Sympathy and tea

Hopefully, I'll be a little less crotchety today. Who would've guessed that the way to relax my sore neck was by sleeping on it? I also submerged it in a warm bath this morning; even if that didn't help my neck, it helped the rest of me. Unfortunately, the left side of my jaw feels like I was s*cking d*ck all last night, which is assuredly not the case--not even in my dreams! My erotic ones seem to have run their course for now; a couple night ago, I dreamt there was a huge fire somewhere to the south and west of me and I was wending my way through city streets trying to get a closer look. This morning, I heard on the radio about a HUGE warehouse fire in what I initially thought was Nuphy's neighbourhood. Turns out, it's just over the tracks in Pilsen, so everything should be fine when we bring him home tonight. (Which is good news for me, since I plan to spend the night there.)

And I actually cooked last night--sort of. I fried up some frozen pot stickers and then refried my leftover capchay. It gave me a chance to break in the wok-like frying pan I got from Bumiputeri and it is faaabulous! No sticking here, caitalainn! I also tried the linden blossom tea I bought from the Persians and decided that the bags will be disappearing slooowly. Then I considered conducting a tea census for the benefit of my readers. Tell me, honestly, is that too pathetic?

Fun with networking

There's this huge international cooperative database that people in my department use for a lot of our work. We've been promised a web version in the near future, but for now we connect by telnet with a clunky old interface. One of the features of this software is that it's easy to produce lots of additional sessions without knowing it. When this happens, and we violate our usual number of subscriptions, stiff price increases apply. Last month, they were through the roof and we're still trying to find out why that is. I'm just happy that I've personally certified that none of my workers can be blamed.

Yesterday, everyone's sessions were sluggish as hell and no one knew why. Not us, not our local IT, not the db's administrators. After a whole day of running around, we'd located the cause: The Campus telecoms office saw the heavy traffic (from all those previously-mentioned phantom sessions), assumed we were engaged in illegal online file swapping (despite the relatively tiny size of the files), and punitively restricted our bandwidth. When I say "the office", I really mean a computer in the office, automatically implementing a recently-imposed "security" measure.

Upon hearing this, one of my co-worker's reactions was, "Someone there should be slapped." My boss said, "A computer did it automatically." He replied, "That doesn't mean someone shouldn't be slapped!"

It's been seven months and thirteen days...

YAY! NUPHY IS HOME!

I just called him there, since there was no answer at his hospital room. He says ottr4bear is unloading his IV supplies. For his part, he's awaiting training in all the fun things he gets to do for himself now, like change his dressing.

I'm going to grab a quick bite before I head down so I don't end up eating in front of him. That would be too cruel. Damn! I forgot to pack the bottle of ouzo my parents got me! Oh, well, he probably shouldn't be having any anyway, not even a sip. We'll save it to toast his return to REAL FOOD.

Update: I realise that the title of this entry has mislead a lot of people. I was riffing on Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U". The actual period of hospitalisation was more like six months (early June to mid-November) minus about two weeks at home in August. Still half the year, as monshu points out, but shy of seven months.