I'm getting into the world of containers finally. It's been something that I put off for years, thinking that it was a waste and wouldn't really go anywhere, but I was wrong.

For this work, I've been using Podman. It's a RedHat fork/replacement for Docker, and is open source. What's cool about it is that you can use Docker images, Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml syntax, and have all of the features that Docker would have in your environment.

What has really put this in high gear for me is that I need to move a lot of my content off of the server that this blog is on, including the blog itself, and host it elsewhere. The cheapest option is to run it all from a small server here at home, then use services like Cloudflare to route the traffic to it and serve it back to the users as if it was on another server. I also like that they have CDN caching for static assets, which will really help with bandwidth over time.

The setup I have been working on for FlightMan uses 3 containers:

• The PHP/Apache bits
• The MySQL/MariaDB
• The MongoDB

It's worked well so far, and I think it can really help me to keep things isolated and secure much easier than a single server trying to serve all the content directly.

All in all, I feel good about this, and I think it's going to add a lot of skills to my toolbelt and CV.

I've been suffering from chronic laryngitis for the last couple of years. I've had it probably 6 or 7 times by now over that span, and it's very annoying.

I've seen multiple doctors about it, and have had the following recommended:

• Peppermint tea
• Honey
• Rest
• Antibiotics
• Steroids
• Antacids

It's been unclear on whether any of these has helped at all, but one thing I've been able to determine is that it generally lasts about a week, maybe longer. The longest I dealt with it was around Thanksgiving in 2023, when I had no voice for about a month and a half.

Of all the things that I've noticed, it's that just before I start to lose my voice, I feel very run down, more so than my usual lethargy from the other medical crap I have going on. Otherwise, I have no other symptoms that go along with it, no fever (though there was one time where I did have a mild one), no cough (other than intentional ones to try to force something to work), no sinus drainage, no reflux, nada.

This round started last Wednesday. I thought the run down feeling was just because we were busy the week prior and that week itself. But later in the day, I felt my voice start to fade, and it went to nothing by mid-day on Thursday. It slowly and minimally improved over each of the following days, allowing me to get a longer run out of the voice each day before it went away.

Friday, I decided to schedule at my allergy clinic to see an ENT about it. I just got back from that appointment a moment ago, but here's what went on.

First, they gave me a high volume/high pressure spray of Afrin and Lidocaine. That was awful. I spat a good bit of it out, and I kept smelling and tasting it for a while thereafter. Then I had a chat with the doctor about everything above, which prompted him to go ahead and shove a scope up my nose and down my throat.

He said my sinuses looked great, except for a deviated septum and a spur in my left nostril. Moving down my throat and past my tongue, everything looked good. Then he got to my larynx and had me make an "EEEEE" sound. He said that everything was red around there and that the vocal chords themselves were swollen, which suggested acid reflux to him.

I have no memory of any reflux symptoms last week or before, and I'm pretty aware of what they would feel like. But since he's the expert, I trust his opinion for now.

He put in a prescription for a once-daily antacid and wants me to do that for 3 months before we repeat the scope. If all is good then all is good. If not, he'll send me to see another type of doctor that uses a similar scope with a high speed camera attached to it to see what's going on with the vocal chord movement. If it goes that far and they do see issues with how they move, it'll point to my ankylosing spondylitis being the culprit, which means I'll have to talk with my rheumatologist about it more.

For now, I'm trusting what the doctor said, as it's much more specific than what any others have in the past. In the meantim(e), I have to rest my voice for 2 weeks, so I'll be non-vocal in team meetings and whatnot.

I've blogged about it before, but things aren't getting any better.

I can't think of a time, going as far back as my mind allows, when I didn't have some sort of a symptom related to this. When I was young, my parents and I assumed it was a pinched nerve in my arm or something. As I've gotten older, I've noticed the patterns, though. It's all getting way more frequent, and far more painful or otherwise disruptive.

The most recent symptoms are just repeats of things I've had before:

• Tactile Allodynia - Pain sensation to a light touch, even triggerable by air movement
• Twitching - Looks like a tremor, but is very localized to a hand/finger or a foot/toe, lasting several minutes if not days, and has always been on my left side
• Muscle cramping/spasming - I can't find a clear medical distinction between the two, so I've lumped them together. It comes and goes, though, and is almost always in my left arm, left hand, left leg, or left foot.
• Aphasia - I lose the ability to process things like words, sounds, or other things. It's not that I can't hear, or that I don't know how to read or write (this blog alone should tell you that), but rather my brain loses the ability to make sense of things. Music will sound just like noises, speech will sound similar, but turning it into useful, comprehensible things just completely shuts down.
• Middle Ear Myoclonus - I've had a hearing test and I have excellent hearing, but I get this thing in my right ear where it sounds and feels like someone is physically tapping my eardrum. The neurologic audiologist I saw said it's completely benign and my hearing system is otherwise perfect.

Today, It's a cramping/spasming thing, but in the weirdest way. It feels like I slammed 3 of the fingers on my left hand in a door. It's the proximal phalanx, not in any of the joints. As I'm typing this, I'm feeling it elsewhere, like in the same relative bone in my thumb. It's excruciating, and I'm just waiting for the meds (Gabapentin, Cyclobenzaprine) to do their thing.

I just want a doctor to pay attention to all of these things and understand how disruptive they are to my life and help me to identify what it actually is and how to treat/manage/cure it beyond what I've been doing.

August 1, 2008, I set foot in my first living space in the Houston area. On the west side of the city, right along Interstate 10, it was my biggest and one of the most important chapter changes in my life. Having lived in a small city in Indiana before, and a rural area prior to that, also in Indiana, I was overwhelmed by the grandeur of this new metropolitan area.

August 4th, I made my way to the downtown Houston office for the first time, nervous about working in a more corporate environment after working for small companies and startups prior. It was wild, parking in the downtown lot, taking the elevator to the second floor, and setting my stuff up in a cubicle on a side of the building that was still being set up. I recalled stepping outside the office and staring in amazement at the skyline that was close enough to touch. I even took a picture, sharing with my family and friends back home in Indiana, and feeling nervous about the future ahead.

Here I am, 16 years and a couple months later, staring at my final day in that office, surviving 2 major acquisitions/mergers, arriving at IBM after it was all said and done. Our leadership decided though that we were not going to occupy that building any longer, and that we had to be out before the end of October this year. Fortunately, though, they had organized other office spaces for us to occupy, relative to our roles within the company. Mine, and that for most of the people adjacent to me in the organization, is actually closer to where I live now, on the 5th floor of a high-rise on Houston's west side in the Westchase District.

It's bittersweet for me. I have a lot of memories, some silly, some amazing, and some frustrating at the downtown office. I got used to the area, and took great advantage of all that was nearby, including the downtown tunnel system. But on the west side, it's not as familiar to me, and we don't have the convenience of a tunnel system, of which to navigate the surrounding area subterranially. But I know it's going to be a great experience, may actually be a quicker commute, and will expose me to new people, new benefits, and there will be new memories to form there.

I'll have to find my picture I took of the downtown skyline from the downtown office, and try to replicate it tomorrow before I leave for the last time.

For the last 8 or so years, I have been dealing with a condition called aphasia. This comes and goes, and as such, it's classified as transient.

This condition presents itself in multiple ways:

• I could struggle to process sound, that is, make any sense of it
• I could struggle to comprehend written/typed words
• I could struggle to comprehend spoken words
• I could struggle to perform certain "basic" tasks
• I could struggle to get words out of my mouth (or fingers, if I'm typing)

These are just the most common ways I deal with it. There may be other times where it presents totally differently, though that's not happened frequently enough for me to remember off the top of my head.

For the people with whom I interact, this may appear as though I am being ignorant to what they have to say or want me to do. With my work, I do a lot of text-based communication, and in those situations I often have to request for people to rephrase what they say. If I'm having a phone call or face-to-face conversation with someone, I will hear the sounds they are emitting, but my brain fails to process them as words. This often results in me asking the other person to slowly restate whatever they had just said.

While it is frustrating for everyone else, let me tell you how frustrating it is for me. It's like someone has bound my hands, put a blindfold on me, or stuffed rubber chickens in my ears. It's like I'm trapped inside my own head, much like that episode of "House" where Mos Def played the one guy who was trapped in his own head. For me, it's not as severe as what was portrayed in the TV show, but it's quite relatable for me.

When it comes to the struggle with basic tasks, the best example I can give is a time when I got up from my desk with the intention of going to the kitchen for a snack or drink. When I got to the door, it was closed and latched, and I stood there for 5 minutes trying to figure out how to open it. It's not a complicated task by any means, and I knew that at the time. I still got very angry though, because of how limited I felt.

If you ever interact with me and I tell you that I'm dealing with this aphasia, please grant me some grace and understanding. It's far worse for me than it is for you.

I've been listening to a few of Our Lady Peace's hits from the 90's, and I've got to say, they had GREAT musical abilities back then, even with the lead singer's nasally vocals.

I've tried to listen to a few of their newer things, and it's not as good. I even caught a more modern live performance of Superman's Dead, and it SUCKED.

Seriously, if you want good sounds, check these out:

• Superman's Dead
• 4am
• Clumsy

Pay attention to the musical qualities and aspects, especially on Clumsy.

Starting about 7 years ago, I got to a point where things either didn't sound right to me, or I couldn't understand them, whether an audible source (such as spoken word, music) or visual/literary source. When it first started happening, I chalked it up to just being tired, or failing to have sound around me or words in front of me. I didn't think much about it, but then it started happening more frequently, and started affecting me more dramatically. It would come on with no warning, and would never last the same length of time as previous.

I ended up talking with my doctor about it, and was sent on to see a neurologist. Thorough testing and monitoring, no serious underlying issue was found. But the condition kept happening, either robbing me of my ability to understand music, or my ability to find words, or my ability to read written words. My job, being one that required a lot of reading, writing, listening, and speaking, I started to feel as though my abilities were fleeting and I would soon find myself standing in an unemployment line. I've always been regarded as a strong author, both when it comes to things like this blog, or when it comes to writing software. I know several different programming languages and can switch between them with no struggle. I'm a musician, and enjoy being able to hear the different parts of music and even replicate it myself. And people usually rely on me as a human spellcheck. Though when a wave of this issue would hit me, at least 2 of those abilities were seemingly removed from me. There would be times that it would only last a few minutes, but would sometimes last hours or days.

Doctors looked at the makeup of my brain, the blood flow through it, and the electrical signals it would generate. I had MRI imaging done, a variant of it called MRA, and a few different types of EEG. Everything looked normal, nothing was amiss, and the doctors found nothing to remark on. The neurologist I had seen at the time determined it was just a thing that happened and there was no visible cause for it. His assessment was that it would fade over the couple of months following, then I would never deal with it again. It was then qualified as idiopathic transient aphasia, meaning "An unknown loss of ability to perform cognitive duties, lasting a short period of time, then going back to normal". Another way of saying it, "You lose these abilities for a random period of time, but we find no cause for it." As such, it's been classified as benign, having no long term, damaging effects.

I appreciate positivity and can respect doctors who think that way, but there was an air of ignorance to it. I wasn't able to get him to understand that it was a thing that had been going on for a long time. He just said that I needed to give it time and patience and it would pass.

It did subside for a few months during the great COVID-19 pandemic, but it's been coming back since then, much more frequently, lasting longer, and having more profound impacts.

One day a week or so ago, I stood up from my desk and walked towards the door, but the door was closed. I couldn't figure out how to open it. It's not a fancy or elaborate door; it has a simple doorknob that needs to be turned, then the door pulled open. I couldn't figure that out though! I was so frustrated that I just went back to sit at my desk and wait for it to pass then try again later.

Another time in the past that I can recall, I was staring at my browser window, needing to switch to a different tab, but couldn't figure out how to do it. I mean, it's as simple as point and click, or ctrl+tab, or ctrl+a number for which tab I wanted. I couldn't understand any of those though, and I was just as frustrated as I was with the door a few days ago.

Tonight, before dinner, I decided I was going to work on a specific code thing. I felt confident about it, and thought I would be able to wrap it up tonight. After dinner, I came to sit and work on it, and I couldn't figure out the first step to get started on it. That was over an hour ago. I still don't know how to get started on it. I even opened the code that I have been working on for the last couple of years, being the only author/developer of the entire complex platform, but failed to understand any of it. I couldn't (still can't as I write this) make sense of what I was looking at, what the file structure was, or how any of it worked together. I was left dumb in context of software development.

What makes no sense though is that while I might not know how to open a door, I am able to load up a flight simulation, start from cold and dark, plan and enter a flight, fuel up, taxi to the runway, take off, reach altitude, cruise, descend, enter final approach details, and land. I can still drive when it's going on. I might not be able to speak or understand someone else speaking, but I can certainly drive from A to B without any issue. In fact, if I didn't tell anyone about what I was feeling, they would never know.

I need to go over this again with my new neurologist, and I need to get more updated testing done. I'm smarter than this, I'm more able than this, and I am stronger than it is. But the symptoms keep coming around, and keep hitting different faculties, and doing nothing more than frustrating me.

For the last few years I've been dealing with what my neurologist has called Cramp Fascination Syndrome in the left side of my body. Starting earlier than that, I have been dealing with Idiopathic Transient Aphasia. All my life, I have also dealt with what I can best describe as panic attacks.

I've been able to manage until recently. There would be times of more degraded ability, but for the most part it was a thing that came and went. I'd bounce back and be able to live as normal. But this past weekend I have started to notice something: My left arm has really lost muscle tone and strength, particularly in my forearm. I noticed it first when I was driving. If I had only my left hand on the wheel as I came to a stop, either a stop sign or a red light, as the forces of inertia kept me moving forward while the vehicle stopped, that arm would not be able to resist the mild forces and would begin to shake and ache like crazy.

It became more apparent at an event we took Jr to, where I helped operate a small rope bridge exercise for the boys for a bit. All I really did was grab the two upper ropes and pull them together and downward for the smaller boys to be able to reach them. But in doing this, the shaking and aches would reappear, but only in the left arm.

Yeah, I'm right-handed, and my right side is more toned than my left, but I have always been seen as the strongest person around and have had almost no issue with any task handed to me. The disparity between my arms wasn't enough to limit me or cause concern until now.

I'm not medically trained in any way beyond basic first aid, so my own self-diagnosis is not likely anywhere within accurate. But with that in mind, most doctors are surprised at how much I know and how close I can get to a diagnosis on my own. Because of that, I have been able to identify two possible conditions that account for all of this:

First, there's Multiple Sclerosis. I have had several tests to determine if that's what it is, and the doctors who have done the test have said "no, this isn't MS." But yet, the more I have read about it, and having one doctor suggest it might be MS, I am thinking that it's not been excluded from a possibility. In all that I have read, I've learned that there's no specific shaped hole that the person has to fit through for it to be quantified as MS; it's a complex disease and has a lot of variability between people who have it.

Second, there's Spinal Muscular Atrophy, or SMA. This is much more serious than MS, but can be managed to live a full life. I am less convinced that this is what it is though, as there aren't enough connections between my symptoms and it.

And finally, there's Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease. this is the most concerning but also seems to be coming more into view as a likely thing. Some of the symptoms include muscle atrophy and problems swallowing. I definitely have muscle atrophy in my left arm and hand, and it's been quantified by my neurologist. But this increase in atrophy has me more concerned. As far as the swallowing issues, I have always dealt with a random choking sensation when I try to swallow my saliva. It doesn't usually last very long, but it does happen frequently.

I'm pretty freaked out at the possibility of it being ALS or SMA, but I can probably manage if it is MS. The more I've read about MS anyhow, I've come to think it's probably the same as Jed Bartlett's MS, relapsing/remitting, given that I have periods of feeling perfectly normal and healthy, punctuated by periods of pain and struggle around all my symptoms.

I'll try to keep this updated with the most current description of what's going on and what doctors think it is as I learn more.

Tonic - Open Up Your Eyes

• Spotify
• YouTube

I had a dream one night several years ago that makes this song so much more intense for me to listen to ever since.

I was backstage at an outdoor concert. The crowd was packed. The ring of the electric guitar began, and the crowd went crazy.

I approached the microphone on stage as the ring reached its peak and the rest of the band played the intro. I had thought the crowd was going crazy before, but somehow they found the energy to take it up 5 levels.

The intro was approaching the end and I grabbed the microphone, and just as I got the "ch-" sound out for the opening line, the crowd was still finding new levels to reach.

Then I woke up.

This might seem like a pretty vague description of the dream, but it's really hard for me to paint the picture with words. It was such a vivid dream, and I can remember all the feelings I experienced during it. I was nervous, but excited. I was confident. I walked up to that microphone stand so confidently, you'd think that it owed me money. It was such a wonderful feeling. The crowd's energy fed me. The band's energy fed me. I was full-on experiencing it.

If you think about it, along with the lyrics, you'll see the irony of it too.

Open up your eyes
Don't let your mind tell the story here

My mind was telling the story.

I don't know what it means for my life, at the time of the dream (over a decade ago) or for right now. Am I supposed to explore a singing career? I don't think I'm that talented of a vocalist. Also, who wants someone with a deep bass voice singing lead for a song like this?

When I listen to the song now, it brings a lot of those feelings out, and it's a fun ride.

At any rate, I thought I would log this for my own posterity, but also to let y'all in on how meaningful this is to me.

For years (more than 20) I have been doing things the long way with PHP. One of the examples of this is processing files and putting the results in an array (or object) to serve as key/value pairs.

Consider the following:

Foo: bar
Baz: biz

Here's some content...

If you wanted to match these lines in a way that you only get the Foo: bar and Baz: biz into a key/value pair, you would need to somehow match those values into a variable. Something like this would work:

<?php
preg_match_all('/^(.*?): (.*?)$/m', file_get_contents($filename), $matches);

But this will give you something like this: Array ( [0] => Array ( [0] => Foo: bar [1] => Baz: biz )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => Foo
            [1] => Baz
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [0] => bar
            [1] => biz
        )

)

But what if you want to have the matched group [1] be the keys, and matched group [2] be the values? A for loop would accomplish it, as would other array-walking techniques.

It's far easier than that, though!

<?php
preg_match_all('/^(.*?): (.*?)$/m', file_get_contents($filename), $matches);

$keyvaluepairs = array_combine($matches[1], $matches[2]);

If you print_r() that resultant variable, you'll find that it's exactly what you want:

Array
(
    [Foo] => bar
    [Baz] => biz
)

That's all I wanted to share. I hope it benefits you.

In the recent decade, the internet has moved away from written articles with figures and whatnot in them, in favor of things like YouTube videos. This cultural change has spread beyond YouTube and the public internet, though, and even includes major corporations, including the one I work for.

What I've found is that I am unable to really process anything that's presented in a video.

I am a decent reader, and over the last couple of decades or so, I've been able to cultivate a form of speed reading, which I use almost always. This allows me to take in loads of information rather quickly, not constrained to the limits of my ability to process spoken word, or another's ability to speak it. But when I am presented with either recommendations to watch a YouTube video to learn how to configure a piece of flight simulator software, or when I am issued mandatory education at work in the form of a video, I get incredibly frustrated, and I find that I'm unable to retain whatever it is that I observe.

When it comes to important things, where a certain set of steps must be followed precisely, or when it's a thing that I am required to do, PLEASE, I beg of you, don't throw a video at me.

We've lived in this house long enough to have experienced 2 tropical storms: Harvey and Nicholas.

Last night, Nicholas was approaching us at bedtime, and the wind and a bit of rain kicked up. Sometime around 2:30am the power went out. I left it alone, then a little while later it flickered back on briefly, then back out. When the power comes on in our house, several things make a fairly loud beep sound. When the power flickers in the middle of the night, that beeping can be disruptive to my already-light sleep.

I wasn't wearing my watch most of the night to see how I slept, and I didn't take my typical medicines that would assist in my ability to stay asleep. I figure I got segments of sleep lasting about 20 minutes each, with a period of 15-20 minutes awake in between. The awake was partially due to the storm noise, but mostly due to how my body was responding to the weather and the lack of medication. Then when the power went out, those physiological responses got worse, leading to an all around shoddy night, sleep-wise.

I got up around 7:30am and decided that 5 hours off electricity was approaching the maximum for the refrigerator, and it was starting to get warm in the house with the sun peeking through the southern bands of the storm. I somewhat robotically marched out to the garage, flashlight in hand, and laid out the extension cords, wheeled the generator to the back porch, gassed it up, and got everything running. Then I got into the house to get the portable air conditioner going, and Emily helped me with it. Then I sat for a bit to try and recover some energy before I went to boil water on the grill for coffee.

We went for a walk at one point, just to see how the neighborhood faired, and afterwards I decided it was safe to take the meds that I had skipped last night. After I did, I laid down to attempt to sleep, which was interrupted repeatedly by a wound up nearly-six-year-old, until I finally got what felt like 10 hours of sleep (it was maybe 1 hour) and felt better.

At that point, Emily had fixed me some lunch and we sat and enjoyed our food together as a family.

We had some errands to run after that, and while we were out the neighbors sent a text message declaring victory against the lack of power. When we got home, the air conditioner had already brought the house down to the "cold" we like, and we went about getting things back to status quo.

Damage-wise, all I have been able to see so far was one branch off a rotted Japanese Wax tree, which I'm already planning to cut down. The loose bark on the Crepe Myrtle trees was blasted clean off the trees as well. Some neighbors didn't do as well: One reported an uprooted, large tree. Others had fences blown over. Some neighbors reported on Facebook that they heard a tornado blow through the neighborhood overnight. That was probably when I was either actually asleep, or just almost asleep and tuned it out completely.

Total time without power was almost exactly 13 hours. The longest cycle I ran between fuelings on the generator was from 7:30am to 10:30am. I think I only refueled it twice after the initial fueling. I've decided to not take storage actions with it just yet, as there's another storm on the maps that I am unsure about for this next week or so. With that in mind, I prefer to just leave everything ready to go, and refill my fuel supply sometime in the next few days.

All in all, it looks like the area did well, and we did well here, so it wasn't really that bad from our perspective.

There are certain times that mindlessness is understandable, but here lately I have been getting rather irritated with the complete lack of intellect people are putting into things. Before I get into the details about what's getting under my skin, I'll warn you, some of this may seem very trivial and like a dumb thing to be upset about, but there are some much deeper reasons behind why it bothers me than what you'll see at the surface. If you want to understand those more, feel free to reach out to me and ask.

Working in an internet business, I'm acutely aware of what proper customer communication means, and what the lack of it can result in. When we have to restart a service, apply an upgrade, even if it's remotely possible that it's a disruptive action, we have to plan, review, schedule, notify, wait, then act. Except in the case of emergencies, this is the well understood pattern, and failure to adhere to it can result in customers getting frustrated and leaving.

Where I'm starting to see issues with it are in a variety of things I use on the internet. First and most importantly, my home internet service. Perhaps having been working for a top 5 cloud provider for the last 10 years, I've become conditioned to expecting to be notified when my service is going to be interrupted. I've sat on the other side of the modem and issued those notices, so why am I not getting them on this side from my ISP? Last week alone I had 3 days where Xfinity (I really dislike their rebranding, but that's another topic for another day) had disruptive maintenance during my working day. Given that so many people are still working from home during this pandemic, that's just absurd that they'd take such actions. All they need to do is have a subscriber notification system by which they can send messages (email, text, Twitter, whatever) and give a heads up of an upcoming service disruption. Instead, they play the "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission" game, and start taking the service offline before they even throw an outage notice up. I know that this is how it's going because my cable modem sits on my desk, just to the right of my work computer screen, and when the lights flicker I know they're poking at things.

If my internet service is online, other things suffer. For example, I have been using online Minecraft gaming as an outlet for my fidgety hands during meetings, and as a means of keeping social during a time when the world frowns on face-to-face time, or my own health keeps me from it. There have been a few communities I've joined, and a couple that I've basically left because while they want players to give them money for features (I've paid a couple), they nerf the game, conduct service restarts, or somehow disrupt gameplay in another way. If it wasn't a thing that I put money towards (total I'm at about $30 spend, so it's not a lot to grumble about, I know), I'd expect the unstable service and the Mickey Mouse management. But alas, I can't even expect to have a relaxing time to enjoy what I put money and time towards, and it causes me to reconsider why I even gave them $0.01 in the first place.

At least in one of the communities I've thrown money at, they've asked me to help keep the service stable, so that's worth something at least.

I'm going to probably write another private entry about another case, but for this particular entry I'll just say that I'm starting to see laziness on these topics everywhere, no exclusions.

I understand we're all exasperated at the shape of the World today, and we just want to get back to "normal", whatever that was. I just want people and businesses to use their brains, and to approach things as if they were the customer and what the impact would be.

Maybe the transit providers need to gimp Xfinity to get that point across, and just say "oops, we have a guy working on it and it'll be back in now + 12 hours , be patient." Sure, the rest of us downstream from there will be feeling the pain as well, but I'm willing to bet money that Xfinity doesn't expect that sort of behavior, and they need 90+ days notice before a link is disrupted.

I know you're clinging to the light of day To tell you everything's a-okay And medication don't do much Yeah, it just numbs the brain

Shinedown - Get Up

This lyric paints the picture nearly perfectly. Suffering with Ankylosing Spondylitis and now suspected Multiple Sclerosis, I can't even begin to say how true this is.

I spend most of my time either in extreme pain and discomfort, or I spend it really doped up from whatever my doctors have me on at the given point in time. It's not a good balance, and it's very demoralizing. I have a nice bike that I would love to ride. I have a number of tools that are collecting dust/rust. I have a 3d printer that hasn't budged since February. I have 3 bass guitars that are rarely played. I have a mountain of reading material in the form of magazines and books that haven't moved hardly at all since they were placed on the surface where they currently reside.

I just want to be not what I am today I just want to be better than my friends might say

William Fitzsimmons - Passion Play

I want to do more. I want to be more. I want to be healthier. I want to be more social. This all feels like a giant stone tied around my neck though, and the stone is my health.

While I am writing this, I am dealing with both the AS and the MS symptoms. It's a wonder I can even put words together because I'm medicated to try and ward off the pain enough to function. I'm about to fall over the edge of consciousness though and just sit here, staring at my screen and drooling on myself. There's almost no way for me balance it on the edge of that tipping point and function without pain.