November, 2008:

In early August I wrote a blog entry that celebrated the end (so I thought) of nearly three months of tooth-related pain and suffering, with a lovely x-ray of the root canal I’d just had done. For those of you who weren’t here, or weren’t paying attention, or got really bored of my whining: the short version was that I got some botched fillings done, which led to extreme (and I mean extreme) sensitivity to cold on some teeth, plus jaw pain and TMJ, plus a swollen sinus on my right cheek (above the teeth that had the fillings). The jaw problems went away but the other pains increased until I felt like the entire right side of my face was being repeatedly sliced open while my brain kept trying to explode out the back of my head (also on the right side). Which I guess was a bad pair of analogies to use, since the dentist thought I was exaggerating.

From the beginning the dentist had scoffed at all of my complaints about pain. The fact that drinking liquid became an ordeal of tilting my head to the left and sipping slowly, or my right temple would get a shooting pain, just suggested I had slight sensitivity. My right cheek sinus hurting like hell he put down to him bruising it from giving me too much novocaine, and told me it would go away in 3 weeks; so I spent 3 weeks suffering it before he’d listen to my complaints again.

The eventual root canal (I got after having an emotional breakdown in front of him when he wouldn’t believe my pain was real) helped a bit, and when I wrote that final post I thought that had fixed everything; but most of the pain was still there after the weekend of supposed recovery. As a last ditch effort of dealing with the problem (before he was going to send me to the hypochondriac lonely woman hospital for the mentally deranged) the dentist prescribed me antibiotics. 2 days later I was all better.

The only amusing thing out of this whole ordeal was that near the beginning, when my cheek had first started to hurt, my mother said, “you might have an infection; that dentist should give you antibiotics”. Perhaps everyone should listen to mothers more often. Or at least to mine.

It was all very traumatic for the overly sensitive me: the ever-increasing pain, the mystery of it (the dentist not believing how bad it was, the worry that it would never go away, etc.), the inability to work except in the snatches of time when the spasms subsided, and having to drink myself silly and take sleeping pills every night at the end because whiskey seemed to be the only thing that helped (after marijuana and Tylenol 3s failed). Even drunk I still couldn’t get to sleep without prescription drugs. It was bad, there was no diagnosis and there was no end in sight.

I never really got to enjoy the instant and miraculous recovery, beyond being relieved that it was all over. Work was stressful and busy and I’d been underproductive (by my personal standards) for the previous month, so I threw myself into my job in an attempt to get a handle on everything, working late hours and even on weekends. 3 weeks later I was laid off.

It’s only been in the last while that I’ve been remembering the details of this, and how utterly ridiculous it all was. How, near the end, I had collapsed onto the floor of the IT room, clutching my face in agony, while the manager stepped over my body as if I were some annoyingly-placed piece of furniture. Ah, personal strife, my life would be so boring without you.

But I’m especially remembering all this right now because the pain has come back.

I tend to get canker sores (shut up, they’re not herpes) once in a while, and two weeks ago I got one, followed by a second maybe a week later because life isn’t fair. The second one was odd, being on the inside of my cheek, right beside my lower back molar where it could be repeatedly rubbed and scratched. On the same side of my head as all the problems last summer, by the way. And now a good portion of that side of my head hurts, from my teeth to my eye to my ear to the back of my skull, including that cheek sinus that has never entirely stopped bothering me. At first just the canker hurt, but now it’s fine and the rest of my face is having a go at me.

Hence the need to bitch about what happened, and hence my new worry that there’s something going on that’s worse than the original infection. It could just be the fact that facial nerves are all cross-wired and canker sores tend to cause nearby teeth and lips to hurt anyways, so it’ll all go away once the ulcer heals. But this is far more extensive than the usual I’m used to, and again, pain meds and Ambesol-type numbing gels aren’t helping me. I guess if it’s still bad tomorrow I’ll call my doctor, but I’m hoping I’m just being a hypochondriac and deranged lonely woman and will be fine in the morning.

Another result of all that happened this summer is that I’m now afraid of going to the dentist’s. It’s a good thing, then, that I can’t afford to see one anyways.

My friend Bill sent this to me earlier this week: a time-lapse video of a guy sleeping, and the cat that pesters him in the night.

It’s pretty much a reenactment of Simon’s Cat, so for any of you who’ve never owned a cat and thought that that cartoon was an exaggeration, now you know the truth. Well, maybe the baseball bat to the head was a bit over the top, but everything else has happened before.

That’s it for cat links; I didn’t want to scare you off, after all. Have a good weekend, everyone!

Maybe this has been discussed elsewhere, or maybe employment standards aren’t quite as important as unemployment itself these days, but I’ve been hearing rumours of bad things happening at formerly nice companies, and I’m wondering if it’s more than coincidence or the moon being in Taurus.

In the last week I’ve heard about one place having their staff work around 70 hours in a week, but without providing them dinner. I can’t find where it talks about that in the employment standards act, or if it does at all, but I believe there’s some rule that if you keep people late then you’re supposed to feed them. And generally you shouldn’t work them that long because their brains stop working after a while. At least mine does.

Another situation has a company only giving one week of vacation a year to new hires. This being Canada, people are entitled to 2 weeks. Frankly I don’t know how Americans can survive on one week per year, because 2 doesn’t seem like enough. We should all be like the Europeans and get a month, minimum, but in an imperfect Canada it’s still 2.

These situations are just hearsay, mind you, but they’ve got me wondering if managers of dubious morality are going to take the opportunity that this economy has provided to squeeze the life out of their employees. I’m guessing many people are too scared to jump ship right now, and I’ve heard of those who were looking for new jobs but stopped when the markets crashed. So the fear of layoffs and unemployment are keeping people tight in their seats and accepting whatever treatment they’re getting because they think it’s better than the alternative. For the sake of society I’m hoping I don’t hear about more stuff like this, but I’m afraid I might.

To be fair, I can understand that it must be tough on managers too. People have been laid off, there’s a hiring freeze at the company, but their team is still expected to perform as it did 6 months ago when projected growth was 20% per year. Of course, if they’d read up on negative productivity they’d know that working their staff to the bone is going to produce crap(-pier) results; but in a panic they’re going to throw hours at things to get them done, because there doesn’t seem to be any other choice.

Have any of you heard about changes in employee treatment at formerly nice/happy/fun companies? Do you think we’re going to hear more of this? And if the world economy continues to die an endless death, will people waive their rights in exchange for a biweekly paycheck?

The fact that I’m sitting in front of 3 computers right now suggests that I am really, really geeky.

What’s even geekier is that I’m using all three at once. One isn’t enough, neither is two. Okay, one of them is just playing music right now, but that’s a very important function.

I bought a refurbished gaming computer from Best Buy a few weeks ago, which wouldn’t boot up Vista no matter what I did, so I wiped that off and put Ubuntu on it. I was going to do that anyways, but still, Vista missed its chance to not suck in my presence. FAIL. I bittorrented a 64-bit version of Vista Home Premium, since the license key is on a sticker on the side of the computer and Best Buy wasn’t going to give me installation disks. I’ll get around to burning that onto a DVD and setting up a virtual Windows machine one of these days, when I’m feeling especially masochistic.

I intend to use the new desktop as a software development and database testing machine, but most often as a music server, since it’s got a big enough hard drive to hold all my mp3s, unlike the Macbook or webserver. I’ve got it hooked up to the living room stereo and I’m thinking of buying an Apple Airport Express to put in my bedroom to attach to the boombox. Supposedly it’s been reverse-engineered to work with Linux and stream its music.

And then from my bedroom I can either remote desktop or ssh into the music server using my Macbook (or with my iPod Touch if I get command line mp3 playing commands figured out, though that’s an awkward interface) and control the music playback. Because walking a few metres to the physical computer itself is too much work. I’m not sure “my apartment is large” is a justifiable excuse for wanting to set this up, but then, the only real excuse is utter shameless nerdity.

Stuck inside and unemployed for 3 months, the typical woman would probably clean and redecorate. And instead I’m trying to create the sweet wireless media hookup throughout the apartment using Linux and Apple hardware. Note, while the Ikea furniture I bought 4 months ago is still in boxes on the living room floor. I’m even wondering how I’d be able to play music into the bathroom. Priorities, what happened to you?

A few weeks ago I was showing my friend Chrissy these dishcloths I’d been making, using a pattern I’d made up in my head because I was too lazy to look one up on the internet. She complimented me on them and said I should publish the pattern, so here it is below. As it’s quite simple, I’m sure it exists elsewhere under a different title that doesn’t have a swear word in it.

In regards to the pattern name, it’s based on my frustration when I gave a few of these to my stepmom the other weekend as a birthday gift. She insisted they were potholders due to their corner loops for hanging. Even when I told her that I made them and that therefore they were whatever I said they were. So she’s using them as potholders. Which pisses me off, because I feel as if my art has been defiled… by not being defiled.

Update June 2009: Chrissy was nice enough to mention this pattern in her podcast a few months ago, and she had the great idea to add a single crochet border around the thing to make it look better and stronger. I have added this to the pattern itself below. Right side photo is also by Chrissy.

The “It’s Not a Fucking Potholder” Dishcloth

Yarn: Any cotton worsted weight yarn, such as Lily Sugar ‘N Cream.

Hook: 4.5 mm / US 7
(or whatever is recommended for your yarn)

Gauge: Who cares? It’s a dishcloth.
The example I created with this pattern is using Sugar ‘N Cream yarn and a 4.5 mm hook, is 29 stitches across and 26 rows high, and measures about 19 cm (7.5″) on each side.

Special Stitches:

FLSC: front loop single crochet
BLSC: back loop single crochet

Notes:

In brief, the pattern involves single crochets on all the outer stitches (first and last row, and first and last stitch on each row), and then an alternating FLSC and BLSC in all the stitches in between. If you need to make it larger or smaller than given in the pattern, chain an even number of stitches for the foundation chain and crochet to the desired length.

Pattern:

CH 30.

Row 1: SC into 2nd chain from hook, SC in every stitch across: 29 stitches. CH 1, turn.

Rows 2 to 24: SC, FLSC, *BLSC, FLSC* 13 times, SC. CH 1, turn.

Row 25 (or last row): SC in each stitch across row, 3 SC in corner stitch, repeat around edge of dishcloth. (This makes a nice thick border.)

Hanging loop (optional): SLST under the last stitch you just made (the corner stitch) from the side, CH 12, SLST into that same space from the top, fasten off. Weave in ends.

It’s getting close to 3 months of unemployment. If you can find where the time went, can you let me know? I’d like it back.

The job hunt has been sporadic, and is currently on hiatus. I don’t know what happened, but all the ads for MySQL DBAs disappeared. Not that there were many. I applied for a few a while back that wanted someone with knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL, and never got any responses. Because obviously knowledge of one RDBMS doesn’t make it easier to learn another (Oracle, sure. But MS SQL? C’mon). (My apologies for confusing you non-IT people. It’s too boring to explain.)

So I haven’t applied to any DBA jobs in a while. It’s just kind of insulting. Most of them don’t even mention MySQL anymore, anyways, so I don’t see the point of writing another cover letter of forced enthusiasm only to be ignored again. And I’d rather hang myself than have to work in a Windows environment. No, really.

I think the problem is that disregarding the savings account depleting, I’ve actually enjoyed this time off. Except for the regular doomsday reports about the economy, which are ruining my buzz, yo. But when my phone rings, I often don’t bother answering it unless I’m expecting a call. I love that. I really love that. After all these years of on-call work, there’s something so satisfying about ignoring the phone. And getting a full night’s sleep without the worry of a 3 am phone call. Some of you will, sadly, understand this.

I’ve had a few recruiters and potential employers contact me, after finding my resume on some site. One job sounded promising, except for it being in Victoria, but the CEO (or owner, anyways) was calling me every 15 minutes for several hours (as I happily ignored the phone). And then the next morning at 8 am. 8 am! After that, I decided not to speak to him on the grounds that if this was how he was to me before I’m working for him, I didn’t want to experience what working for him was like. Then again, I didn’t want to move to Victoria anyways (been there, done that, got the sweatpants with “UVIC” written on the ass).

There’s a job in Toronto I’d be perfect for, and it’s been advertised since the summer (if not earlier), but I got no response from them when I applied in September. I’m just going to chalk it up to either sexism or them having something against west coasters (jealousy, perhaps). But then, it would be just another on-call DBA job for a high-traffic site, and as I said before, been there, done that.

I could apply for a Java developer job. There are tons of those advertised right now, more than anything else in IT land. However, I’m a sucky coder. I admit it; I’ve admitted it before. Actually, I’m not horrible, but I’ve never had any mentoring on it and the few team leads who glanced at my masterpieces told me how unimpressed they were, but without telling me why, which was oh, so helpful in improving my skills. Hey, my stuff worked, it had good error handling, it was well documented. It was just not designed right, in that object oriented fashion that’s the whole point of the Java language. I know, I know.

So there’s no point applying for such a job, unless I want to go for a junior-ish position with a massive pay cut and start over. If I were interested in being a coder I’d do it, but I still have hopes for database-related work. Although they’re diminishing over time.

I’m still crossing my fingers for the job I wrote 2 tests for (and had 3 phone interviews! Stress!) but they’re waiting on their head office to approve hiring me, which means I’m in a limbo state of maybe sort of might be hired someday. This is certainly better than being rejected outright, obviously, but I can’t celebrate this either. It’s sort of an employment cock-tease, and I’m feeling frustrated and unsatisfied.

My contract work is ending this week, and after that, there’s nothing. I may never work again (you never know). Really, besides the lack of money, it’s not that bad. I’m surprised at how much I don’t miss having a job, given how I over-dedicated myself to the last few. I had always assumed that life would cease to have meaning if I wasn’t working. I guess this is what it’s like to be recovering from burnout. At least I’m feeling much better now.

For those of you in the UK (or with UK proxy access) you need to go watch the BBC One video here: Inside Out North East and Cumbria (or use the iPlayer link). Quickly, as there are only a few days left to see it.

The first segment on the show is about Brenda Beecham, who’s the lovely wife of my dad’s Oxford buddy Jeremy. Though we really should call them Sir Jeremy and Lady Brenda, since the dude got knighted a while back. Here’s a photo I took of them when they were visiting in 2005 (from L to R, Jeremy, my stepmom Bertha, Dad, and Brenda):

Earlier this year Brenda found out she had colon cancer and that it was terminal. One of those examples of doctors not being cautious enough when seeing symptoms, I guess, combined with a disease that doesn’t take its time. This sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?

But rather than getting angry and hating the world (i.e., what I would do) Brenda went and made a documentary about her illness, in the hope that it might encourage people to get themselves checked when they experience similar symptoms. There’s a short article about her here, for the rest of us who can’t view the BBC video.

Brenda’s going through chemo right now, and remains cheerful and upbeat in a rather superhuman way. It’s sort of entirely unsurprising that she’s a life coach, eh? Hopefully she’ll share her secret for seeing the silver lining in this dark cloud.

(Oh, and if anyone in the UK is able to grab a copy of that video for me, I’d really appreciate it. I was able to watch it by using a UK proxy, but was unable to download the video despite trying various Ruby and Perl scripts.)

Update Thanks to Josh we can view the article (in lame quality, but better than nothing) here on the BBC site.