Winter is not my favorite time of year. I really dislike the cold. I know that a lot of the reason that I dislike it is because I do not prepare well and am usually not dressed appropriately. On the other side of the coin, I also do not like the heat of high summer. Utah is fairly temperate, but we do get a fair number of days where the temperature goes pretty high or pretty low.

If I thought there was any way I could afford to live there, and it wouldn’t make the kids crazy, I would move to somewhere in California where the Pacific Ocean keeps the temperature fairly constant for most of the year, but I don’t think I would live right on the coast.

Must the toothbrushes with the small heads all have soft bristles? Why is it that the drugstore thinks that only tiny kids with soft teeth could ever use a brush with a very small head?

Anyone know where I could find such a compact head brush with medium bristles? Walgreens was no help.

Today’s post title is utah’s new marketing slogan. I am sitting in the airport waiting for my flight, and there is a commercial on TV about utah and our wonderful snow, showing a skier interspersed with other images. I thought “life elevated, and it’s all downhill from there.”

In other news, they just asked “Dibley, party of two” to the podium. I wonder who Dwayne is with…

From Smiths @ 9th and 9th:

• Don’t be overly suspicious where it’s not warranted.

From the usual, Smiths @ 9th and 9th:

• A good position and a comfortable salary will be yours.

Maybe I’ll go to the CFO’s office and tell him that Master Fung has an urgent memo for him regarding me. Because Master Fung is sensitive to both the economy and the environment, he wrote it on much smaller paper than is typically used.

At work, we are replacing our 5.6 meter two-way satellite dish with one that is 7.6 meters in diameter. This dish offers twice the surface area of the old one. So you can get an idea of the scale involved, the yellow ladder inside the cage is 8 feet tall.

A picture of a german shepherd has been found on the Internet. Kepler looks virtually identical to this one, except that he has very short fur.

puppy found on Internet

We decided to re-home Dexter. A beagle is not the dog for us. Now we have picked up a new puppy who’s been with us a little more than a week now. We were told when we got him that he was a 7 week old Australian Shepherd Border Collie mix. We don’t doubt the age much, but we are starting to doubt the breed. We kept getting asked at Petsmart whether he was a German Shepherd. His name is Kepler.

We may end up with a bigger dog than we were planning, but he’s such a good animal that we aren’t going to care. Aside from a tendency towards puppy-play-biting, he’s been great. There have been a fair number of accidents as we attempt house-training, but everything we’ve read says that he’s got a long time left before we can expect much in that department.

Yesterday we took him to the vet, and he wasn’t sure of the breed either, so we’re going to just watch how he changes as he grows. I’ll get pictures up as soon as I can.

In other news, I got an unusual fortune cookie from Smith’s on Tuesday. At first I thought I was looking at the wrong side of the paper:

• Your lucky number for this week is the number five.

We got a dog a few days ago. His name is Dexter.

Entering the chat room this morning:

(8:56:00 AM) entered the room.
(8:56:01 AM) darklady: It’s still caffeinated
(8:56:08 AM) darklady: And doesn’t require pants.

From ZJ China, Downer Grove, IL:

• Executive ability is prominent in your make up.
• Trust him, but still keep your eyes open.

Chicago is a very cold place in the winter, more than I’m used to dealing with even living in Utah. The thing that really strikes me when I come here though is how warm it is kept indoors. Most public places are kept at a temperature that must be near 80 degrees (Fahrenheit).

This strikes me as a very bad idea. Studies have shown that large sudden temperature swings are a major cause of illness. With the temperature outside being so low, a more comfortable temperature would be in the neighborhood of 70 degrees.

Last night when I arrived, I forgot to turn on the heater in my room. I was comfortable all night, until I woke up and the room was freezing. At that point I turned on the heater, and also turned it down quite a bit from the setting it was on. After my morning routine, I came out of the bathroom to sweltering heat, so I turned the heater down again, this time to the point midway between hot and cold. As I write this, it is still too warm, so it’s now inched into the blue.

Thankfully I will be spending most of my time in an air-conditioned data center. I’m sure the locals start shivering anytime they go inside it, but to me it’s wonderful.

We have a Porter Cable 19.2V cordless drill that I have really liked using. Lately it has had some issues, the biggest of which is a horrible electrical almost-burning smell.

I would like to replace it so I have a drill to take with me on my business trip to a data center, and was thinking I would stick with the Porter Cable 19.2V, thinking that their other cordless tools in the same line would be also very good tools … but I just learned that they have discontinued that line, and are now only making 18V products.

What brand and line would all of you recommend that I invest in now? I would like to find a balance between Tim-Toolman-Taylor perfection and price.

From the usual, Smith’s Chinese near downtown SLC.

• You will never need to worry about a steady income.

Ominous. This is the second time I’ve seen this particular fortune.

In just under three weeks, I will be on a Delta flight to Chicagoland. It’s a 6 night business trip to Lisle, where I will install a bunch of new hardware. This is all in preparation for the project to move everything from Lisle to Salt Lake City in a couple of months.

My ticket ended up in first class (2D) for the trip there. How this happened is a mystery, I definitely didn’t book a first class ticket. On the way back, it’ll be an exit row (26D). Both airplanes are the MD90 model.

I’ve done this trip before. It promises to be full of cold weather and workdays that last at least 12 hours. The fact that I can eat wonderful meals on someone else’s dime almost makes up for it. I do hate to be away from my wife for so long, I wish she could come with me.

As noted in my last post, my wife has an autoimmune disorder, which her new specialist doctor believes is most likely to be Beh

My wife and I visited another doctor today. He is an immunodermatologist with a very limited practice. We had an official referral from her regular doctor, but we had to get past a very protective personal secretary before we could even get an appointment. He’s apparently a serious big-wig in his field. This guy was our Obi-Wan Kenobi – if we couldn’t get him to take us seriously, we didn’t hold out much hope that anyone else would either.

We went prepared with a personally written history and pictures of the visible problems, and made sure they were added to the file the doctor would read before seeing us. It was close to an hour after going into the room before we saw any action.

When he came in, he was followed by a younger female doctor and a nurse, who both stayed in the room. At this point, I was cautiously optimistic, but still unsure what to expect. The first thing the doctor did was to go over his understanding of the problems based on all the written information and have us fill in the blanks. Then he did something unheard of in the medical profession – he asked her what she thought was wrong with her. We continued our “playing stupid” game, but said that the last doctor had mentioned Beh

It’s January. A lot of people I know are having problems right now. My wife feels it very strongly. I’ve been reading and hearing things from many friends that cover everything from feeling a little down to severe medical issues. I would normally exclude myself from this, but you just have to look back one post from this one to see that I’m affacted to.

Can we just go to sleep on New Years Day and not wake up for a while? People in good relationships could wake up for Valentine’s Day, then go back to sleep until that green Irish day, or maybe the egg-laying bunny day. Others could just sleep through Single Awareness Day.

It’s late afternoon, I’ve only been awake for about three hours, and feel a serious case of the blahs. I have no particular desire to do the cleaning and laundry that needs doing, or to fight with the kids in the eternal struggle to have them take responsibility for themselves.

My wife, who has some kind of energy-sapping and pain-causing autoimmune disorder, is still sleeping upstairs. My blahs are worse when she is recovering from doing too much when she’s awake.

Despite years of trying, we still have not gotten a doctor to take my wife seriously so we can get her diagnosed and treated. We are pretty sure we know which disorder she’s got, but today’s medical climate requires that we play stupid and pretend we don’t know how much information is available on the Internet. In the best of circumstances, medical doctors (the highly specialized in particular) have little humility. When the patient tries to figure out what’s wrong with them on their own, their natural arrogance and pride, which are unfortunately required to be exceptional at medicine, take over completely. This reality has us stroking their egos and filling their wallets in an attempt to find one that will listen to her and either disprove or confirm what we’ve already learned. Thankfully, health insurance handles most of the wallet-filling.

We’ve learned something interesting. There’s evidence to suggest that modern medicine’s efforts at wiping out parasites is the reason for the incredible rise of autoimmune disorders, which includes allergies, asthma, type I diabetes, MS, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and many others. It’s thought that the type of immune response that evolved to fight parasites is what’s responsible for autoimmune problems. In order to survive, the parasites reduces that immune response. We’ve evolved to live in relative harmony with parasites for thousands of years, and now the balance has been upset.

It would be nice if we can get involved in some kind of clinical trial that explores this idea. The alternative is to go to Africa and walk around in open latrines, but that involves risks we’d rather not take.

Today is my 8th wedding anniversary, and also precisely one week after my birthday. I love my wife as much as I did then, perhaps more.

Marriage has been much better the second time around. It’s given me 8 good years, three great stepchildren, and a royal seven year old terror that I wouldn’t trade in.