I did not feel very good this morning.  I woke up at about 6:15, rolled around in discomfort and after a minute or two decided that taking care of the discomfort was more important than trying to comfortably fall back asleep since doing the latter was impossible, given my level of discomfort.  So I got up and went to the bathroom.

I’m not sure what the deal was.  I couldn’t think of anything I’d eaten the day before that would have caused me to feel that way plus almost throw up.  I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, cereal with milk (the bread and milk were both bought this past weekend) and a slice of provolone cheese.  That’s all I had all day long.

I attributed it to a bug and went back to sleep after I was done.

My dad, Jerry Dotsey, called this morning.  I always get a little nervous when I see him calling in the morning, mainly because his Pap isn’t in the best health and the thought of bad news crosses my mind.  Fortunately he was just calling to say that he and Mom were thinking of coming down in a few weeks because Josh Sawyer’s family (that’s my brother-in-law’s family via my baby sister, Andra) gets a place at Oak Island every year, so my parents thought they’d come around for that.

I accomplished quite a bit at work today I think.  I sent Scott an e-mail with a number of things to take a look at and he e-mailed me back this evening with a rundown of replies.

I’ve got a song from Dr. Horrible in my head right now.  The line goes:

With my freeze ray I will
STOP!
the world.

I don’t think I mentioned Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog yet.  It was a series of three short episodes made for the internet by Joss Whedon to show people what can be done on a small budget outside normal distribution paradigms.  It’s a musical about an aspiring loser of a villain with Neil Patrick Harris well cast in the eponymous role with two things going on in his life: he’s trying to join the Evil League of Evil and he’s trying to win the affection of a girl from the laundromat.  In the way of both pursuits stands the smarmy and egotistical Captain Hammer.

I thought it was great.  Joss Whedon lulls you in with all the camp then turns it around for what I found was a truly dark turn in the final episode.  It reminded me of Anakin Skywalker’s transformation to Darth Vader, honestly.  Amanda and I watched the whole series on Saturday.

Speaking of Amanda, I heard a phone message today that I felt the need to pass on to her.  I turned off my iPhone’s caller ID and left the first part of it on her and Michael’s voicemails.  Here it is:

My plan was to leave the second part of the message for her in a few days, but when she came home she asked if I’d left her that message.  I said no at first, but then she asked if I promised and I couldn’t bring myself to lie to her about it.  She had suspected Michael.

And speaking of phones, I had a good talk today with Lorin Van Zandt about our small group.  She just said some very encouraging things towards me and Amanda and let us know that whatever we decide to do with it in the future, they’d stand behind us.

What she was talking about was how hard it’s been to get everyone together over the summer so far.  And it’s not that everyone has had things to do, but it seems that people aren’t giving it any priority.  It’s not everyone and some of the circumstances are understandable, but it’s nearing the point of being ridiculous.  We’d decided to make things more casual for the summer to accomodate people’s vacation schedules and the like, but honestly it’s getting a little frustrating.

Anyway, I think we’ll make things even more casual for the next few weeks, then at the beginning of September I want to make sure everyone comes and have a talk about what everyone’s expectations are and what their levels of interest in keeping it going are.  I mean, we’ll keep going, regardless, but I need to get a feel for how committed everyone is and go from there.

Continuing with the weak segues, we didn’t have small group tonight.  The only person who was available to show up was Mike Boscaljon, who was planning on going out to the beach to surf anyway, so it would have just been him and me and Amanda with no real study or anything.  We ended up going over to Michael’s place.  This was the first time we’d been there since helping him move in.

We played Settlers of Catan there.  Actually, I’d played him in a game of Catan on Xbox Live right after work and I won that.  To be fair, his connection had dropped, but I was winning pretty handily anyway.  I won pretty handily at his place too, beating out both him and Amanda.  I’ve been generally doing pretty well in that game lately.  My strategy has been to find a resource with some decent numbers, get on it as much as possible and get the port for it.  In the game at Michael’s tonight I had ore hexes with 8 and 10 on them, and those are fairly common numbers.  I never had any brick hexes until very late in the game, but Amanda and Michael shared a brick hex and I kept that blocked off as much as possible to help  prevent them from expanding too much when I couldn’t.  It worked pretty well.  Michael was on a comeback and Amanda was starting to do well, but I didn’t feel too threatened throughout.

Amanda and I came home after the game and watched Ghost Hunters International.  I wasn’t watching it too closely- I was more wrapped up in trying to get GameCals.com back to working.  I decided today to move everything into the main directory of the site and it worked fine until I upgraded to WordPress 2.6.  Now I get an error message saying “Redirect Loop Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete,” and I can’t find a good answer about fixing it.  The only thing I can think to do is to completely wipe out my hosting account and reinstall everything, which isn’t a big deal, but I’ve got my friend Jason Revill’s site, ThirdPartyView.com, set up in there too, and it would be a bigger deal to wipe out his site and reinstall it.  I might test out backing up and reinstalling his site then go ahead and nuke my own.

There’s an Old 97’s concert for free in Raleigh on Saturday that I’ve been looking forward to going to see for a while now.  I thought the show was at 2:00 with a band playing before them, but now I’ve found out that they won’t be playing until 9:00 or so.  That makes it a bit more difficult.  Amanda and I were thinking we’d drive to Raleigh, about two hours away, then just come on back afterwards.  But now we wouldn’t be back until really late, plus it might rain on Saturday and the concert is outside.

I don’t know, man, I don’t know.  I love me some Old 97’s.  I’d say they’re probably my favorite group right now, but it’s starting to look like a mighty undertaking to go.  They’re playing in Charlotte on Friday night and Jason is going, along with Joel Freeman, but to do that I’d have to miss over half a day of work on very short notice.

We’ll see what happens.

Zach Dotsey
.