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Yesterday, though technically Wednesday night I made the decision, I was going to go to a doctor. It didn’t quite work out though…

I called my family’s ‘new’ doctor’s office, to which I had not personally been yet, and after being on hold for nearly twenty minutes I was told basically “tough shit we’re not seeing you” because they’re not accepting ‘new’ patients… the 102 fever made no difference, nor did the fact taht the rest of my family went there.

Discouraged, I called my ‘old’ doctor’s office, the one I’d pretty much vowed never to visit again. They couldn’t find my records and wouldn’t see me either because they were only accepting ‘new patients’ by “approval of the office manager” …a little shady, particularly because I’m definitely not a new patient!

I was absolutely disgusted. It took a lot of… courage (?) to actually even call a doctor… knowing that it’d cost me an arm & a leg to see one… and then to find out that I couldn’t anyway… argh! I threw the phone book across the house. I was a little impressed with the distance it went, lol.

I cam to the conclusion that for some reason unknown to me that the woman had transferred my records from my doctor to hers… without telling me. Once she FINALLY got home around 10pm lastnight she confirmed that. Of course by then I was feeling fine anyway, so in a way I guess it’s a good thing that I couldn’t see a doctor, I didn’t need one anymore.

Well, I shouldn’t say that I was feeling fine, because I had basically traded one kind of agony, the muscle tension headache from hell, for another…. tooth pain from hell. Because there was no way that I would be able to get to the dentist or pick up a prescription that day, I just held off from calling. My dentist, like many others, take three day weekends… so he wouldn’t be in until monday. Great….

I decided to call the dental center that all the mexican migrant workers use… they’re open on Friday at least… but I couldn’t get an appointment, ugh. I call my dentist’s office, get the nice receptionist, thankfully she remembers me. I tell her about the Vicodin screw up, she gets the doctor to call me in a prescription for Tylenol 3… which is apparently the only pain killer they can just call in, and I get an appointment for Monday morning. The codeine takes the unbearable agony down to slightly bearable agony… ugh. It’s still really tempting to get a pair of pliers… I’m giving it a try though, the receptionist said that if it wasn’t helping that I should call her back. The dentist did come in on his day off once for me, but that was after a filling he’d done went bad or something like that, causing more pain than if he’d done nothing.

I really wish there’d be some sort of warning, I mean, of course I know that I have these teeth that need help, but they either feel fine or they go straight into “kill me now!” level agony. There is no “it kinda hurts” at all.

Of course, narcotics aren’t going to help the food going in and not going back out problem, hah… argh… ouch.

I still have no idea what was/is wrong with me from the illness point of view, nobody I’ve spent time with is ill and Patrick didn’t get ill from spending time with me while I was sick.

I am very close to feeling the worst I have ever felt. This comes in second place to when I had my sinus surgery and basically all I could do is moan in agony on the bed, ugh. Though this is pretty close… if it’s part of my body it hurts, *Everything* hurts… though I’ve not thrown up, which is a bit of a miracle actually. From what I can gather I have a persistent muscle tension headache with a lovely persistent migrain too, with elevated blood pressure and elevated heart rate. Of course the ‘waste removal system’ is totally fucked up too… I’ll leave it almost at that, but also say that Magnesium Citrate is very effective… though the walmart ‘brand’ is so incredibly nasty, if you ever find yourself needing “medicated perrier” get it at CVS! Now, if I had *any* faith in the medical world I would be much more eager to go to the doctor/hospital, but considering that ‘under treatment’ with all sorts of medications the medical world left me in pain like this for about a year, I’m not terribly excited about going into the hospital and racking up a shitload of debt. Weekly visits to the doctor, cat scans, thousands of dollars of medications (that’s with insurance too, if I didn’t have insurance it would have probably cost 15,000?)… they could do NOTHING to help me, so I really doubt they could now anyway.

I’d felt generally crappy all of last week, but not terribly so… I even felt good enough on Friday to go and buy a 20GB iPod, of course, come Friday night when Patrick arrived I started feeling really bad… Apparently I had one hell of a fever, because I was shivering like crazy and he said that I was very warm.

Anyway, I’m still feeling wretched and I’m sleeping most of the day. The brightside is that I’ve only had maybe three cigs since Friday evening. Patrick was worried about ruining my weekend because he was working, but of course, my ill health managed to go a pretty damned good job on its own… *sigh*

Quite long time ago I realized to my horror that this persistent green spot on my Nikon’s images happened to be a hot pixel… and upon ‘testing’ for them (by taking a solid black photo) I found several more. This was when my camera was under warranty, but I couldn’t risk not having it for when davey was here, so I never sent it in for ‘remapping’ …and basically just forgot about the problem because they’re easy enough to fix in The Gimp or Photoshop if necessary. I also planned on ‘upgrading’ to a more professional Nikon Digital anyway.

The hot pixel problem became apparent again when photographing Patrick in January, and really annoyed me enough yesterday when looking at the photos of Jon that I’d taken on Monday.

While doing some research into using Image Magick to create a ‘one step’ shell script to resize, rotate, border, & watermark my images I stumbled upon this fab little app/script, Jpegpixi. I didn’t realize that it came with a ‘tool’ to map out the hot pixels automatically, so I spent a seriously pathetic amount of time doing it manually… whoops.

Geeez! My little Nikon has such a fucked up CCD! I really think I damaged it when I was doing “bulb” exposures one night outside… if that’s actually possible, I just don’t know. According to the automatic mapping tool I have nine (9!!!) hot/stuck pixels. Of course I’ve only visibly noticed about three, so the other six are (and according to the coordinates) pretty insignificant. I think I want to run the test on my brother’s Nikon and see if it has an equally bad CCD… might do Patrick’s Canon too, just for the sake of comparision.

The good news is that jpegpixi seems to perfectly interpolate around the bad pixels, with no apparent loss of image quality, the weird splurts of neon just vanish. Of course once a ‘full’ sized photograph is reduced down from 300dpi to 72dpi the hot pixels vanish anyway, it’s only a major issue when printing or viewing at full resolution.

Writing of Printing… I need/want to print some photos, of course my general idea was to just upload them to either Apple or Shutterfly, etc, and order them that way, because it’s considerably more cost-effective than replacing my ink cartridges, but definitely cuts down on the ever important instant gratification factor. Considering that decent-quality printers (like my Epson Stylus Photo 820) are practically disposable these days (actually, my laser printer, hah, it’s CHEAPER to buy a new one than it is to replace the toner cartridge!!). Anyway, I don’t know what I’m going to do… I don’t like the idea of tossing a printer just because the ink has run out, but it’s not that much more to just buy a new one, lol. Example being, the two cartridges for my Epson cost $50, a new Epson C84 (though I don’t know about its quality) is $80 after a $20 rebate. Maybe I should have splurged when I bought my new inkjet and bought one where it’d be ridiculous to replace when the ink ran out? ;) There are also printers that cost the same as replacing the ink… mostly HP stuff, don’t know about them though.

I still want a new digital camera though, but I’ve decided to go the Canon EOS digital route, as a Digital Rebel is approximately $1000 now, not including a lense, but I already have two EOS system lenses from my film Rebel. The photographer at my brother’s wedding was using a digital rebel… of course I don’t think he did a very good job, lol — his metering was WAY OFF in pretty much most of the photos. I need to look at the EXIF data to see if he was on automatic though. Granted the ambient lighting would have made for very difficult metering… lots of backlight situations, so if one wasn’t specifically choosing where to meter, by way of metering on the manually chosen focus area, well, it’d mean bad results. It’s still a swank camera though. :) My main thing, I suppose, is that I want a camera that is able to take quality images in very low light situations without adding a lot of noise.

My little ‘make ready for the web’ script is still a bit lacking, as I’m having a very difficult time trying to figure out how to use Image Magick’s border functions… though I do have it doing pretty much everything else. I need to tweak it a bit so that it will still work if the image isn’t at the preset resolution, etc. I think my main annoyance is that The Gimp doesn’t preserve EXIF data, and since both my gallery on ALP and deviantart can read the EXIF data, it kind of sucks that it is missing after resize and watermarking.

I booked it up to Harrisburg Saturday morning, Patrick & I went shopping for vintage furniture stuff, he took me to the California Cafe in Carlisle for dinner that night (that was a big “YAY!”), we had a good bit of ‘mmmmmm’ time. Sunday morning early afternoon he was to go to York to get a cd player installed in his car, and apparently he’d asked me if I wanted to sleep or go along, but I couldn’t quite comprehend it in my semi-conscious state, heh, so I ended up hanging out there plundering his music while he was in York. Sunday night was a Sushi Party at this Scott guy’s place, very cool, even if I was feeling overly anti-social that night, but everyone else was tired too so I guess it was alright. I was feeling a bit sick before the Sushi, so I’m not blaming that, heh.

I was approximately two hours late getting there on Saturday, but it worked out fine anyway because he’d not even woke up by the time I finally left Chambersburg, lol. I did a bit of a banal heterosexual (i.e. traditional) Valentine’s Day thing and got him a heart-shaped tin of Mrs. Fields chocolates, but hey, they were good. :) He helped reinforce my being perceived as a lush (lol), by getting me a set of ‘Swerve’ martini glasses (I’d always wanted a set, but never managed to actually buy them, though I almost did several times) and a set of really cool ‘bottle label’ shot glasses. Later on Saturday he also bought me a cocktail shaker that coordinates with the bar set/ice bucket that David & Louise had bought me for my birthday.

Monday morning, after a bit of late night style quick organization, I left Patrick’s and headed to York to pick up Jon. From what I gathered his weekend was, erm, considerably less spectacular than mine, and, well… I wanted to do whatever I could within the boundaries of our respective relationships to make it a bit better. We picked up some mushroom & black olive pizza & Barq’s rootbeer on the way home and mac-geeked-out for the rest of the day down in my lounge area. Since I was rather in a hurry Saturday morning I’d not made my bed or otherwise tidied up like I usually would (even though part of me suspected I might be seeing him); when I went downstairs several minutes after him, I found him making the bed, hehe, that was sweet. Of course, now that I think about it, he made the bed after he’d spent the night here back in January too.

The last time he and I had gone to IKEA I picked up, quite randomly, an artificial rose, which seemed like a good idea at the time… and apparently I hid it well enough that he didn’t notice I’d bought it, even then he’d probably not have expected it was for him anyway. Needless to say I didn’t give it to him that night, mostly because our plans had changed and I totally forgot about it between Philly & York. There was also a small question of it being appropriate too of course, but I figure it’s all about intent, and my intent was what I consider ‘boyfriend-safe’ anyway. So I finally did give him the rose on Monday, Happy Valentine’s Day, only slightly late, heh. He seemed genuinely thrilled, quite unlike the last time I gave a boy a rose (and a real one at that)… so in my small way I think I did good.

Anyway, more to come when I’m feeling less decrepit. I did have the best Valentine’s Day of my life though. :)

I keep meaning to write about the past weekend (Valentine’s Day and the like), but I’m having this horrid stress/muscle tension headache issue that has progressed down my back. I also still have a bit of an upset stomach, of course I’ve not really been eating well either, so that doesn’t help. I started to feel a bit ill on Sunday night, but blamed the stomach weirdness on taking regular (non-coated) Excedrin to help aleviate the muscle tension headache that started then, but considering how it’s lingering all the way until now, Wednesday morning, I doubt that’s the cause. This whole headache ordeal has progressed to migraine levels, ergh.