If it can go wrong, it will go wrong more than once

I woke up this morning unable to successfully breathe through my nose. I relocated from the bed to the recliner in the living room. I then proceeded to blow some nasty, thick goo from my nose. Yep, it is official, I have a sinus infection. Totally bites! Fortunately, until today I haven’t had much in the way of “pain.” Yesterday, my jaw and ears hurt after I did my antibiotic saline wash. Go figure. The treatment is worse than the ailment sometimes. Medieval water torture. Actually once you get used to it and figure out just what temperature the water needs to be to be comfortable, it isn’t half bad considering it does help aid in the “feeling better quicker” result. I’ve been blowing goo all day. Fortunately, it isn’t green or bloody. Just yellow, thick, and nasty. I’ve got a nice cough to go with it. The cough just tastes nasty. It is possible that it is more than a sinus infection, I suppose. Today I’ve had the whole stuffy head kind of feeling complete with the foggy mind. I’ve had a bit more headache but due to the pressure of my clogged up head. We’ll see how it goes over the next couple of days and hopefully the saline wash will work and I won’t need more.

This is what I do, or at least, that’s what I want you to think I do

Of course, today was the day I spent working on my portfolio of all the various things I can do – web design, logo design, print design, digital scrapbooking and kit design, etc. I was on a roll. I figured I’d have it done tonight and only have to fill in the filler text tomorrow (you know, the autobiographical accounts, etc). I was moving right along, making progress. I was moving things between the PC, the network drive, and the Mac (working on the Mac of course). I was resizing thumbnail images as I went. I got to a stopping point…I’ll be honest, I was getting bored…and decided to go ahead and resize some of the larger preview images.

I am using Macromedia Fireworks to do the batch processing on the images because it is on the Mac not on my Windows partition on my Mac so less hassle moving back and forth between the partitions and whatnot. Not to mention that Fireworks has a nice easy batch processing for scaling images. I don’t keep it around for much else. Basically, you got to Batch Processing, tell it to scale, what to scale it to, tell it where to save it, and hit process. Badda bing, you’re done!

I had been using it all day for doing the thumbnails. Go figure that it decided that it was not going to be doing anymore valuable work for me after about 4:30pm. *angry face* Go to scale the larger images and clearly set them to scale down to fit within the 500 pixel width and to only scale if larger than that. Hit process. Wait. Go to Firefox and hit refresh, click on the gallery image…wait…and there pops up NOT my nice 500px wide image but rather a 1×1 pixel image. What the heck?

So being gluten for punishment like I am, I did it with another set of images. Double checked to make sure I set it to 500px wide, etc. Yep. It did the exact same thing, except this time some of the images were 2×1 pixels. *angry face*

So I shut down Fireworks as Studio 8 is not native on the Intel Macs so there are some stability issues with it from time to time. It runs, don’t get me wrong, just sometimes it flips out. I restart it after a few minutes. Try it again. Evidently, I am also learning impaired. It does the exact same thing, scaling it way down.

So now a lot of the progress I had made today was totally wiped away! Grrrr! Yes, yours truly saved the scaled images right over the top of the originals in the portfolio folder. Don’t worry, I am not totally stupid…I had copied all the images over to the portfolio folder so I did not overwrite the true originals. Just now, I have to go back through all these files and folders and whatnot on 2 machines and the network drive and save them back over to the portfolio folder again.

Still, I am happy with my progress overall. This is just a setback in my opinion. A minor one. They happen.

It is how much?

So I called earlier to refill two of my prescriptions that had run out. I had been without my Prevacid for a few days already and let us just say that I shouldn’t do it and I knew I shouldn’t, but I didn’t want to go to the pharmacy.

So I get to the pharmacy tonight…Kyle and I went out to go to Wal-mart to get a few things (razor cartridge refills for Ben and misc stuff)…I stopped at Walgreens on the way home to pick up my medicine. I get to the counter and they have it ready (better since I told them I’d be there at 3:30pm to get it and it was now 8pm).

She rings it up and gets my Sudafed (from behind the counter). I fill out my required agreement that I won’t make drugs from my decongestant form. Then I hear my total and about fell over. For the 2 prescriptions and a box of 48 Walgreens brand Sudafed decongestants is $101.05 and change. What!?!?! Yes, that was with my insurance.

Evidently, Prevacid is really gold pellets in a capsule as my information sheet says that my insurance saved me $115.60 over what I would have paid. Since it was $69 (and change), I can’t imagine anyone without insurance is taking this miracle reflux aid.

Now the pharmacist does tell me that I had a $50 deductible on our prescription plan. The thing is, I don’t understand why I got hit with it tonight. She couldn’t tell me how high my deductible is, I’ll have to call them tomorrow and find out…but…I am sure that I paid $50 last month when I got my prescriptions refilled too.

I suppose this is a sign that I should get myself to the doctor again and have them do the reflux scope and nonsense to figure out if there is any damage that needs to be repaired and solve the problem permanently. I mean, at $69 (and change) times 12 months, that’s some $828 plus whatever the change added up to over 12 months. I’ll call the insurance tomorrow and find out what the deductible is and what it would cost me once I am past that, but right now I am getting reflux flares just thinking about the cost of the medicine.

You want me to do what with what?

Tonight I picked up an old “lace” knitting pattern. I had tried it 4-5 years ago. Remember, that long gap of non-knitting for the most part? Yep, that would be from way back when. I thought that I’ve learned a lot over time (especially with everything I am working on now) and that I would be able to figure out this pattern.

I’ve knitted 6 rows and am totally NOT sure I am doing one of the “stitch patterns” correctly. I mean, if you slip 1, knit 1, pass slipped stitch over the knit stitch, and then you knit 1…How the heck do you then pass the previously slip stitch over?..Then knit 1 and do it again? What is this supposed to look like?

It has a stitch pattern abbreviation of MH…which I have come to decide means “make hole” but outside of that I am not sure what the heck I am supposed to be doing. I figure I am doing something “wrong” since I ended up with 8 extra stitches on the needle on 1 row and 5 extra on another row. I am totally scratching my head here!

Naturally, I hit my friend Google and started searching various terms – knitting Endymion Lace, knitting abbreviations, knitting stitch patterns, etc. I can tell you that there are some classic novels that (1) take place in Endymion, (2) there are references to lace in them, or (3) there is a character with a name of Endymion. Evidently this pattern is based off the very ornate laces of way back when around the time of Endymion.

Now, none of this new found knowledge gives me any more insight on how to make it look like it is supposed to look or even a solution to the extra stitches once I’ve done what the pattern tells me to do. Clearly there is a problem. The solution, not so clear.

I did, however, find a new way to easily “make 1” and I am going to try that on the next row and see if it makes more sense than what I was doing. It still doesn’t solve my “pass previous slip stitch over” problem…Maybe I’ll go back to knitting on that sampler afghan again…

Way to go, Kyle!

Kyle had a fabulous Wednesday folder today. OK, so there was one grade (last week’s spelling test) that wasn’t so great, but it was at least passing. In his folder was his progress report. STRAIGHT A’s! GO KYLE! I am so proud of him!