Month: January 2015

I’ve now been on antibiotics for over 24 hours. This morning, I wasn’t sure at all if they were having any positive effect on my sinusitis. I was still slightly congested and I was still blowing some gnarly amounts of yellowish mucous out of my nose. I had some breakfast but wasn’t feeling all that great so I headed back to bed to get some rest.

To my surprise, I woke up and it was almost 4pm. I guess I was really tired. I got up but I was feeling even worse than this morning. I was quite dismayed to discover that as I was hoping the antibiotics would be working. Feeling hungry, I ate some food and drank lots of warm water to stay hydrated. About an hour later, I felt much better. I also noticed the congestion in my sinuses had abated considerably. While it’s still not 100% back to normal, I haven’t felt the need to blow my nose since this morning. This is quite the development since I’ve been rocketing mucous out of nose frequently for nearly three weeks now.

The only bit of bad news to report is that I think I have a very mild case of tonsillitis in my left tonsil. This is only the second time I’ve had it, the first being last summer where I had a very painful case of it. This instance of it is definitely annoying but nowhere as bad as last time. It sorta feels like a canker sore in the back of my mouth. There’s normally no pain as I go about my daily business. Drinking any kind of liquid, hot or cold, always eases any kind of sensitivity in the area. Eating is the only thing that flares up the pain. Eating any kind of soft food doesn’t cause any problems. I had a whole whack of tuna sashimi tonight for dinner, dipped in soy sauce and I was fine. Stuff that’s hard and has sharp edges though do cause a lot of pain. I had a potato chip yesterday and that was a bad, bad idea. Being on antibiotics will definitely help the tonsillitis go away much quicker.

In general, I think I’m finally seeing some improvement in my condition though I’m super frustrated I lost three weeks of my life to sinusitis. What a waste!

I saw a doctor today about my never ending sinus congestion. I went into great detail about my symptoms, including how I’ve had this for weeks and the great quantity of the yellow-green mucous my sinuses have been producing. The doctor looked into my ears and up my nostrils. He also tapped on my sinuses under my eyes and on my forehead. He prescribed me some antibiotics. I asked him how he knew it was a bacterial infection instead of viral. He told me based on the colour of my mucous it was most likely bacterial so antibiotics would work.

So now I’m on 500mg of amoxicillin, three times a day. In hindsight, I wish I went to the doctor earlier because this stupid illness has made the beginning of the year an awful time for me. Though, in my defense, this thing seemed like a normal cold to me at first and usually I don’t need to see a doctor to get better from colds. Of course, it would be useless to get antibiotics for colds anyways since they are caused by viruses, not bacteria. A lesson learned for next time perhaps but I hope I never get a bacterial infection of sinuses ever again.

I am aiming to feel better by the weekend but who knows how long it’ll take the antibiotics to work its magic. Come on drugs do your thing!

Though the severity has varied over the last few weeks, I have been under the weather since about Boxing Day. For first week or so, I had what seemed like a mild sinus infection on my right side. All it was was some congestion and a bit of mucus build up. It wasn’t really so bad, just a minor annoyance as I didn’t have any other symptoms. After a week though, I felt terrible all of a sudden and the mild sinus infection turned into what seemed like a full-blown cold. Both of my sinuses were now clogged up and congested. I started making copious amounts of green-yellow mucus from my nose. I also got a bit of a sore throat and a cough.

For the next three days of so, I felt awful and basically stayed in bed most of the time. Then I started feeling better as the general malaise went away as did the sore throat. The cough got better too but the nasal congestion remained. I could have seen a doctor at this point but it looked like I was getting better.

I waited for the sinus congestion to go away and on some days it felt like it might but it would never fully get better. It’s been like this for the last week and a half. Some nights it’s difficult to get decent rest since my sinuses are congested. I try to blow my nose to clear it but sometimes there’s nothing there but it’s still really hard to breathe.

I finally decided to seek medical advice today but when I phoned my family doctor’s office, I was told my doctor was booked up until he gets back in two weeks. I then visited two different walk-in clinics but both had reached their patient limits for the day already. I’ll try to wake up early tomorrow and get to a clinic before they close up for the day.

In recent memory, I can only think of one time where I’ve been ill this long. Back in grad school, one winter I had a nasty cough for an entire month. I just could not shake it. I wound having to take codeine which I’m pretty sure made me high for a while.

Anyways, I’m ready for this cold to go away.

It was way more hassle than I ever envisioned it to be but I finally have real Internet access at home again. This whole process of changing ISPs was a comedy of errors and if something could have gone wrong, it basically did in the last few weeks.

My new ISP, Lightspeed Communications, originally said someone would be coming to my home to set me up on 6th of January. I was supposed to be up and running that day. Then that date got pushed to the 8th but no one told me that though. I had to chase down Lightspeed for the basic details of the installation. I have to say they weren’t very good at all about making sure I was informed of what was going to happen. The onus was always on me to keep phoning them to figure out how my installation was going to proceed. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re a small company or if they just suck at communicating with their customers, either way, it’s not a good way to treat people.

Anyways, on the 8th, some dude from Telus finally comes to do some simple wiring at my apartment. He leaves, I try to connect to the Internet and nothing happens. I call Lightspeed again and they say that I might have to wait up to 24 hours for Telus to finish their work. Of course, 24 hours later it still doesn’t work and so a trouble ticket is opened up with Telus. It’s the weekend by this time, so no one is available at Telus. So two days pass without any resolution.

This morning, someone from Telus phones me and says he’s ready to come up and take a look at the wiring. I let him in and show him what the other guy did. He takes one look and tells me the other guy completely screwed up the wiring job. According to him, it wasn’t even close to being right. The new guy was way better than the idiot from last week. He fixed the wiring job, told me exactly what he was doing, and stuck around to do some tests to confirm the line was working properly. The final test, of course, was to plug in the DSL modem to see if I could get Internet access. As is typical with my luck in life, it did not work. Since he’s not responsible for the modem and anything else from the wiring on, it’s now back to a Lightspeed problem. I thank the guy and he leaves.

I get back on the phone with Lightspeed and they figure out that I was given a super fast 25 Mbps line instead of the 6 Mbps line. The modem I got doesn’t work with a 25 Mbps line. As I mentioned previously, if there was a potential to go wrong, it basically did in this whole mess. So they tell me I can drop by their office to pick up a temp modem so I can get Internet access while they change my line over to a slower one. Luckily, the office is very close by and convenient to get to. It takes me about half an hour to get it and come back home.

I plug the new modem in and it works, to my pessimistic surprise. It takes me about an hour to configure everything so it was working like before but it’s all good now. The one silver lining in all of this is it will take a few days for them to downgrade my line. Until then, my connection is four times faster than what I’m paying for. I’ve already downloaded a few games and lots of torrents to take advantage.

Well, what was supposed to be a simple process turned into a bit of nightmare. It feels so good to be back online again. Alright, now let’s go find some porn.

Well, for what it’s worth, I still don’t have Internet access at my home. My change in ISPs has turned into a bit of a nightmare. There’s no point in talking about it again until it gets fixed. Anyways, I’m typing this from a soup kitchen somewhere in east Van where I managed to get a nice bowl of hot minestrone and some free wi-fi. Thank the maker for the charitable nature of our society.

Recently, I went to a surprise birthday party for a friend of mine. His wife had arranged the whole thing. She invited all the guests to their family home while my friend was out for a few hours. My friend and I had been talking about visiting his home for a couple of years now but we never got around to it. With the surprise party, I was able to see his nice house and meet his wonderful sons for the first time. He gave me a tour of his lovely home and one of the rooms he showed me was his oldest boy’s room. That young man is about six years old now I believe. When I saw his room, I noticed his parents bought him a “double” or “full” bed. For a dude who was just in a crib a short while ago, that’s a hell of a step up. I didn’t start sleeping in a “double” until I bought my apartment. For the majority of my life, I slept in a “twin” or a “single”. That’s what I slept on when I was living at home and when I was at university for both of my degrees. When I made the switch to a “double”, it felt like I almost had too much room. I can’t imagine what his son felt like when he crawled into his big boy bed for the first time. He must have thought his parents bought him the largest bed in the world for him.

Will he be prepared to sleep in a “twin” if he needs to in some sorta institutional environment like a university dorm? Will he required a “queen” or even a “king” in his high school days? I think I’ll discuss this with my friend the next time I see him.

Today was the day I was supposed to get the Internet working again in my home. Around 10:30am this morning, a Telus technician phoned me to say he was five minutes out and ready to finish up some wiring in my home. He arrived promptly and the worked he needed to do lasted only about ten minutes or so. He was out the door very quickly after that.

I then ran quickly across the street to the post office, where my DSL modem was waiting for me. I brought it back home, unpacked it, and wired everything up. I plugged it in and turned it on. One particular light on the modem would have to go from off, blinking green, and then finally to solid green to indicate everything was working properly. After five minutes, that light never changed from blinking green. I called my new ISP to ask them what was going on. I was told that even though Telus completed all the physical wiring work today, they have until 1pm tomorrow to actually flip all the necessary “switches” on their end to enable Internet access in my home. Contractually, my new ISP can’t chase down Telus for this until the stupid 1pm deadline passes tomorrow. Of course, no one told me this, neither my new ISP nor Telus (even when the guy was in my home). I’m stuck with another day without proper Internet access.

I get the feeling when it’s 1pm tomorrow, that damn light will still be blinking green instead of solid. That’s just the luck I usually have for these type of things. I am running out of patience!

Like clockwork, I received my property assessment in the mail this week. Every year I have received the assessment, the assessed value has gone up, except for this year. For first time since being a homeowner, I have seen the value of my home go down. According to the province, my home is now worth six percent (6%) less compared to last year.

To go into more detail, the assessments are broken down into buildings and land categories. Each value is summed to give the total assessment value. Interestingly, the value of the building stayed exactly the same but the land was worth 10% less compared to last year. Does this mean land is cheaper to buy now? I’m no real estate expert but I’m guessing yes?

What is also interesting is that my municipality has stated that almost universally, all property assessments went up which makes me lucky or unlucky? Perhaps my property taxes will be lower this year.

I’m still under the weather, my sinuses are still congested and now I have a cough. It sucks really. Being sick while having limited Internet access just adds to that suckiness. Since I’m ill, I haven’t been outside much in the last few days. I might go out once a day to get some groceries where I also get some fresh air. I feel like I’m not sure what’s happening in the world currently.

Being a hermit used to mean you probably were very disconnected from the world and had very little knowledge of what was going on in the world. With the advent of the Internet though, living a hermit’s existence no longer meant these things had to be true. I tell ya, if you’re gonna be a shut-in for whatever reason, make sure the Internet is working for you.

I look forward to the end of the week where hopefully I will be able to get porn in HD again and more importantly, I hope my body will stop producing green-yellow mucus like I’m Slurpee machine.

I think I fell asleep around 3am last night and I woke up just after 8am this morning. While the rest of the world returned to work from the holidays, I found myself in bed and still under the weather. The good news was my nose was less congested compared to the weekend. I grabbed my phone and surfed the Internet for about an hour before I started feeling tired again. I closed my eyes and the next time I opened them, it seemed a lot later. I checked the time and I was startled to see it was almost 3pm. Whoa. I had not been getting a lot of sleep in the last few days and I supposed my body was comfortable enough to sleep about 11 hours in total.

I got up and the first thing I did was to phone my new ISP about the status of my new Internet connection. As many of you know, I switched ISPs and the original plan was for everything to be ready tomorrow. I’ve been without in-home Internet service since the early morning of December 31. From that date, I’ve been relying on just the Internet access I have through my cell phone. It’s not the fastest connection and also when I set my phone to be a mobile wi-fi hotspot, it becomes very flaky. This leaves my other computing devices at home with very limited connectivity. To say that I’m ready to have a real Internet connection again would be an understatement.

When I got my new ISP on the phone, I discovered that my connection date had been moved two days forward. So instead of having it ready on Tuesday, today, it would be connected on Thursday. Not only that, I would have to home for a Telus dude to come check some wiring in my hallway closet. Even though I’m no longer with Telus, a Telus dude has to do the wiring work. Here’s the real fun part, the window that I was given for this visit is 9am to 8pm. What kind of stupid work window is that? No wonder people hate the big cable and ISPs. They expect me to be home for nearly 12 hours on Thursday and be waiting the entire time so a Telus technician can grace me with their presence. I’m lucky that I’m not working right now but even so, the thought of having to wait half a day for a house-call seems stupid.

Ideally, the dude would arrive around noon, so I don’t have to get up too early and that also means I didn’t have to wait for him until after dinner. The worst-case scenario is he arrives around 7pm, meaning I would have wasted the entire day waiting around for him.

Well, this new year is off to a great start for me. The minor sinus infection I thought I had last week managed to linger all through the last several days of 2014. It bothered me just enough to knock me out of my ordinary routine but wasn’t debilitating to the point where I was bedridden all the time. On Friday, it seemed it was clearing up for good as my right sinus (the infected one) was producing less of that greenish-yellow mucous and I was breathing without difficulty. I even went outside and got some exercise which felt great. Things changed drastically on Saturday afternoon. I felt really tired all of a sudden and both of my nasal passages were very clogged up.

I felt awful for most of Saturday evening, like perhaps I had a real cold rather than just a sinus infection. I decided to go to bed early, which was 1am for me. I was probably asleep for about two hours when I woke up with this feeling like I couldn’t breathe very well. Once fully awake, I discovered the source of my troubles were my congested nasal passages. I had to sit up to somewhat breathe normally. I went to the bathroom and rifled through the cabinet drawers to look for some cold or flu medications, anything that drugs for relieving nasal or sinus congestion. Then I realized I threw out all my cold/flu meds a few months ago when I discovered they were all past their expiry date. So I had nothing to use and I wasn’t about to go to a 24 hour pharmacy at 3am to get something.

I went back to bed and sat upright again. I began reading an e-book on my tablet, Darrell Hammond’s account of his early life and his time on Saturday Night Live. I’m a fan of his work, so the book was a fascinating and at times, tragic view of his whole life. I kept waiting for fatigue to take me back to sleep, hopefully sitting up so I could breathe easier. Well, the hours went by quick and I finished the book. I then turned to randomly surfing the Internet when sometime around 8am, I finally felt tired enough to fall asleep. I’m not sure how long I was out for but it didn’t seem long because of my awkward body position caused the circulation to be cut off in one of my arms. That jolted me out of my sleep. This happened a few more times before sometime after 12pm, I decided I wasn’t really going to get much more rest with my sinuses still congested like this.

Still feeling kinda crappy, I got up, blew my nose, made some breakfast, and decided I needed to go to the drug store downstairs. It took some effort but I dragged my ass outside to some meds, specifically something to clear my congestion. I consumed one pill right away after I got home and it seemed to work almost immediately. I was able to breathe easy all evening. I’ll take one more before going to bed and hopefully I’ll be able to sleep normally tonight. I have no more e-books on my tablet for tonight.