Digging Out

Beginning to feel a fair bit better today, and that's a good thing, considering I've got to get on a plane at 4:10 PM and fly out to Detroit for a family wedding. Oy. No rest for the wicked.

Richmond, like most of the rest of the eastern U.S., was blanketed by snow, then ice over Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Richmond, being a fairly wimpy snow town, pretty much shuttered itself yesterday, and is still mostly shut today, though I am of course out and about. There's been a fairly world-ending documentation deadline hanging over the end of today, but thanks to the miracle of XP Remote Desktop I was able to get my parts mostly done, despite all the illness drama. Not having to get gussied up and drive to work saves a surprising amount of time, though I doubt I'm an ideal candidate for telecommuting, because I'm far too easily distracted by the puppies, the kitty and the fact that I have Diablo II installed on my home box, and it's prone to whispering to me when the days get long. :-)

Still, the past few days have been replete with poor sleep, sneezing, coughing, and the baking of cheap storebought insta-pizzas to feed my cold-drug-slackened face. It's nice to think it may be coming to an end, but I'm famous for picking up bugs from crowded airplanes, and I don't doubt I'm doing my own Typhoid Rich thing lately, so don't break out the champagne yet.

Oh, and I had to take down my satellite dish - evidently my apartment complex has grown tired of all the new residents screwing their dishes into loadbearing members, and despite my painstaking efforts to create a freestanding mast-mount, with clearly visible guy wires and everything, they've imposed an additional security deposit and insurance requirement that I simply cannot meet. Jerks. So much for NFL Sunday Ticket. So much for TechTV, SciFi channel and all the extra HBO, Starz and Showtime channels. Paying for the equivalent digital cable package will be just as prohibitively expensive, so screw 'em all. I've gotta shift locations in the spring anyhow - rent's gotten horrendous where I am, and state workers are going to go a second year with no raises.

(For the record, DirecTV was just golden about the whole thing, and was willing to credit me the amount of the security deposit to keep my account alive, but it's the insurance requirement that was the killer, anyway, so no dice.)

But hey, it's the holiday season, so merry Christmas and all that, right?

-Rich