Just another quick random though.
The other day a friend of mine was saying she couldn’t see how I could post things like the post I just did in such a public place.

I think for me it’s a way for me to just vent about things to do with my life. In a lot of cases its stuff that I’d be telling my friends anyways. And if other people out there decide to read it, who cares.

In the case of my lung stuff, I figure that if someone else in a similar situation happens to find this stuff all the better. I know that i’ve benefitted from sites on the net that have to do with people’s experiences from transplants. One site that is a great example of this is: New Lungs — A Complete Guide To Lung Transplantation. In a lot of ways, this was about 1/4 of my inspiration for writing about this stuff more.

I’m starting to get a bit nervous about tomorrow. Besides being my gig at the Phoenix Landing I have an appointment at the Transplant Clinic. This is the first appointment I’ve had their since I got called as a backup (and turned it down). I feel like I’ve made really great strides since then in dealing with this all. I think at the time I was called back then I really wasn’t quite ready. I don’t know that you can ever fully be ready for it to happen, but that situation really did force me to face my fears about the whole issue.

It’s a very daunting thing for me. Just two years ago I was diagnosed with this ‘condition’ that has really ruled my life for at least that long. Now I’m facing a fix to the problem. The thing is, when you get a transplant you aren’t getting a cure for whatever you have. Instead you are replacing one medical condition (one where in many cases your chances for long term survival aren’t that great) with another medical condition (one that is also serious, but much more managable). It’s also going to mean some fairly substatial chagnes in my life. No more drinking (though I understand that after a while I can have a beer now and then). I have to be much more aware of my health. At the same time. I’ll be able to walk places and not feel like I’m going to pass out after walking half a block.

So, after that night in May, I had myself inactivated on the list for a little bit. My understanding of this is that while inactive, if my name were to come up, they’d just go to the next person on the list who matches. As of the end of this month I am hoping to activate myself again. I’m just really nervous because I feel bad about saying ‘no’ when they asked me to come in back in May. One of the things they ask you again and again when you are there is “Are you sure this is what you want to do?” And I’d said over and over again, “Yes”. I just don’t know that I’d really thought about all the issues to do with it. My biggest lesson learned was that I can’t do this all by myself.

LOTD: My Cat Hates You
Someone just pointed me at this one today. I love it!

So this morning I stumble into work a bit late due to being hungover to find that one of our Network Appliances seems to have crashed.

This has to be one of the coolest moments in my life. Why? Because when we bought this device I fought so hard to get it in a clustered configuration. What this means is that it if the first Filer (the name of the device) goes, the second will just take over for it. It worked *perfectly*. In fact it worked so perfectly that if I hadn’t gotten the email I never would have known. If we’d only had the single unit I would have been paged at some godawful hour this morning because things weren’t working. I would have had to crawl into work (hungover) and futz with this until it is fixed. Instead. I got to sleep, recover a bit, make it to my weekly team leaders meeting and in a few minutes will be driving over to Exodus to fix it. It’s still a high priority item, but it’s no longer an emergency.

I missed seeing Dino spin last night. I’m quite grumpy about that, but I was just feeling so hosed after hanging out at Dunwells listening to the Growroom guys spin yesterday. I think it was that huge Cosmopoliton that I had in a plastic cup that did me in.

Just a quick interlude into the life of someone with IPF.
I woke up about 20 minutes ago and started coughing. I’m never quite sure if I started coughing and it woke me or I just happened to start after waking up. This isn’t any ordinary coughing. Imagine coughing where it seems to come from deep in your lungs and you feel it all the way up to your neck. And you just cough hard, again and again, enough that you almost can’t breath. It feels like you might be trying to cough up some phlegm, but usually there is none. It’s hard to tell what makes it stop. I usually end up on the couch, not moving much, sipping water. I take a bit of Robitussin-DM and that always seems to help out some. After about 15-20 minutes it seems to calm down and I can go crawl back into bed. One of my actual thoughts is that I’ve coughed so much I don’t have the energy to cough more.

In some ways the cough is the worst part of this for me. From what I understand, people with IPF seem to be go the whole range on this issue. Some are heavy coughers like me, while some don’t seem to have quite as much an issue with it. In some ways, I think the second of the two would be worse. It was the coughing that let me to the Doctor’s office to have it investigated. If it wasn’t for that I would have just thought I was really out of shape.

I seem to be calmed now for the most part, so I’m going to head back to sleep.

So lately I’ve taken to just have a copy of my web server’s log file streaming in a window in the corner of my screen. Usually there just isn’t much happening there. But every once in a while I get a spurt of traffic and I wonder just who might be looking at my site. Like today I saw someone hit my dj page and download just about every set, or at least attempt to. It’s kinda weird. So often I forget that anyone but me ever looks at my web site.

I added a little mood indicator thing to my page. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it. I’m not quite sure what I think of it. But for now it’ll stay.

LOTD: People Cards
Who said that only celebs and sports starts can be on trading cards. These cards have everyday ordinary people on them. You can even apply to be on one of them yourself!

Just a quick plug to promote myself here. For those of you in the Boston area, I’m spinning at the Phoenix Landing next Wed night (the 18th). It should be a fun night. The Phoenix Landing has been a big goal of mine since I started DJing. So this is a very symbolic event for me (and I’m trying not to put too much pressure on myself because of it).

LOTD: Launchcast
This site’s here because it was done for a while, and I’d almost assumed for good, but has been back now for some length of time I guess. I dig this site because I have my own ‘radio station’ and they are actually quite good at playing just what I like. There’s a link to the left to listen to my station specificly. (Now, if they’d just have more good electronic music it would have the full range of stuff I like).

So I saw the Final Fantasy movie last night.
While I wasn’t sure what I thought of it at first, after a bit of thought I’ve decided that I really did like it. I thought the movie definitely rocked for the kind of movie it was. The animation was stunning. I definitely knew I was watching something animated the whole time. I don’t think we’re at the point yet where we can have animated actors take the roles of real people, but it was still amazing. The level of detail in the animation was stunning, I can’t even imagine how long it took them to do all that work. The one area I felt it was lacking is something I’m not sure if I can describe well. I felt that the voice actors and the animation didn’t always quite fit with each other. It was like the levels of expression weren’t quite the same.

Anyways, I definitely recommend this movie. (Though I have a feeling it’s the kind of movie that won’t necessarily have a wide appeal to people.)

There are too many things in my life that beep, chirp, whatever. This morning in the space of about 5 minutes, the on-call pager went off, I got a page on my phone, and my alarm clock went off, followed by another page on the pager. I almost threw it out the window. I hate the sounds these things make. I think I’m going to put as many things on vibrate as I can.