So I had a really interesting experience Monday night. I think I was hallucinating. Some definitions of hallucination seem to imply it’s only visual. I disagree, and luckily have found much better definitions that cover all of the senses. Here’s one:

A hallucination, in the broadest sense, is a perception in the absence of a stimulus. In a stricter sense, hallucinations are defined as perceptions in a conscious and awake state in the absence of external stimuli which have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid, substantial, and located in external objective space.

<snip>

Hallucinations can occur in any sensory modality — visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, proprioceptive, equilibrioceptive, nociceptive, thermoceptive and perception of time.

I can’t remember the last time I had a really high fever, but Monday night I broke 102. It was 102.1 actually. Made my joints cramp up, and I was getting chills. Under blankets and wearing fleece top and bottom, I was still curling my toes from being cold.

Slept on/off from about 2pm Monday until 8am Tuesday.

So Monday night, I wake up and I’m getting ready to go upstairs and get off the couch. I got myself into a state of awake, but not awake. It’s as if both my conscious and unconscious minds were acting at the same time.

I knew I was awake, but I knew that I was asleep. How strange is that? I started talking to Jean about things at work. Both incomplete and complete thoughts about projects I was working on and problems I was having. She would tell me that she didn’t work with me and had no idea what I was talking about.

Then, immediately after saying it, I realized that I was making no sense, so I would apologize to her. I went so far as to tell her that I wasn’t making sense and that my mind was all foggy like I was dreaming, but I was sitting there awake and talking to her. She chuckled to herself. This went on for several minutes.

She should have recorded me, because it didn’t stop there. We went upstairs and I continued being loopy. Today, when I brought it up with her, she told me at points in the “conversation” I would look straight at her, with open eyes, and say something. She thought I was awake, because my eyes were open and what I said sounded coherent,  but she didn’t know what I meant.

When she asked me what I meant, I would say “I have no idea”.

So I’m not sure if I was actually hallucinating that I was at work, or just somehow that my unconscious mind was wrapping into my conscious one and the crossover was complicating things. I would say it was like sleep-walking, but instead sleep-talking. But then how do I explain the fact that I was able to *know* I was being weird at the time I was doing it?

Really kinda trippy if you ask me. Took some Tylenol. The fever finally broke. Spend much of Tuesday with a negative fever (hovered around 97 for most of the day). Finally last night came back to normal.

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It’s been over two months since my last update and over 30 days since I changed my status.

Let me explain how I’m making this post, and that will give you an idea of how busy and stressful life/work has become.

As I write this, we’re driving down I84, in northern Connecticut. I have a wireless Broadband adapter for my laptop, so that I always have Internet access when we travel. I took today off so that we could come back to Massachusetts for Easter. Supposed to be a vacation, but I answered email both Saturday and Sunday nights, as well as for the last 45 minutes in the car.

I need to learn to start putting up a hard wall separating work and weekend, but I keep finding reasons to make it permeable.  We’re launching a new initiative on Wednesday and there were lots of little last minute things that needed to be dealt with. The flipside could have been not taking a vacation at all, so I guess this the compromise.

Jean’s driving, and I’m about to see if I can do some programming, I just needed a break.

I’m feeling on more stable ground now. Just starting my 5th month. At least I feel like I have a better understanding of the picture that the puzzle pieces are trying to make. I still keep finding whole sections of it that were hidden under the bed by a devious child, but the cleanup on those items is coming along quicker each time.

I haven’t kept up with LJ in weeks. So much so that when I read through my friends pages, I get to the end of what LJ shows me without having read all the new messages, and for that I apologize. I need to at least start reading it weekly if I can’t get to it daily. My other daily reading has also suffered. When you find yourself 8 or 9 strips behind in OoTS, while its nice for continuity, it reminds you have long it has been.

This car ride is making me sick.. need to take a break from this LCD and have a snack.

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The kids are just a pile of talkative recently. Connor has alot to say, although we still have trouble understanding him. I would say we’re about to about 80% understanding of what he is saying. Now whether others understand that much is yet to be seen (heard). Maybe Jean’s comprehension is a little higher because she works with him everyday, but it’s still not where I think it should be. Alia enjoys singing and knows the words to dozens of songs. They are both into imaginative play and direct each other to play parts, such as the princess, or the rescuer, or the bad guy.

What’s great is that they are moving in the combination of thoughts and phrases that are culled from previous conversations and are putting it all together.

Yesterday, they came to visit me at work as part of our recent car fiasco.

When they came in the front door:

Me: Connor, say hi to Marie.

Connor: Hi Marie. This is my sister Alia.

When they came back to my office:

Me: This is where I go everyday when I leave you guys and go to work.

Connor: This is a nice place.

When I showed him the pictures of themselves on my ‘keep my happy’ wall:

Me: Connor, who’s in the pictures?

Connor: That’s us.   <- Note the use of the of the plural pronoun. Usually he identifies himself and Alia separately, so it’s nice to see the combo.

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I’m not sure if a cat purring is really therapeutic or not. Why a cat purrs is a different matter altogether.

I know, that also I’m allergic to them – when the cat sits right on top of chest and looks you in the face and starts purring, it’s kinda calming.. Then of course, I start to struggle to breathe and all sense of calm is lost.

Never fear! Now you can get a dose a virtual cat purring to relieve that midweek tension — sans sneezing.

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So I got myself zapped by electricity, not once, but twice yesterday.

The first one was all fun and games. Jason and I were installing some phone lines and computer wiring and had been joking about the fact that phone lines carry a small current.

Most times, you don’t worry about it, because the <40V doesn’t really bother you if you touch it together. If you happen to be working on it when the phone rings, then you could get up to <=150V and really catch your attention.

When I was in college, such a thing happened to me, and we were laughing that it might happen to us. So to play it safe, we would just disconnect at the source while doing the splicing.

Trying to strip the casing off the copper with our tools was getting cumbersome, so we started using our teeth. Sharper and stronger than fingernails, we could expose the end copper in under a second.

* Fun electrocution #1 *

After testing the line once, we went back to splicing. We forgot to disconnect at the source, and I bit into the end wire, while the other hit my hand, thus completing the circuit and giving me a little ‘ha ha” jolt, which was repsonded to be “you left the phone line plugged in fu***er”. Standing on the ladder, fan times were had by all.

* Not so fun electrocution #2 *

About 20 minutes later, we finished all our primary splices and were running the last extension. It required going across some HVAC ducts and under the stairs. I was just ‘blind’ pushing the phone cable over the duct, but it didn’t come out the other end. I reached up to try and push it over, and BLAM. Bright white flash, knocked me off the ladder and I fell to the ground, sweating and unable to speak for about 15 seconds.

My first (and only thought) was that there was a exposed electrical wire over the top of the HVAC system. We looked and couldn’t see anything. We then thought one of the other pipes or something was shorted and carrying a current. Nothing there either.

What we finally surmised (and hopefully was correct), is that the HVAC ducts acted like a capacitor. They are all covered with foil and insulation, and there is a ‘chance’ that as I was pushing the phone line across it, that a charge build up. When I reached up to push the phone line, my head hit the HVAC duct causing the discharge. It was more painful then because of the contact with the head.

In any case, I proceeded to let Jason finish the rest of the wiring, and I went to work on the Access Point. He worked as if he was dealing with razor blades for the rest of the night… just in case…

Now, Mythbusters has confirmed that under the perfect circumstances you can get electrocuted on the phone in a lightning storm, and even CSI had an episode about it.

But I don’t think they considered the hazards of the HVAC system in their analysis!

Snopes aside, I was on the receiving end of it.. so I know it’s possible.

Current Mood:  restless

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