It's been 24 days since I posted anything, so here's a quick entry.

Things have been pretty crazy lately, what with trying to finish projects at the office, getting Emily hooked up with a new car, and trying to keep health on the up-and-up.

I took a day off last week to get my teeth cleaned and see about getting some treatment started. As I expected, the dentist ordered a root canal for one of the teeth that was in pretty bad shape.

I went in yesterday morning at 10:00AM for the procedure, which went pretty well. There was one point when the dentist hit a spot with the drill that wasn't entirely numb yet, so he stopped and gave me another shot, waited, then continued his work.

After sitting there with my mouth wide open for an hour, my neck and jaw started hurting pretty bad. Luckily he was done though, so I was able to leave, get some lunch and my medication, then come home and recover.

I was able to get some work done while I was still numb, but as that wore off I started feeling the ache of the work that was done in my tooth, so I decided to sleep it off.

A couple of hours later, I headed off to Chili night at the church, followed by bible study. By the time that was all over with, I was ready to hit the Vicodin that the dentist prescribed. After I took that, I was in bed at 9:30 and out like a light. I woke up a couple of times in the night, but slept fairly well otherwise.

When I woke up this morning, I was feeling feverish and nauseous, which seemed to go away for a few hours during the day. After lunch though, it came back so I ducked out of the office a little early.

So that brings me here where I sit. I need to take my next dose of the antibiotic, but the instructions say to not lay down for an hour after taking it. If I take it, I want to just take a nap until Emily gets here at about 6:00 so we can go get dinner. I don't know how much I'll be able to stomach tonight, or how much my mouth can tolerate, but I know I need to get something in me.

...isn't dead; it's hibernating.

Well no, not sharing them with you. But I've been trying to figure out how to share the movies on my computer with my XBox, since I'm sick and tired of plugging my computer in to the TV when I want to watch one of them, then unplugging it when I'm ready to use my computer again.

Those of you who pledge to promote Microsoft products would probably suggest using Windows Media Center. But since I'm taking that tone, you're wondering why I own an XBox 360 if I'm not a Windows fanboy. Well, quite frankly, the 360 is probably the one thing Microsoft has done (somewhat) right.

No, I'd much rather use this computer I have plugged in to just power and networking as my media server. On that computer, I can mount my network shares from my Windows computer (sigh), then use the power of Linux and uShare to turn that power-and-network-only computer into a media server.

Luckily, I found this article that outlines how to do it. Of course, you'll want to adapt the article for your flavor of Linux, but otherwise it does the job PERFECTLY.

*** Tim just reached level 10 in laziness!

My updates are again kinda sparse, so here's a short and sweet one.

- Work is good, though I have taken the bulk of my PTO/VTO this month, leaving just 11 days of October as days I have worked.
- I have the bestest girlfriend one could ask for. :)
- I am now pretty involved with the church I attend.
- I need to go see a dentist.
- I need to get over this flu and ear infection. It has kept me working from home this entire week and now I feel like I'm going to collapse.
- My back has been mostly better since I got a new bed and new shoes. I still have my days though.

To fill in any gaps, I just want to say that life is great.

As I mentioned on day 6 without caffeine, things have been going quite well. I'm now just shy of 1 month without it, and I don't really see any need to return to it.

I was pretty stressed out yesterday evening, so at dinner I had a glass of Dr. Pepper. It didn't taste good to me, and I got absolutely nothing from it other than a slight thirst quenching. Other than that, the most caffeine I've had in this month long stint has been a nibble of a brownie here just a couple of times.

There has actually been a fair bit of benefit from kicking the habit, not the least of which is better sleep at night. On top of that, I have lost a little bit of weight and I find that it's easier to focus. I haven't had my blood pressure checked yet since I stopped the caffeine, but I would be willing to bet that it's back down to a normal level, even without medicine (I'm still taking my meds though).

Many people, including my lovely girlfriend who got this ball rolling, have asked why I'm still going without caffeine even though I've beat the 2 weeks. My answer to them is always, "Because I'm sleeping at night now." I think that alone is worth it.

Saturday, Emily and I went on a trip with a group from the office. This was a trip down the Comal river in New Braunfels, TX.

I went tubing with a few of the guys from work back in April, but we tubed down the Guadalupe river in Canyon Lake, TX, just about 20 minutes away from the Comal. During that trip, the most current we saw was in the places where the water was just 2" deep and ripped over some sharp rocks. Thus, I didn't think twice about wearing my glasses as we went down the Comal.

As we approached the first chute on the Comal, Saturday morning, I thought, "This is gonna be fun!" Then when I got to the bottom of the chute, I saw that I was going to hit a wave pretty hard. Before the nerve impulses went from my brain to my arm to grab a hold of my glasses, that wave ripped them clean off my head and dropped them to the bottom of the river.

While this sucked hard, I didn't really sweat it too much because I knew I needed new glasses, and this was just a very convenient excuse. After we got back to Houston, Emily had to drive back to my apartment so I could find my old glasses. Luckily, I did find them right where I thought they would be, and I have been trying to make use of them since.

I don't know what my prescription strength was in my glasses I lost, nor do I know what it was in the glasses I am currently wearing. What I do know is that I can't see this 12 point font on my screen as I'm typing from about 18" away. I also know that I have been wearing these glasses all day and the strain is starting to cause some really wicked migraines.

I will be calling a couple of different eye doctors tomorrow to see who can get me in the soonest, who accepts my insurance, and who can get me my glasses the quickest. If I have to wear these glasses for more than another day or two, I'm probably going to (try to) kill someone because of the headaches. Work is going to be rather interesting for the next day or so as well.

Since she says I haven't blogged enough about her (and she's very right), I'd like to take a quick moment to say how lucky I am to have this very pretty young lady, Emily, to call my girlfriend.

Since I've met her, you've probably noticed a severe drop-off in my amount of online activity such as blogging and whatnot. Well, that's because I have a much better use for my time now, and I enjoy it much better than sitting by myself in front of that dull box of blinking lights.

Emily is really a great lady, and I hope that you can all meet her sometime. My life just hasn't been the same since I met her. :)

Several years ago while I was working at a local auto body shop, I had some personal health issues. Among those issues was this time when I was cutting some rusty metal off a customer's car. I was wearing the full safety gear (goggles, mask, gloves), but somehow a chunk of metal managed to find its way to my eyeball. I didn't know about it until the next morning when I woke up with what I thought was welder's flash.

Since I was having a really hard time seeing, I had my mom call my boss and tell him that I was in this situation and that I probably wouldn't be in that day. They somehow got into the details of the ordeal, and it was brought up that only my right eye was giving me fits. The boss, experienced as he was, told my mom that it probably wasn't welder's flash and that if it didn't go away within a couple of hours I would need to get in to see the eye doctor. That was one of the longest days of my life.

During the several hours that went past, I was sitting on the sofa in the basement, listening to the television. Why wasn't I watching it? Well, apparently my left eye started to feel bad for my right eye, and it began to swell and water, thus leaving me blind, a sensation like no other, which I do NOT want to experience again.

By about 2:30PM, Mom called the local eye doctor and was able to secure me an immediate appointment. The eye doctor knew full and well what to expect on both a best-case scenario and its counterpart, the worst-case scenario.

Upon arrival to the clinic, the optometrist put a colored eye drop in both of my eyes. This solution would "puddle" around any foreign objects, which would make them much easier to see on the scope. She first checked my left eye and found nothing. When she moved to the right eye though, she said I was a very lucky guy. She mentioned that had the chunk metal been just millimeters to the left, it would have been in my line of sight and would have left me somewhat impaired as a result. Not only that, but if I had waited longer the metal shard would have worked its way into my eyeball even deeper, which would have required emergency surgery at one of the nearby universities.

As we were finishing up at the clinic, the doctor mentioned that I would have a scar on my eyeball for the rest of my life, but it should not cause any issue in the long term.

This process repeated itself another 5 times over the course of that year, and they all resulted in the eye doctor telling me that I wasn't being truthful about wearing protective eye glasses or goggles (though I was). Each time though, I was just as lucky as the first: The damage was never in my line of sight.

Well, all of this changed just the other day. While it's just a minor issue, it is very annoying. As I was staring out the window of the airplane on my way to and from Las Vegas, I noticed this little black dot towards the bottom of my view that seemed to follow wherever I was looking. At first I thought it was probably just a speck of something in my eye, but on the return trip today it was confirmed.

I don't think this is going to cause any problems, since it's more of an annoyance than anything. It's just really weird though.

The RHCE is DONE.

How did I do? I aced the first part, and I'm relatively certain I aced the second part. The 2 months of studying really helped out and I was able to recover a lot of knowledge I already had. :)

I want to thank everyone for the moral support, regardless of how I did on the test. I couldn't have done it without you!

I leave here at about 7:30 in the morning to take the RHCE exam. After working through a couple "practice" exams, I am pretty confident that I'll do okay with it. I was able to get the installation and configuration down in 1 hour and 10 minutes, and only one thing was broken afterward (and easily fixed!).

Wish me luck: For tomorrow night I shall be an officially Red Had Certified Engineer.