Doings large and small

It's been quite the week for yours truly. My apologies for not posting earlier, but I've either been in no mood to do so, or busy doing other things and haven't had the chance. So this will be a long entry....you're forewarned!

I've been dealing with some issues a family member in Jersey is coming through. It has my entire family in turmoil, and the resulting stress really had me down most of the week. I was at the point where I'd have a headache every morning by the time I got to work. Been spending a lot of time on the phone talking with different family members, and it looks as if the situation is partially squared away for now.

I was running out of my blood pressure meds and needed to go to the doctor's office last Saturday morning to get checked before the prescriptions were renewed. My BP was running high...around 145/90...when I should be at 120/80. I've had a med substituted for another and been advised that I should get a home monitor and check my BP regularly. Between the stress and the BP, I knew I had to make some changes, so I'm going to try to stick to a low-sodium diet, and cut out the alcohol for the time being. Add to that being more stringent about my gym attendance and looking to reduce/avoid those things that add to my stress level.

Going on the wagon isn't much of a big deal...I rarely drink at home and usually limit myself to hitting the local once a week. When I do go out though, I can feel the rise in my BP the next day, so I'll take a break and try to get it within an acceptable range again.

Other than the health update, it was a quiet week at work. I'm trying to help set up a VPN tunnel between my contractor and their parent company's network, which is pretty entertaining as I have little experience with firewalls. My networking expertise is limited to servers and how they interact with gateways and firewalls, so it's a learning experience. I'm also busy getting our servers patched for the Daylight Savings Time switch in a few weeks.

The weekend was fun...took my wife (henceforth known as L.) to the Exchange Street Bistro in Malden Saturday night. I liked it, she thought it a bit pretentious (we got there to find it was half-full...the young lady at the front desk asked if we had reservations, then advised we might have a wait. The wait turned out to be 3 minutes). The food was good (had a 20 ounce pork chop which was delicious), the service excellent. Split a bottle of cabernet and enjoyed dessert (mixed berries over a shortcake biscuit for L, chocolate mousse for me). We definitely want to try it for brunch someday.

My strat-o-matic order showed up Friday...loaded on my PC and spent a good chunk of the weekend replaying the 1964 season. Right now, the Yankees are 7-4..have a doubleheader to play against the Senators when I get home tonight. The blogging and web authoring pieces of the program weren't working...I'll get something up soon.

I tried to replace the fan in my neighbor's museum piece PC yesterday...amazingly, I got the power supply open and removed the old fan, and put the replacement in, even though it had a three prong adapter and the supply only had 2. Plugged it in and the fan didn't work - like a knucklehead I tried to unplug the fan and got shocked for my stupidity. I have to go back to CompUSA tomorrow and see if they have a compatible fan...if not, it's either order a replacement somewhere or put it back the way it was and return to my neighbor. I've already told him the PC is 10 years old and should be replaced.

That's it for a snowy Monday morning...I'll try to get some more posted later.