Late to the Party

Having some special edition M&M’s — strawberried peanut butter. Not bad. The M&Ms are twice as large as the regular ones, with a peanut butter center surrounded by chocolate, then the candy shell. Tastier and less cloying than the regular M&M’s are to me now. Want to find the coconut M&M’s that I saw someone post about on Twitter. Anyone tried them yet? Hope I didn’t miss them.

Finally got to see “Epitaph One”, the last episode of Dollhouse season
one that wasn’t aired. A. Maze. Ing. If you are a fan of the show, but
haven’t seen this episode yet, I highly recommend buying the DVDs or
Blu-Ray set (yes, please buy it so Fox knows people like this show!)
ASAP. And if you aren’t a fan of the show, please consider watching
season one.

 It had a rocky start thanks to Fox; the first five or six episodes
were standalone, “pilots” to ease people into the show. For Pete’s
sake, Fox, would you give audiences more credit?? Anyway, after those
episodes, the show really got into the groove and started setting up
the mythology of the Dollhouse. It is a great show that almost didn’t
get a second season. I hope that by the end of next season, there will
be enough viewers that the show won’t be on the bubble again. It
didn’t deserve to be on the bubble at the end of last season! So tell
your friends and buy up the DVDs and Blu-Rays for all your gift-giving
needs. Your friends will thank you, if they’re not dorks.

Hey, cool, I just saw that one of the panos I did of the Sears Tower SkyDeck views is being featured on this site!  Yay!

Here are a couple more:

Well, I’ve been sick for the better part of 5 days now (I came across my tweet from 5 days ago lamenting the fact that I had a sore throat which started this whole mess). And though I thought yesterday that I was on my way to wellness, it seems today I had a relapse or something.
 
I got woken up before 6 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. Luckily I was able to finally nap for a few hours in the middle of the afternoon. But the main thing that irritates me about being sick is the sudden coughing fits (which was part of the reason I woke up so early this morning). I’ll be fine for irregular periods of time and then something triggers some dusty, scratchy feeling in a corner of my throat that isn’t satisfied by clearing my throat or lightly coughing once or twice. No, this sends me into a fit of loud, hacking coughs (sometimes so strong they make me gag) until I can somehow calm the dry, sandy feeling in my throat, usually by gulping down water in between groups of coughs and popping a cough drop. It’s been worse when not even water will soothe my throat enough and I just have to cough until I don’t need to anymore.
 
In order to prolong the intervals between coughing fits, I have to have a cough drop in my mouth almost all the time. The syrupy-ness gets to me eventually, and at that point I just try to manage things with water or some other drink. I don’t know if the excessive cough drops killed my taste buds today or if it was just another symptom of my illness, but when this happens (I actually noticed it once before, a couple years ago (?), the last time I was really sick during the holidays) it really sucks. Not only is my appetite already affected by being sick, but also when I finally eat something, it tastes rather stale at best or like cardboard at worst.
 
I hope tomorrow is finally the real turning point to getting better, but even when I start feeling better, the cough often lingers for weeks and weeks. Not the full-on fits, but just an annoying cough that just hangs around like a houseguest who has worn out his stay.
 
P.S. There was no redeeming value to this post other than to complain (duh). Sorry if you stuck it out waiting for a tip on how to cure coughs or anything like that; I wish there were a remedy that worked for me. Over-the-counter cough syrups and other remedies don’t work. The last time I had really bad coughing fits I had lots of spoonfuls of honey to try to replace needing cough drops, but the soothing didn’t last long per tablespoon. If anyone has home remedy suggestions for soothing coughs, I’m all ears. Otherwise, sorry for the mega-rant. Just felt like typing this out (on my iPhone, BTW).

In the process of installing Win7 RC in a virtual machine on my MacBook, thanks to an article Andy Ihnatko posted recently. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s my first time doing something like this. Let’s see how it goes, especially with only 2GB RAM and under 8GB free on my HD… I’m guessing that if anything goes wrong with the install, it’ll be because it ran out of room on the HD. I was too lazy to try to move more stuff off the HD to make sure there is enough install space. Living on the edge!