wasn’t cheated.

As adults, it’s not such a big deal. Well, to us it’s not, but to them it still is.

When I was moving into this place, I asked my parents for some help financially to pay for the movers. They didn’t blink. My dad responded that they’re always having my sister over for dinner and that they’re always spending money on Sarah, so helping pay for my move wasn’t a big deal to them. I hate asking my parents for money. I won’t ask my mom. For some reason, I always ask my dad.

The other night, I was talking to my dad on the phone and he said that he was going to be sending me a check. My sister just bought a house and needed to buy a new refrigerator. Well, my mom wanted a new refrigerator that has ice and water on the door, even though hers is only about three years old. They decided to buy themselves a new one and give the “old” one to my sister. My dad said that the check would be for about half of what the refrigerator cost.  Being honest, I told my dad that I didn’t expect a check but I totally appreciated it. I hadn’t given it much thought beyond that.

Zoom in on this morning and I checked my bank account balance and had a bit of a panic attack. I made a mistake of some type and found my balance to be FAR below what it should be. I called my landlord and told him not to cash the rent check just yet because it would bounce. That would suck. I still have to figure out what’s wrong with the account and will probably have to beg the bank manager to refund a few overdraft fees. At least I’m not going to starve this week.

When I checked my mail this afternoon, there was a check from my parents. It was twice as much as what my dad told me it would be. The timing was flawless. I’ll be able to pay my rent as planned, pay down a credit card, and still buy Reggie some treats.

Parents have a funny way of doing things with perfect timing.

Really… I’m not making this up.

http://www.hubpolitics.com/archives/000707.php

Today was fun. I went with Beth and Paul to Dave and Liz’s house. Dave and Rita were there, too. Much food was consumed. I totally gorged on Liz’s cilantro potato salad. It was incredible. My fruit crumble was good, although it was a bit… moist. Had I baked it today, it may not have been so bad. But since I baked it last night, the crumble topping had time to absorb some of the juice from the fruit. Making this with peaches was a great idea, although they’re a bitch to peel.

Anyway… it’s been a long day and I’m tired. The database maintenance ran just about 12 hours.

I’m off to bed.

Hi. I’m Mike, and I’ve lived in this fine city less than a year. Boston is rich in American history. I understand this much. 

What I don’t understand is your fascination with fireworks. In my drive home from Salem tonight, I can’t tell you how many fireworks displays I witnessed. Fireworks are nice, I guess. But they’re loud, and they make my Pug bark. He doesn’t bark at much of anything, including the gunshots when we lived in Dorchester.

Not only that, but it’s 10:45 and I need to be up shortly before 6:00 AM tomorrow to do my part in keeping the economy of this great city moving. Unfortunately, I’m being kept awake by the sounds of the fireworks displays still going. Can we keep the fireworks limited to more reasonable hours, please?

Finally, can we keep the fireworks away from the approach paths into Logan? As crazy as this sounds, nothing would suck more than fireworks hitting an American Airlines 757, causing it to crash. Plane crashes are bad. Senseless crashes caused by fireworks would be worse.

Fireworks make me nervous. I don’t bark much, either.

Since today is a holiday, I’m running some database utilities to check our database integrity. I’m not worried about the physical structure of the database because that’s tested nightly. It’s the actual data in the database that I’m checking today. Our vendor provides this functionality in the system, but I’m not entirely sure what it does. For that reason, I’m running a trace to see the database transactions. The trace has been running close to two hours and it has over eight hundred thousand trasactions in the trace table. It’ll take some serious analysis to understand what it’s doing, but that’s what I do…

I’m doing laundry today, and my first few loads were “essentials” that had to be done right away. The first load was colors, including underwear. That load of laundry had 22 pair of boxer shorts in it. No kidding, that’s enough underwear for three weeks.

Next came all of my white clothes, including socks and t-shirts. Next was jeans. They all fit into one load, no less. Finally, I’m doing another load of colored clothes, including a ton of my novelty t-shirts.

I haven’t done laundry in over two weeks. It was time to dig in and do a tackle this mountain of laundry.

I saw this ad before the previews when I saw Superman Returns the other night. I thought it was really funny as long as you get the “We are the world” reference.

You can find it here, too.