Wednesday

I missed choir tonight - whatever respiratory thing is going around I seem to be getting, and it showed up today with earache, scratchy throat, and general malaise.  I feel lousy - achy, headachy, tickle cough - just crappy.

I don't deserve this - and so I am visiting a doctor tomorrow to see if it needs an antibiotic or patience.  I'm hoping for an antibiotic, because if I get a good slug into me, I'll be able to keep a commitment to sing in another church with our daughter, Elizabeth - if it's a patience thing, she might get to do a couple of solos instead of a couple of duets with me - and she'll have to pick them on Saturday.  She's perfectly capable, but I do so enjoy dueting with her, and we don't do it all that often.

Feeling crappy will also keep me from Sammy, our newest grandchild - and he always makes me feel better.  So tomorrow I'll dog it in the morning, visit with the doctor in the afternoon and then decide what Friday will bring as far as work goes.  

I have spent no time downstairs - Arnold is behaving but I need to get bumping on the mail, web and FTP server aspect(s) of what it has.  I also have to get into the router and convince it to play nice with Home Server - and I am still waiting on RAID cards to get the array working before I cover it up and start ignoring it.

I should do the taxes this weekend, and hope I feel good enough - they need to get done, and I fear the feds are going to get a big piece of my butt because I started taking Social Security.  The money has been nice - it killed off some old credit card debt, but I didn't reckon with the Feds taxing it on me.  Being old is not all it is cracked up to be - trust me on that.  I have a feeling I'll have to work even longer than I thought before retiring - unless I want to adopt a monastic lifestyle, without motorcycles, computers, fiber to the internet, etc.

Speaking of fiber - if you can get it and you use the internet, especially for file transfers or remote work, you'd be silly not to do it.  I put a bunch of stuff on one bill since Verizon has my cells as well as my landline, internet and TeeVee - and their fiber internet service is so fast that it is hard to saturate it.  I put up my favorite robot and started rebuilding some of the stuff I lost in the last big drive crash - and pulled something like 30 gigs off the internet in less than 24 hours (binary newsgroup service mostly, using GigaNews as my supplier, NewsBin as my collection robot, and using all 20 connected sessions) and had NewsBin showing throughput between 18 and 19.2 megabytes per second, on a connection rated at 20 megabytes.  Bloody amazing - and even with that extreme internet load my HD televisions continued to work just fine - and it all comes in over one little piece of glass fiber.

And to think that I can remember when a fast print device for a network was an IBM Selectric that ran at 134.5 bits per second....

I should be going to bed, but I'm staying up so my wife can sleep.  I have to take some nyquil, and will probably sleep with the TeeVee tonight and off and on tomorrow.  Hope this bug, whatever it is, goes away fast - I don't much feel like feeling like this for the next week or so.

Goodnight all - tomorrow will be better.