health

A Hep A shot, an HR meeting, and too late a night out…

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I was up at oh-dark-hundred, and out to my doctor’s office in RTP for a 7:00 appointment with Amy Hird, my GP, who really is a P.A, and whom I absolutely love.

She ordered up my Hep A shot, which was actually administered by her nurse, and she wrote me prescriptions for Cipro, Nexium, and Lisinopril. She explained to me that cipro is not at all effective for your run-of-the-mill stomach virus—cramping, diarrhea, and such as that. It’s for serious bacterial infections—stomach cramping, bloody stools, fever, chills, and so on. I appreciated the distinction.

My blood pressure was most excellent today, 124/78, which was good news, as I haven’t checked it for a while.

I got home in time to catch the 8:25 bus to work, where it was a quiet day. I did get a news item written about yesterday’s expo, and passed it off to Jude for editing and publishing to the OIT website.

I had a 2:00 appointment with Rob Stevenson in benefits, and the fact that only three Wolfline buses were running today due to Fall break only complicated my getting around by a time factor.

I walked over to the Brooks Hall stop, which is over by the Bell Tower. Fortuitously, Holladay Hall is right next door to that, and I took advantage of the opportunity to stop in the Vice Provost of Diversity’s office to give Marcia Gumpertz a copy of my Will & Ned poster.

I had a list of nine questions for Rob, all of which he handled in one way or another. Two of them involved sending notes to other people, which he did on my behalf.

The two most important things covered were:

  1. Clarifying my potential retirement benefits with the State. Using the most conservative estimates in terms of pay increases, he estimated that if I retire in 10 years, at age 60, I will have a pension of about $707 a month and half-price medical benefits for life. That $707 would be enough to cover my mortgage payments, and hopefully the other half of the medical benefits I’d have to pay, depending of course on what kind of incredulous and unpredictable things happen to health care in this country between now and then, as well as how my general health fares.
  2. Clarified how leave accumulates, which was not good news. I was hoping it would be like it was at my previous employer, which was you could use whatever leave you are acquire over the year at any time in the calendar year, even if you haven’t yet earned it. Not so with the state. What’s bad news about that is that it means my planned February trip to visit Kevin and skiing in Whistler is out the window. I’ll only have one day of 2009 vacation earned by then. 🙁

From Rob’s office I walked up the street to catch the city bus back to my office, as it would have taken me right to my building, while with one of the three Wolfline buses that were running, I’d had to have walked a bit of way to get back.

A Wolfline bus came about five minutes after I got to the stop (it’s a shared stop), and I passed on it for the city bus, which I anticipated arriving in about five more minutes. Well about thirty minutes later it hadn’t arrived, and when the Wolfline bus came back around, I hopped on it.

Turns out the city bus switches in the afternoon from every half hour to every hour. Lesson learned.

Back at my office, I updated three Remedy (our customer work request system) tickets, since I’m going to be out on Monday.

I met Joe at Flex at about 9:45, where we played to free, but once again frustrating games of pool due to the crooked table.

We spent most of the night talking with Patrick and a friend of his named Ali who works with him. He’s married and calls himself straight, in spite of the fact that he had recently been [expletive deleted], and is in the process of leaving his second wife. Not to mention the little fact that he’s hanging out in gay bars.

Real fun guy, though, and we had a lot of laughs.

After drinking way too much, Patrick, Joe, and I ended up at Shanghai Express at around 2:00. There’s a Chinese guy that works there (You don’t say!), who’s always there when we come, and when I told him I was going to China in a couple of weeks, he just lit up, and then wouldn’t stop talking about the place. Cute.

Bus scrambling, the OIT Expo, a flu shot, and dinner to get China adapters/converters…

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I had intended to catch the Wolfline bus to the Talley Student Center this morning, but remembered—fortunately before I waited at the bus stop—that it’s fall break and most of the NC State buses were not running today, including the one I would have taken.

The city bus I usually take to work—the Method Road bus—doesn’t go by the Student Center, so I quickly checked another city bus route—the Avent Ferry bus—and found that it had a stop practically at the steps of the student center. Sweet.

Today was the culmination of a lot of work that has been done in the almost month now that I’ve been working at NC State. Our organization is called the Office of Information Technology, and today we held OIT Expo ’08, where we had booths of a bunch of the services that our organization provides to the university, including those for faculty, staff, and students. We had tons of drawings for door prizes—two real nice ones that included a GPS system and a Sony digital camera. Unfortunately, the staff was not eligible to win those nice prizes. 🙁

I spent most of the day taking pictures of the event, and standing at booths whenever the booth owners had to step away, either to attend, or present at, one of the many workshops that went on throughout the day. From 11:30-12:30, I attended the keynote address by Dr. Marc Hoit, the recently hired, and first ever, vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer.

I attended one workshop in the afternoon. It was on the features of Contribute, Adobe’s Web authoring, reviewing, and publishing tool.

At about 2:30, I slipped over to Campus Recreation, which is just across the street from the student center, and got my free flu shot. 

I met Steve H. at the Borough tonight for dinner and to get his adapters and converters for my China trip. Liz stopped by our alfresco table, and welcomed me back to the Borough and comped my bourbon and diet, which I very much appreciated.

I had their “Which Came First?” salad with balsamic vinegar, which I loved as much as the last time I had it, which was actually the first time I’d had it, too.

Which Came First?    $7.00
Marinated chicken, egg, tomato and red onion over mixed greens, served with a choice of dressing.


After dinner, Dave (singer of “Come Monday” at karaoke) joined us, with a friend of his named John, who was an absolute stitch. He was a real young kid (probably still is, it’s only been a day), and was talking about being in Spain with his parents, while his dad was there on a business trip.

“Yeah, their national team had just one some huge soccer final, and the people were going wild. They were all out in the streets and shit. And talking all that Spain shit. And they knew I was an America right away.”

I retorted, “Yeah, probably because of all of that American shit you were talkin’.”

I updated our People-to-People “Who’s Flying from Where” file, adding folks’ cell phone numbers.