jozjozjoz.com

I left work “early” today (I still worked more than 8 hours, seeing as I’d arrived at 8am and worked through lunch) because I got a call from my Dad and Bro from the hospital where Grandma currently is. She’d been taken by ambulance a couple of nights ago to the hospital for a procedure on her lungs. She made it through the surgery but still had some sort of lung infection. Sometime last night/yesterday morning, the doctors felt it was necessary to move her to ICU.

My Dad and Bro got there around 1:30 in the afternoon but my uncle was already there. Grandma was having a very difficult and painful time breathing. My Bro said he was worried because G’ma’s breaths were short, deep, and fast. They called me and told me about it around 3:30ish. I told Bossguy I had to get out of there as soon as possible and he concurred.

Dad called me just before I stepped out of my office with the message: “Please call Mom and tell her to get a plane ticket back from Taiwan. It’s any minute now.” I freaked out and talked to Mom for 40 minutes while rushing to the hospital. (Boy am I going to hate my cell phone bill when I get it.) I was scared I wouldn’t make it to the hospital in time.

I was stuck in horrible L.A. traffic for an hour and by the time I arrived, it was close to 6pm. Luckily, Grandma’s condition had improved and somewhat stabilized. She didn’t seem to be in as much pain, I’m told. While we were visiting, we each held her hand (not Dad, he’s got a cough and has to wear a mask when entering ICU) and she grabbed us and wouldn’t let go.

At the staff shift change, we got kicked out of the room so we went to have dinner. Dad took us to a restaurant called L.Y.L Garden (500 W Garvey Ave, Monterey Park, CA 91754. 626-289-8329.) I was disappointed because I forgot my camera and they had Geoduck on the menu. Bro and I kept joking that it was the name of my Pokemon character (if you pronounce it incorrectly as “GEO-DUCK” instead of “GOOEY-DUCK” it does sound like a Pokemon, doesn’t it?). On the way out, I grabbed a business card. They have their hours listed as:

Hours: 11 am - 12 am
Lunch: 11 am - 3 am
Late Dinner: 10 pm - 12 am

What?

Anyway, I also noticed that the restaurant had a ‘C’ rating which was (funny enough) hidden behind a plant so I didn’t see it as we were walking in. Nice.

Bro pointed out that if we got food-poisoning that we’d already be at the hospital. Very comforting.

We got back to the hospital and visited Grandma again, but she was sound asleep and we didn’t wake her.

Dad is staying at Grandma’s house so I had to give Bro a ride back to OC. We called Mom again when we got back to the house (no, we did not use Skype) and gave her an update.

I headed back to L.A. and got home sometime before midnight and I’ve been cleaning, which is a pretty good indication that I’m not myself.

I need sleep because I have to take Yoshi to the airport by 7:15 tomorrow morning and then be in the office by 8am. Plus, I’ll probably try to leave a little early again and see Grandma in the afternoon.

Grandma could still use some good mojo, so thanks in advance.

Can someone tell me how to unlock a Nokia 6200 (locked to AT&T Wireless)?

Thanks.

UPDATE: Never mind. I figured it out with help from here.

My “real life” website is down which is no real big deal except that I can’t access my email. I haven’t built out that site so if it’s down, no one misses it (myself included).

But I do want to get my email, so I opened up LiveChat with my host and here is the log of the chat:

Please wait for a site operator to respond.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
You are now chatting with ‘Jim K.’
Jim K.: Welcome to iPower Live Chat. How may I help you?
Jocelyn: My site is down
Jim K.: There is a slight network issue which is being resolved right now.
Jim K.: I apologize for inconvenience , we are experiencing network difficulties at this time.
Jim K.: Thanks for your understanding and patience regarding this matter.
Jocelyn: When will it be resolved?
Jim K.: We are sorry for the inconvenience faced by you regarding this matter.
Jim K.: I’m sorry but I have no ETA regarding the same.
Jim K.: But please be assured that it is been looked into and will be resolved very soon.
Jim K.: Thank you for contacting iPower Live Chat.
Jim K.: Have a good day.
Jim K.: Good-bye.

Thanks for nothing. I waited on chat for over an hour for “I have no ETA.” It’s been about 3 hours and my server is still down.

Our floor (entire building? city?) had a brief power failure. All my unsaved work, all my opened windows for research I was doing, all my hopes and dreams… all gone.

Ok, maybe not my hopes and dreams, but definitely the other two things.

::blogging.la:: ::yahoo/AP story::

So the good news is that I was only at work for 3-1/2 hours today since it’s just past noon and I’m home already. (It could’ve been much worse.)

The bad news is that Bossguy might call me at anytime tonight to look at some stuff online and that I have to be back at the office at 7:30am.

Fun stuff.

This time I’m not being sarcastic about my “Hooray.”

I got a phone call this morning from Ernie of littleyellowdifferent. After countless IMs harassing him to CALL ME when he comes to L.A., he has, albeit at the last minute when he’s already here. Whatever. I’ll take whatever Ernie time I can get.

Anyway, we’re going to have brunch together tomorrow. The question for me is when I’m going to work on Sunday. Bossguy said I could pick the time, so I might make it annoyingly early. But that means *I* would have to get up annoyingly early, too. (I’m bad at being an evil genius, as you can tell.)

And we’ve got tickets to the Bowl tomorrow night, as well. So much for a lazy Sunday…

Guess who was just asked to come into work on Sunday?

Food’s here. I’m much better now.

Hooray for sushi!

…and I’ve been at work for an hour.

Gee it’s quiet here.

(What’s the equivalent of *crickets chirping* at 8am in the middle of the city?)

I have officially been fired from laundry duty.

Tonight, I thought I would be a good jozjozjoz and do the laundry without being asked. I separated all the clothes into four loads (darks, lights, pinks, and whites) and started them early in the evening.

I was pre-occupied with a few things so I did not realize that the night of boneheadedness had begun even before I started the laundry fiasco. [Warning: Tangent ahead.] I had arrived home and gone inside, not realizing I’d left my headlights on for like 3-1/2 hours before Yoshi returned. I got a phone call from outside where Yoshi, TeeBubble and JeniJeniJeni were in front of the house saying “Bring your car keys outside.” I was taking an important call so I ran out to the street, opened the car door and turned out the headlines and headed back toward the house without checking to see if my car would start. Duh. Yoshi stopped me from going back inside with the car keys and tried to start the JozMobile. Achuga-chuga-chuga-nothing. So anyway, thanks to T & J for not only being chauffeur to Yoshi tonight, but for also jumping my car in the dark. Thank you also to Yoshi for driving the JozMobile around for half an hour after that.

[Ok, I’m back to the laundry story.] I was still on the call when Yoshi got back from driving the JozMobile and decided to take a load of laundry out of the dryer. The next thing I know, Yosh is standing at the door to the office, holding up a pair of khakis with blue inkstains all over them. Then Yoshi showed me the remnants of a blue Pilot G-2 gel pen (my favorite pens). Eeek.

I was so anxious to throw the clothes into the laundry, I neglected to check pockets for any dangerous items like pens, cell phones, crayons, lipstick and money.

What was I thinking?!

So the load of lights was pretty much destroyed which included my favorite pair of grey slacks (to be fair, these kind of needed to be thrown out because the zipper was broken and I was keeping my pants on with a nifty little trick using a paper clip) and my only two non-pink/red/purple shirts that I wear to work: two light blue shirts. I no longer have any shirts appropriate to wear to work that aren’t pink, red, purple or black. Oh yeah, in all that stuff that I bought at the mall yesterday, only two things in the bag (not counting socks & hosiery) weren’t some shade of pink.

On the Yoshi end, I ruined some khakis, a couple of pairs of jeans, at least a couple of shirts (including a $35 shirt recently purchased in Maui), and 3 pairs of shorts. Ooops. There was far more damage done to Yoshi’s clothes than mine. The funny thing about the clothes that survived? Most of them were clothes that don’t see the light of day: some boxer shorts, yoshi’s pajama bottoms, a sports bra, and the like. What’s up with that?! I want whatever ink-repellent is in those clothes to be in our regular clothes, dammit!

Worse yet in this dryer debacle, it was discovered that the load of lights was not the only one that shared a ride in the dryer with the blue pen. Some of the darks from an earlier load had mysterious blue inkspots, too… though certainly not quite as noticeable. Yoshi’s dark blue shirt from Hasegawa’s General Store in Hana, Maui (we had to drive the windy road to Hana to get it) was spared by virtue of it being dark blue in the first place.

Oh yes, and a nice bonus to all this was that there was blue ink all over the inside of the dryer and I spent more than half an hour with a dishtowel and a bottle of rubbing alcohol trying to get that crap off the inside of the dryer, lest it destroy the next load of laundry (my load of pinks and reds). Dude, if something happens to my pinks and reds, I really will have nothing left to wear and then I will cry because I will have to go clothes shopping again.

If you look closely, you can see the blue ink on the inside of the dryer. It looks a lot lighter because it was hard to photograph, but rest assured none of it came off without alcohol (the rubbing kind, not the drinking kind) and some elbow grease. Rubba-rubba-rub.

Anyway, from now on, if I run out of clothes to wear, I will tell Yoshi to do the laundry so that half of our clothes don’t end up going to Goodwill.

P.S. - Yoshi was also nice enough to put the label maker to use placing this nice little reminder on our laundry basket:

Bob Denver, TV’s Gilligan, Dead at 70

LOS ANGELES - Bob Denver, whose portrayal of goofy first mate Gilligan on the 1960s television show “Gilligan’s Island,” made him an iconic figure to generations of TV viewers, has died, his agent confirmed Tuesday. He was 70.

Denver, who underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery earlier this year, died at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in North Carolina, according to agent Mike Eisenstadt. Denver’s death was first reported by “Entertainment Tonight.”

I treated myself to a facial this morning at Aspect Beauty (I got the Aspect Signature Mineral Layer Facial) and while I was at the mall, I got sidetracked and spent a lot of $$$ that I wasn’t planning on spending. (I had booked the appointment a couple of weeks ago, forgetting that having an appointment in the late morning would make it near impossible to attend Shelli’s infamous Labor Day Grillfest Bash. Boo me. I suck and missed out on a bunch of yummy food.)

For instance, I spent $30 on Thank You cards at Papyrus. The last thing in the world I need is more greeting cards. Funny enough, two of the sets are almost exactly alike. Oops.

I also spent $150 in clothes (remember, I am the one who hates clothes shopping). I walked out of the store with 23 items (2 skirts, 2 shirts, 3 unmentionables, 2 jackets, 9 pairs of hose/knee highs, 5 pairs of socks). Most of it was pulled from the clearance racks and I’m only going to return one jacket. I actually want to return one and get a different one for the same price. I’m not embarrassed to say that that jacket is less than $6 on clearance.

Anyway, don’t ask me what happened to me or what possessed me to do that because the last thing I planned on doing when I woke up this morning was going on shopping.

I got lunch at In-N-Out (HUGE line to go through the drive-thru) and got home to do a little cleaning before my Bro came over to fix my computer and network. My Bro seriously rules because everything is finally in working order. He also braved Fry’s today and bought me a PNY Attache Flash drive (512 MB). It’ll cost $22 after rebate (and including tax). For fixing my computer and the network, we paid him with our “old” laser printer (it’s about two years old, not heavily used) and some toner (worth approx $80).

We ordered in Thai food for dinner (had to call 4 different places to find one that was open on Labor Day). I got a bunch of random stuff done (filled out rebate forms, etc). I even talked to Bossguy and got some work done for him, too.

Here’s hoping that having Monday off doesn’t cause me to have to work too many extra hours… I already know I’ll be in the office pretty late at least one night this week.