Lisa has rejoined the blogging world with Mathias Eugene, a blog mostly about our son, but about other things as well.  Right now its invite-only, so if you’re interested, send her an email.

A bit of baby news from last night… For the first time, Mathias slept through the entire night without waking up!

More sleep for the family appears to be on the horizon, especially for mom. That’s good, as she both needs and deserves it.

It’s one thing after another these days. I just got a message tonight that my dad is going in for gallbladder surgery tomorrow morning. I haven’t been able to get a hold of my mom, so I have no idea what that’s all about yet.

I had my final for Strategic Management this evening, and am kind of underwhelmed by my performance. I tried to do some good overview studying before the final, but in retrospect the only thing I did well was studying for the wrong things.

I should know my grade within a week or so. If I get a B, I’ll be happy.

I have a 7:00 a.m. conference call tomorrow morning for work. Note to self: If the world was truly flat, we wouldn’t have to suffer 12-hour work days to get meeting times lined up.

Wow, those last two entries make me sound like some kind of pervert.  I’ll probably have to try to write something exceedingly intellectual in the near future.

I’ve spent most of the day studying for my Strategic Management final, even going as far as missing most of today’s delightful Packers/Vikings game. Anyway, I wanted to pass along what I think are the greatest two sentences in Management Strategy by Alfred Marcus (a great book, by the way), which I’ll pass along without any context whatsoever:

Personalities now cross from MTV to CBS. The Janet Jackson Super Bowl fiasco showed the risks of this strategy.

After over a year of some dude linking to this image on my site, and repeated efforts by me to contact him and to get him to stop stealing bandwidth, I solved the issue this morning by swapping out The Jesus with this photo. (NSFW!)

He removed the link in under six hours.

A couple of other notes about the past week:

First of all, Lisa was amazing.  I’m not sure how I would’ve handled the week without her help.  Maybe I’d still be puking.  She actually wore herself out taking care of me, which I feel pretty bad about.  I’ll have to find some way to make it up to her. She’ll say that’s not necessary, which is all the more reason I should do something.
In other news, my suspicion of the pharmacists at our local Walgreen’s went up a bit.  When Lisa called them to see how much the pain pills I was on could be affecting my nausea, she got this response:  “Have him take two at once.  If he throws up right away, it’s the pills.”

Seriously, fuck that.

Adding to the fun this past week, I missed the final for Strategic Management.  Thankfully, the professor has been very accomodating in letting me reschedule for next week.  As a result of course, much of this weekend will be spent studying.  Having my mind off the subject matter for over a week probably won’t help much.

And, finally, thanks to my migraine we’ve canceled the Turkey Party for the first time in its eight-year history.  I’m actually really bummed about that because of the great streak we’ve had going, but I guess all things must have their hiccups now and then. Maybe we’ll have some kind of make-up party, but probably not.

One week ago–last Friday at about this time, actually–I got a mild headache that didn’t seem to respond to my normal course of acetaminophen. I had trouble sleeping that night, and when I woke Saturday morning the headache was still there. It stayed with me all day Saturday, and then all day Sunday, slowly growing worse by the hour.

I woke up exhausted Monday morning. I made my way into work and scheduled an appointment with my doctor for the next day. By late in the afternoon I was losing my ability to think and went home early. Lisa wanted to take me to the emergency room, but I said no and that I’d just go to the doctor the next day.

By early Tuesday morning I was in the bathroom throwing up. I made my way into my appointment and promptly found myself referred to the emergency room. I called Lisa, she met me at home, and we headed to Abbott Northwestern.

The diagnosis? I had either what was known as an adult onset migraine, or meningitis. A CT scan and a number of blood tests later, they were pretty sure I had a severe migraine, although they refused to call it that since “we don’t diagnose it as a migraine unless you’ve had two.” They sent me off with hydrocodone-acetaminophen pills–which I later found basically means Vicodin–and instructions to drink plenty of fluids. Despite it being dark outside, I wore my sunglasses.

The pills did little to ease my headache, but did a great job of exacerbating my nausea. In the course of 48 hours I threw up more than I had in 15 years. By late Wednesday I couldn’t even hold down water, and after one particularly gross episode in front of Lisa, we headed back out to Abbott. Despite being in a complete and total mental fog by that point, I found myself thinking about the high deductible I’d chosen for our family health insurance plan, and asked Lisa to redirect us to the urgent care center at Fairview/U of M instead.

And, holy crap, am I glad we did that. After putting me through the same battery of tests every other doctor had, the physician on duty concluded I had a migraine and offered a shot of Imitrex, which I accepted. It didn’t completely knock out my headache but within 20 minutes its severity dropped enough that I almost felt like myself again.

(There’s a problem with the 1-10 pain scale all of the doctors I met with asked me to use. Minds like mine can always imagine something worse than what’s currently being experienced, which inevitably leads 9 and 10 being reserved for the utterly ridiculous. For much of Tuesday-Thursday, I rated my pain at an 8.)

As we left Fairview, my headache was still kind of there, but lights and sounds no longer sent sudden jolts of pain through my brain. I got a good night’s sleep for the first time since Saturday, and while the morning greeted me with a headache we were able to knock it back with a simple dose of Excedrin Migraine. I spent Thursday recovering, even reading a bit, something that would’ve been impossible for me 24 hours earlier. I took a strategically-scheduled half day at work today (the half of the day being centered on when I’d have the least in the way of meetings and interactions), which allowed me to catch up while still getting me out and about a bit. I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck, but I’m getting better.

I’ll probably write more about this over the next couple of days, and will likely make light of some of it in the process. If I don’t, I may end up being traumatized by it. I know that makes me sound like a wimp, but I have nothing to compare this to. The pain was bad, but the duration of the headache transformed it into something completely different. I hope I never have to deal with a migraine again, and now have a new of level sympathy I wouldn’t have been capable of just one week ago for those who regularly get them.

More later.

Turkey Party 2007 has been canceled due to sickness.  If anyone wants a free frozen turkey, let me know.  First come, first (and only) served.

I had kind of a stupid evening at school today. Walking back to class after grabbing my evening coffee, I noticed that the smirky undergrad who’d served me had aligned the sip hole with the ridge on the side of the cup, a fairly fool-proof way to ensure that unobservant customers end up with coffee on their shirts. (This is the same undergrad who often ends each sale with “Have a night,” and once shut down the Coffee Corner at its exact closing time of 7:45, despite there being five potential customers in line. She’s seriously elevated not giving a shit to an art form. Like many who’ve had bad jobs, I actually have a weird kind of respect for that, although I definitely didn’t the night I didn’t get my coffee.) I stopped and took off the lid to realign it, at which point I learned that her definition of not leaving room for cream means filling the cup right up to the very rim. So, scalding hot coffee all over my left hand. Ow.

I was kind of hungry, and the $0.85 bag of Gardetto’s snack mix in the vending machine looked tasty. So, I fed in a dollar bill, hit the appropriate button and found myself faced with a “CORRECT CHANGE ONLY” message. Okay, no big deal. I hit the money return button, and… Nothing. I tried a few more times to no avail, and so went back to the Gardetto’s button. CORRECT CHANGE ONLY. Dammit. Figuring the machine may be out of nickels, I looked for $0.80 and $0.75 options, but the few items at that price I kind of wanted gave the infernal CORRECT CHANGE ONLY message again. So, finally, I looked around for $1.00 items and found only one option, miniature Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

I didn’t want peanut butter cups. Of course, I ended up getting them anyway. The machine might as well been wired so when you feed in a $1, you automatically get them, no button-pushing required.

Back in the classroom, I ended up venting to Yash and Jarred, two of the fellow students I’d worked with on the comparative analysis paper for the class. “You know,” said Yash, “it’s kind of fun watching you get annoyed. It’s amusing.”

“Great.”

Later on, at home, Lisa commented on my story. “Oh, you get so annoyed with machinery. It’s so cute.”