personal

Versed, a curious thing

Posted on

Midazolam

I accompanied Janene to the endodontist on Monday to get a root canal (she tells the story here). As they prepped her for the procedure, she eagerly inquired about sedation options. They offered her a little something called Versed. I don’t know if you know anything about Versed (I didn’t until Monday), but it’s an awfully potent drug with some rather remarkable effects.

The endodontist’s assistant explained that Versed induces a conscious sedation. Janene would be awake through the entire procedure, able to follow instructions and answer questions, but she would have no memory of the whole experience. As far as she was concerned, it would feel as if she just took a little nap.

Continue reading ›

Adventures in waking up, day 627

Posted on

woddfellow2 said:

Did the plan to “take over the world” fail?

In a manner of speaking, yes. I’ve been following your blog, and I almost mentioned in my earlier post that you’re having your own adventures in waking up. It sounds like you’re doing well, so I hope you can keep it up!

I believe the last time I blogged about this was day 21, and if memory serves I stopped on day 30-some-odd. I spent about a month off, after which I made a valiant second attempt (I vaguely remember blogging about the second attempt, but can’t seem to find it now), which lasted again about a month, and now, of course, it’s been over a year.

I really miss having that extra hour or so in the mornings to get things done, so I’d really like to get back in the swing of it. I’m not going to get cocky about it this time, though. I was getting up at 5:20 am back then, but this time around I’m going to do 6:00 am at the earliest.

This morning when I woke up to feed the cat, I honestly thought about staying up, but decided to crawl back into bed anyway. Tonight I’m purposely leaving tomorrow’s lunch unprepared so I’ll have to get up and do that. Hopefully that will be enough motivation. Wish me luck! End mark

Twenty-three

Posted on

My doctor said I have the arteries of a 23-year-old. The rest of me is 28, for those keeping score.

Let me back up. I went in for a routine physical two months ago. At a follow-up appointment a few weeks later, in going over my blood work, the doctor mentioned that my bad cholesterol (LDL) was high, but that this may not be much of a concern because my good cholesterol (HDL) was also high. He wanted more information before giving me a clean bill of health, so he ordered something called an IMT scan. This week we got the results of that scan back, and this is where he came to his “arteries of a 23-year-old” conclusion.

Continue reading ›

Back

Posted on

I’m back from my little internet break. I was talking to a friend just the other day who had no idea I was even gone because he reads the site in his feed reader. I had briefly considered putting up an actual post back in September for that very reason but never got around to it, so I apologize for that.

In case you never saw it, on about September 14 I had placed a notice at the top of the page that said:

I’m going cold turkey from the Internet (other than for work, school, and FellowSites). I’ll be back on November 1. Cheers!

Sorry I didn’t say more about my break, but I really needed to just quit everything and didn’t have time to explain. The scientific community is still up in the air about whether Internet Addiction is actually a classifiable disorder, but if anyone has it, I believe I do. It got so bad a couple months ago that I needed some intervention.

So I did what I had to do. As I said in my site notice, I still used the internet for work, school, and FellowSites. Everything else, though, including my feed reader and all my social networks, I really did quit cold turkey. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an occasional visit to Wikipedia or Answers.com, but for the most part I stayed away from everything else and didn’t touch my feed reader once during the six weeks I was “offline”.

So, here we are in the first week of November, and, as promised, I’ve cautiously returned to the interwebs. I’ve finally approved the handful of MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn friend requests I received during the break (thanks everyone for your patience) and caught up on reading all my close friends’ and family members’ blogs. As soon as I can figure out why Trillian is acting funny I’ll be signing back on to the major instant messaging networks. I’ve set up my feed reader again, but kept it pretty lean this go around. I don’t intend for things to get as bad as they were ever again.

When I was thinking about taking the break, a friend remarked that it can take six weeks to form a new habit. I think I succeeded in developing some new behavior patterns and intend to continue practicing them. In other words, I think my break was successful.

One thing I did miss quite a bit during my break was blogging and sharing things with all of you. I read a few good books and had a few noteworthy experiences during the break, so you can definitely look forward to more updates here in the coming days and weeks. End mark

Meme of fours

Posted on

I was tagged for this by my lovely wife, so here goes:

Four jobs I’ve had

  1. Pizza deliverer for 5 Buck Pizza
  2. Coffee and danish gopher1 for the Youth Pastor at Southeast Baptist Church
  3. Superhero2 for Western Governors University
  4. Evil junk mailer3 for Centex Home Equity

Four films I could watch over and over

  1. Stranger Than Fiction
  2. Minority Report
  3. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
  4. A toss-up between The Incredibles and Ratatouille

Continue reading ›

  1. This is a joke, actually. I can’t recall getting anyone coffee or a danish once during the three months I was there. This was actually a very rewarding internship where I learned boatloads about what it means to work in full-time ministry. [↩]
  2. This is an exaggeration, obviously, but not far from the truth. As an IT Service Desk Technician, I put out a lot of fires and generally save the day on a regular basis. [↩]
  3. This one’s no joke. I maintained a Microsoft Access database full of leads (mostly homeowners gathered from public records) and printed, stuffed, and mailed several hundred mail merge letters per week to people on the list. It was a good paying high school job, but I’ll never do it again, I promise. [↩]

You’re an idiot

Posted on

Yes, you, the one who flashed your brights and honked at me last night on Redwood Road. I was exercising my freedom to ride my bicycle down the center of the right lane because there was insufficient space for me to ride any farther to the right and there were two other lanes for you to safely and calmly pass me in.

Utah law clearly states:

bq. A person operating a bicycle on a roadway at less than the normal speed of traffic at the time and place and under the conditions then existing shall ride as near as practicable to the right hand edge of the roadway except when … Reasonably necessary to avoid conditions that make it unsafe to continue along the right hand edge of the roadway including … A lane that is too narrow for a bicycle and a vehicle to travel safely side by side within the lane.

Continue reading ›

My testimony, part 1

Posted on

I’ve been wanting to publish my testimony for some time now and have had an outline written for at least two years. I was inspired last week by Tim Challies’ Testimony Tuesday, so I’ve decided to start a regular Testimony Tuesday of my own. I’m going to write my testimony in installments and publish them every Tuesday until I’m done.

The outline I’ve got is currently divided into seven sections, but I may combine or split a few sections, so it should end up between six or eight installments long. I’m going to try my darnedest to publish weekly, but some of the sections require more work than others to write, so I may give myself two weeks for those.

The first installment has been published. You can get to it by clicking the link I just provided or by using the “Testimony” link on the navigation bar across the top of every page on the site. :syzygy:

MS Bike Tour ’07

Posted on

Start to Finish MS - MS Bike Tour '07

I’ll be riding my bike in the Harmons MS Bike Tour this year on June 23 in Cache Valley, Utah. Read on to find out how you can help me.

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic, inflammatory disease that interrupts the flow of information from the brain to the body and, in severe cases, causes impaired mobility and disability. There is currently no known cure for multiple sclerosis and more than 400,000 Americans live with this debilitating illness. This tour (and about a hundred more like it across the country) is a chance for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society to raise awareness and funds, and it’s a great way for me to get in shape and have some fun this summer.

Continue reading ›

See you later, spam!

Posted on

SPAM!

When I first started hosting my own domain five or so years ago, I was happy to discover this really neat thing called a catch-all email account. Basically, I can set up as many static email addresses as I want or need, but any unrouted mail, no matter who it’s addressed to, is redirected into the main catch-all account.

This comes in handy for tracking who I’ve given my email address to (among other obvious reasons). For instance, if I were dealing with a fictional company called Wally’s Widgets, Inc., I might give them the address, [email protected]. That way, if I start getting a lot of junk mail pointed to that address, I know it’s either coming from Wally’s Widgets, or Wally’s Widgets has sold my email address to the evil spammers. Over the years that’s happened with a few of the addresses I’ve given out, and when it does I simply add that address to a server side filter that bounces those emails.

Continue reading ›