Tonight PB and I got together to work on Sochin.  We probably did a dozen kata in his backyard, and I got a chance to teach the kata to him a bit.  It still feels very natural to do this kata, which makes me happy that I have burned it in so effectively.  I’m going to start sharpening it up over the next few months just because it feels good.

More karate tomorrow!

Happy Mother’s Day to all you mom’s out there, especially my Mom!  For some reason I woke up today thinking about all the things that we used to do for Mom on Mother’s Day.  I can remember one specific Mother’s Day where my sister and I woke up to make mom breakfast in bed and made way too much food… she had just about double the food that you’d have in a Denny’s Grand Slam.  It was always fun coming up with things to do as a kid to tell your mom that you love her.

It’s still a little weird not being right there to wish my Mom and grandmother’s well in person, but the phone gets by as a passable replacement.

I hope you have a good day, Mom!  You’re the best!

Tonight we had a combination Cinco de Mayo party and D&D session.  It was a great time, Paul and Teague made really excellent Mexican food (including margaritas!) and much merriment was had by all.

We had a rather interesting D&D session using the Underdark sourcebook tonight, they opted to explore an area that led to planar shifting and we ended up not battling anything.  Lots of roleplay/puzzle-solving though!

That’s all for me!

Was awesome!  This will be spoiler-free, but I consider this a worthy sequel in almost every way.

Things of note: Mickey Rourke did an excellent job as Whiplash.  Scarlett Johansson is smokin’ hot.  Don Cheadle did a passable job in the role of Rhodey, however I missed Terrence Howard.  I think the difference between the two in physical appearance probably didn’t help… in fact the girl sitting next to me asked her boyfriend “is that supposed to be his friend?” when Cheadle walked on for the first time.

Anyway… more spoiler-laden review at a later time.  The only other thing of note: this movie is a prop-lover’s dream.  There was so much cool stuff in this movie that I am intentionally staying off the prop forum until I have another spending month.

Today was a much better day at the office.  I had a long discussion with our IT director and we smoothed over the momentary differences that have cropped up over the last few days and things appear to be OK now.  The sinus infection/cold/cough that I had is starting to abate and I actually got a good night’s sleep last night.  It was only interrupted at 7:20 am when Teddy had a seizure.  We got up and took care of him, he snapped out of it fairly quickly.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow night.  Tasha and I are going to see Iron Man 2 at the local IMAX and we’re pretty excited.  That reminds me, I saw this really excellent Instructable on how to build your own Iron Man arc reactor prop… seems like it would be a really fun summer project.

Not much else to report at the moment!

We’re entertaining some visitors from the corporate office in Peoria tonight, so I had the pleasure of catching up with one of my old coworkers tonight.

Phil and I had worked for several years on a development team together and sat an arm’s length away from each other for a very long time and I didn’t realize quite how much I missed him until we got to visit for several hours tonight.

It’s amazing how the same problems exist no matter what company/division/job you’re working at, we were both able to point to similar issues still plaguing us years down the line.  What’s fun is that we still get to interact on a semi-regular basis and it was really nice to get caught up with him today.  Hopefully this won’t be the last time we get to hang out and catch up over a few beers.

So I woke up still feeling cruddy today, so I went to the doctor.  She put me on antibiotics for sinus infection and a cough medicine with codeine in it.  I also asked her about my insomnia problem, and once I’m well from the cold I get to take the following steps:

1. No more napping.  I have to tough it out.
2. No caffeine after 8 pm.
3. Go to bed at a set time every night.  I am invoking a 12:30 am bedtime on myself.

If this doesn’t solve it in a month, she wants me to come in for bloodwork to test my thyroid and a few other things.  So we’ll see how it shapes up.

For now, my codeine is kicking in so I am going to dream of fluffy clouds and goldtop guitars now.

I came home from work, fairly beat after a long day of preparing for a big meeting that ended up being more of a fizzle.  I got home, Tasha asked if I still felt like grilling and yes I did very much.  So this evening I fired up the grill for the first time this year, cleaned it using aluminum foil since my grill scraper has gone AWOL, and proceeded to make some pork chops from Omaha Steaks that we had in the freezer.

As I ate dinner, I realized that my energy level was fading fast.  Before those of you that worry about such things worry about such things: YES I’ve been eating and YES I’ve been trying to sleep better, the latter being more difficult due to a nagging allergies-related cough.  I have heavily medicated myself for the last few days in hopes of getting past these allergies, but a nagging post-nasal drip (hey, you asked) has caused a cough that keeps me up at night.

This precipitated a giant nap tonight due to the following thought process: “I’m tired, I’ll have a nap before Big Bang Theory” and in reality turned into “I’m tired, I’ll have a nap before Family Guy reruns come on”.  I’m feeling considerably better because of it, but I can tell I’m still not out of the blooming, allergy laden woods yet.  So I’m headed down to feed the rabbits, then back to bed with me.

After sleeping in a very large amount, I opted to begin the lawn care process.  I mowed, edged, and weed-whacked the front and side yard.  It went pretty smoothly, I want to do some repainting of the mailbox and possibly part of the fence.  The rest of the day was spent grocery shopping, as per our usual Sunday routine.

I think I finally got my email server issues resolved with my side project, so it’s on to bigger and better things.

That’s all I’ve got right now!

Today I helped a few friends move into their new house today!  It was a pretty good time, but I got tired of hauling furniture and boxes up a split level set of stairs.

I’ve also had the good pleasure of troubleshooting mail server problems for one of my side projects.  It’s a pretty annoying problem that is involved with the number of connections allowed by FastCGI and the idle-timeout value that is set. I have a support ticket in to have them twiddle some values for me, but if that doesn’t work I might have to re-implement a piece of code to only send a certain amount of emails at a time so it doesn’t run so long.  Argh.