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September 12, 2004
Bleach Kills Ants Dead!
SeeNoEvil.org is finally back online! As many of you noticed if you tried to visit my blog, it was down for a few days. The reason was that the webserver ("Smurf") that is hosting seenoevil was moved from Josh's house in South Dakota to Gustavus, since Josh is of course studying abroad this semester in Osaka, Japan. The thing is the webserving software didn't seem to want to webserve when it was brought back to Gustavus, and nobody could figure out why, until during the last day or two Josh & Dale finally figured out the reason (more or less, the software didn't recognize that it had a new IP address). So after getting Zach & Ben to just type in a couple things on Smurf, everything's all hunky-dory now.
So now for a recap of the last few days. The incredibly sore chest that had afflicted me on Tuesday had not improved at all by Wednesday, so that afternoon I went to Health Services in the Campus Centre again. After taking a listen to my lungs with a stethoscope, the doctor said that my lungs sounded downright musical and that I had lung spasms on top of my cough. So he prescribed me some antibiotics, in the form of some pills and my first-ever inhaler. Yay for drugs. It still hurt to move any muscles at all in my upper body, including when I breathed, but at least I had drugs, and therefore the hope of getting better. Given my symptoms and what the doc prescribed, my Aunt Kathy figures that I have bronchiolitis. Hooray. With all my classes and the doctor's visit, Wednesday was a very long day.
On Thursday around lunchtime, in between classes I helped out with the world-view survey that CU was conducting in the Campus Centre. We were just walking around, asking people if they wanted to take a little survey about how they viewed the world, and then invited them to bring it back to us when they'd finished it, so that we could score it for them. There were basically six categories that people could score in, theism, deism, naturalism, existentialism, nihilism, and pantheism/new age, and we found that when people saw their scores they wanted to talk to us for awhile, there were quite a few good, long conversations that were had with people. But since my cough and sore chest prevented me from talking comfortably, I was for the most part just the person scoring the surveys on the computer. I'm trying to remember if I did anything else productive on Thursday, but nothing's really striking me.
By Friday I was perhaps starting to feel a tiny bit better. After my lone class I went out to James & Ali's place in Narre Warren for the afternoon and evening. It was wonderful going out there, just being able to relax and get off campus for awhile. They let me use the internet out there, so I started the process of uploading some photo albums to my website (which I can't do from behind the firewall here at Monash). My Photos page unfortunately doesn't show it yet, but I did manage to get three albums completely uploaded: Lake Mountain, The Grampians, and AFL - Melbourne vs Hawthorn. The frustrating thing was that the server kept on dropping me while I was trying to upload everything, so all the stopping and starting cost me a lot of time. As a result, I wasn't able to upload my photo albums for Surf Fishing, the Beaches of Phillip Island, "Dinner"/Melbourne at Night, or AFL - Collingwood vs Carlton. Those will have to wait until the next time I head out to James & Ali's, as will the five or six short video clips of footy action that I'm planning to upload. But James & Ali took good care of me, with some chicken soup and a very nice healthy supper. It was so good to have a home-cooked meal again! Bruce & Joan (Ali's parents, friends of my parents) were there too, so it was good catching up with them as well. And my mom had been being all motherly and worried about how I was doing with my cough and all, and so had sent them a flurry of emails (partly because Joan's a nurse), hehe. James replied to one of them saying that "Jazza" was coming out to their house, which totally confused my mom, because she didn't realize right off that James was referring to me. So he had to explain to her about the Aussie way of coming up with nicknames, hehe. But after supper we popped in a DVD of "Seabiscuit," which I hadn't seen before. But the DVD was kinda scratched up, so we had to skip through probably three or four scenes in the middle of the movie, oh well. I still liked it, it was a good movie.
Yesterday I gave my parents a call to let them know how I was doing, and I was honestly feeling a little bit better, except that I had a rash of coughing fits right before and during my phone call, so that impression was probably not conveyed. I still didn't really feel like doing anything except sitting around, so I just read articles online (of course not articles that I need to be reading for research for my essay!), and then in the evening watched the Geelong Cats vs Essendon Bombers playoff match. The Cats are my team in the footy, and they scrapped out a hard-fought 74-64 win, surviving a hard charge late by the Bombers in slippery conditions at the MCG. The previous night St Kilda knocked out Sydney 107-56. So next weekend in the preliminary finals (final four), St Kilda will visit minor premier (regular season champ) Port Adelaide, and Geelong will face Brisbane, who are the Yankees or Lakers of the AFL, having won the last three Grand Finals. The site of that game is in dispute at the moment, because while Brisbane is the higher-ranked team and theoretically earned the right to host the preliminary final, the AFL has a contractual obligation with the MCG that at least one preliminary final each year must be played there, but they're trying to get out of that. So it's just a big mess right now that's getting a lot of attention in the news here. Brisbane is awesome at home at the Gabba, but Geelong would like to keep it at the MCG so that they wouldn't have to travel, and would essentially have the home-crowd advantage in a match in which they'll be severe underdogs. So with footy in the playoffs down here, and NCAA and NFL football starting up back home, I'd be in a football heaven, except I haven't yet found a place where I can watch any American football on the telly, sigh. I'm tryin to work on it though.
Today I've been feeling a little bit better for the most part as well. Instead of my chest being in sharp pain with every breath, now it's just a bit of a dull soreness that I only feel some of the time. I'm also coughing a bit less too, although I still occasionally have coughing fits. Oh, and over the last few days I've felt like I've been coming down with a bit of a cold too, which has been a bit depressing. Can't I just get better and be done with all this? Anyway, I am somewhat encouraged that I'm improving a bit, although I don't know whether to chalk it up to the antibiotics or just time working its magic. I spent much of the afternoon reading some articles online, this time for research for my essay, although I was quite easily distracted by a number of things, hehe. It's just so hard to get motivated to do work for something that's not due for another three weeks. :-) And then this evening I went to church at MBT, and got back from that a little while ago, and now I'm here typing this.
Some of you may be wondering why I haven't mentioned ants yet, considering it's the topic of this post. Well, over the last two weeks my room has been infested by ants, it sucks. For the first six weeks I was in my room I didn't see a single ant in here, and now they're all over the place. Patrick across the hall has had issues with ants the entire semester, and is starting to reach the breaking point about them. And the toilet (the Aussie term for bathroom), which is just on the other side of the wall from my room, has always had tons of ants crawling on the walls since the first day we got here (so that's undoubtedly where my ants are coming from). We bought some ant traps, and Patrick bought some borax liquid to apply to ant trails, but none of it has seemed to be working. In the case of the bathroom, Pat had put some of borax on the walls, which only seemed to attract multitudes more ants. So we'd both finally had it today, and this afternoon Pat put some more borax in there, to try and attract as many as he could. Then about 15 minutes later when the place was just covered with ants, he sprayed the walls with bleach! Each and every ant was killed instantly when it came in contact with the bleach, it was amazing. Dead ants everywhere, it was quite satisfying. The downside is that for the hours since then, the bathroom has smelled of a powerful mixture of chlorine and borax, haha. In short, and to quote some movie that I forget, "you don't wanna go in there!" Interestingly enough, the number of ants in my room since he did that seems to have declined drastically.
In some of the reading that I've done over the past few days, I've come across a few interesting articles that I'd like to pass along. First, back in the States the Dems are trying for the fourth or fifth time to drag down Bush over his National Guard service. It didn't work any of those times, so it's beyond me as to why they think it's going to work now. Anyway, before any of you fall for the media hysteria about Bush "not showing up" for six months, check out the real story here, by Byron York. He recounts the story of Bush's Nat'l Guard service as a pilot in its entirety, and it's a must-read. Another must-read that I came across (and which took a large chunk of yesterday afternoon to read) is an article entitled "59 Deceits of Fahrenheit 9/11." It is an absolutely devastating critique of the film's veracity, and it is incredibly thorough and well-written. He even includes the responses by Michael Moore's "war room" to each of his points, so it's very fair. And the author is no fan of Bush either, in 2000 he endorsed and voted for Nader (just like Moore, in fact). This one will definitely be going on my Links page next time I make it to James & Ali's house. And one of the more interesting articles about climate change that I've come across during the course of my research for my paper thus far has been one by Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon, entitled "The Sun Also Warms." It raises some very interesting questions about just how much the sun -- and even supernovae elsewhere in the galaxy -- could be influencing our climate, right down to low-level cloud formation. I found it quite fascinating, and this article isn't written in all sorts of technical jargon, so it's easy to understand too (it's also not hideously long, unlike most of the articles I'm having to wade through for my research).
Well you've all probably had more than enough of me talking, so I'm gonna stop, and go back to doing a little research before I head to bed. I sure hope I keep getting over this cough, I've had it for fifteen days now, I'm getting very tired of it.
Posted by Jared at September 12, 2004 11:37 PM