On Top Of Spaghetti

Last night, we brought home the newest member of the family. His name is Meatball:

Apparently his "fetch" mechanism is built in. He wiggles and bounces everywhere.

He's a two month old Papillion puppy, and the funny thing is, his marking and coloring is almost identical to Leo's.

Meatball is only going to grow to about ten pounds, so Leo will still be bigger. So far we're working on housebreaking. He's had a few accidents, but a few successes as well. It's to be expected. He cried a little last night, but only for a few minutes before passing out.

Leo is taking things slow. He's not sure what to make of his little brother yet.

Head Pigeons

Just like milk that's gone bad, one always has to share: “Does this taste weird to you?”

So I'm sharing.

I've always been told shampooing your hair every day is very drying, so you should give it a break and wash it every other day. Apparently, this is not an option for me.

A few weeks ago, while I was working days AND nights, I didn't wash my hair every day. No big deal, I wasn't going into the office since I was chained to my laptop at home. Tied my hair up in a clip. When I did wash it, I tied it up as well.

Woke up a few days later with a weird, oily patch of hair. About an inch in diameter, oilier than normal, but not particularly noticeable. Seemed to wash out.

The next day, the patch grew to cover a three inch area, and was beginning to be very noticeable. I looked like I was smacked in the side of the head with an olive oil water balloon. Or that paste my daughter uses to make her hair stick-straight. It was wet, waxy and STICKY.

I couldn't figure out what I got in my hair. Did I accidentally get paste in my hair? Was there something weird in that new bottle of conditioner? Is the cat somehow to blame? He's usually guilty of something...

I polled some relatives, figuring this was another death-inducing ailment passed down through the family. Everyone told me to go to the doctor. Sound advice, however, it requires taking time off work, so I tried Dr. Google first.

I was surprised to see how many other people had this problem. The most common diagnosis seemed to be seborrheic dermatitis, but more likely a fungus.

We're talking FUNGUS here, people.…...FUN-gus. FunnnnGUS.

Evidently this is fairly common, and occurs when you TIE YOUR HAIR UP WET, REALLY, REALLY OFTEN.

Why is it that you can do something perfectly normal, a zillion times, then suddenly you get “head fungus”?

I know....yuck, right?

So I found two solutions, aside from investing in hats: Nizoral and T-Sal. Salicylic acid in T-Sal to break up the waxy, sticky crud, and the Nizoral to eradicate any FUNGUS!

It's been about five days now and I think I've killed it. Or stripped every drop of oil from my head. Either way, it's looking mostly normal, albeit quite dry.

So no more air drying or tying it up wet. I will embrace technology and utilize the tools available - like the hair dryer.

Can you imagine how people handled this 100 years ago? You know they didn't shampoo every day. I don't even know if there was shampoo back then. That's a whole lotta fungus going on.

I just can't get over the fact that this was so random. Out of the blue. I suppose the combination of work stress, hormones, and general oiliness left me open to it.

Either that or the cat was dragging his ass across my pillow.

Because he's usually guilty of something.

Murphy's Law Applied To IT

When you're on call, there's large swathes of time – literally hours and hours that go by, where no one calls. Nothing's broken, and the business is chugging away at full steam.

However, if that burrito you ate for lunch suddenly needs to make an exit, you can guarantee there will be a network outage at that exact moment.

When you need ten minutes to get your child to the school bus stop by 7am, your servers will sense this and burst into flames.

If you run to the shop for milk - only five minutes down the road - the database will eat itself.

On the other hand, maybe you've had an extremely busy on call week. Maybe you've been awake for 48 hours straight, and those fluffy, bunny-like spiders crawling up your arm don't want to listen to Kylie Minogue on their very tiny iPods anymore. You need sleep.

Five minutes after settling into a cozy cocoon on the couch for a power nap, your cell phone rings. It will be the crisis team informing you that every user on the East Coast can't log in.