So yeah we got a few more chickens the other day. One of them was a hen from Calderglen Country park that kept jumping out of its enclosure so they wanted to rehome her and the others were 3 Scots Grey hens and a cockerel. Unfortunately the cockerel didn’t go down to well with the neighbours or my sleep as you can imagine. With still being ill I’m not getting a good sleep anyway but to wake up every morning at 5am to the cockerel telling everyone in the neighborhood it was morning puts the icing on the cake.

We tried to rehome it at short notice but like most people looking to offload a cockerel we had no chance. So at 10pm on Monday night after trying to completely blackout the cockerels coop we decided that if that didn’t keep him quite to a reasonable hour that was it. So we went to sleep.

At 5.30am I woke up to the chickens morning call. By 6am I’d grabbed it mid crow and dispatched it. Its an awfully weird experience sitting on your back door step watching the sun come as you pluck a chicken. Especially when you live in a town as large as the one we live in! It was round about now that I realised that we never got any photos of Glen, as that was what we named him, before his run in with the broom handle. I’ll stick a LJ-cut style thing in here I think to spare those that may be squeamish from the pics.

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It’s hypnotic!

To quote one of my favourite songs…”I can’t get no sleep”

I don’t know wether its the stresses involved with the christening, a carry over form the pericarditis or a combination of both. I was up at about 5am with the dog again yesterday morning I think but after everyone was out to work/school/nursery I managed to sleep through until about 1pm. I felt great but Barry had been calling all morning and ended up coming over to check I was OK. I’d went straight into the shower after waking up and the phones were downstairs so I didn’t have a clue.

Skip to last night and I was as wide awake as I’d ever been I think and I finally managed to force myself to go to sleep at some point around 1am. Up again at 6am this morning and despite getting a few more hours again once everyone was away I’m like a zombie. I sat down on the couch for 5 minutes about an hour ago to check something on my mobile phone and the next thing I remember is the house phone ringing and I was lying on the couch.  Now I’m up again I still shattered but I know I won’t be able to sleep if I was to try.

It’s not insomnia its just my body recovering. I just wish I knew what exactly from so I’d have a clue how long it’s going to last.

Just a quick update to fill those in that have wondered where I’ve been for the last month.

Basically Mark, who hosted my blog, had a server with a company that went under and its taken us this long to get things in shape to restart this place. Thanks to a reformat of both my home and work PC’s earlier this year I lost all my up to date backups but I’ve got old entries from Jan 2005 - July 2007 with comments and the rest are being transfered over from Livejournal without comments. Unfortunately it also means the entries from Aug 07 onwards have a stupid wee box at the top that makes no sense on here as its a notice to LJ users to come here to comment rather than do it on LJ.

The place will be a bit of a mess for a wee while but it works again

So yeah…my health.

For the last month I’ve been battling a cold/chesty cough/chest infection and at the beginning of last week I finished my course of antibiotics and most of it cleared up leaving me with an occasional dry cough that felt more like I’d cut my throat and the healing was itchy and causing the cough rather than the remnants of the infection.I felt that good that on Monday night we went for a cycle to my parents and on Tuesday I cycled to and from work. At no point did I feel I’d over done it and actually felt really good about it all.

Then I lay down to go to bed on Tuesday night. It hurt to lay down. It hurt to sit up. When I wasn’t lying down it felt like someone was trying to crush my throat and when I was on my back it was if someone was sitting on my chest. It didn’t hurt that much to be honest it was more the tightness that worried me. What did hurt though was when I breathed in and out. It was fine until a certain point then it became unbearable. Vonnie said I was being a drama queen and I sort of believed her but at teh back of my mind was the thought that if it didn’t get any better by 4am I’d go to A&E there and then. I finally managed to get some sleep after finding some painkillers but if I moved from the one position I found that was comfy then I’d wake up in pain again.

I’d told Vonnie I’d go to A&E if it didn’t get any better by lunchtime but when I got off the bus its was just as bad as it was during the night. A quick text to Vonnie to say I was going earlier than expected and instead of walking across the road to work I walked into A&E instead. Sometimes it’s quite handy having the local hospital across the road from your office! I went in expecting them to say I had pulled a muscle and I’d be back in work within the hour. I got to the desk and told then of my chest pains and my difficulty breathing only to see the 4 kids that came in behind me with strained joints get taken first. It took me a few hours to realise they were being taken into the room we normally go into when the kids have to go to A&E and they were waiting for space to come up in the treatment rooms for me. I’d walked in of my own accord so those that came in via the ambulance got in ahead of me. I didn’t thing like that at the time… Vonnie also found out that they refer to the room I was eventually taken into as Resus which certainly didn’t worry her when she asked where I was…

I was taken in, prodded, questioned and hooked up to a monitor. An IV thingie was stuck in the back of my hand so I could get morphine injected and I was given O2 as well as a couple of ECG’s. Just as the morphine kicked in my mum turned up and before I was whisked away for a chest X-ray I was told by a nurse that Vonnie had called. At this point I’d been told it was probably pericarditis and that I might need to stay over night depending on what the X-ray showed. What Vonnie was told however was that my ECG showed signs of a mild heart attack and that I was definitely staying overnight. Nice of them to a)give incorrect info to loved ones and b)to give that sort of info out over the phone in the first place. Anyway by now the morphine felt very good and I’d had my xray and didn’t even question how my brother had got to the hospital never mind how he’d managed to get from Hamilton in about 3 minutes flat. Vonnie turned up to find me with tubes and wires and all sorts stuck to me and despite my smiles looked really worried. She was much relieved to find out that despite the place being called Resus I wasn’t in need of any and that I hadn’t actually had a heart attack.

After several hours of trying to find me a bed, the hospital had about 2 spare at this point, I was moved up to the ward. It just so happened the 2 spare where in the same room and they the other was soon filled up. I shared that room with a guy that just sat stairing at the wall all day or sleeping and a guy that had had a stroke and spent the day pissing into bottles or shitting in a bag. Not long after I got there the other spare bed was filled by a wee guy with a huge O2 mask on that I was convinced wasn’t going to see it through the night. I’d been hyperventilating when I came in thanks to the pain when I took deep breaths but this guy was something else. He was up at 50-60 breaths per minute, his BP topped out at 240/168 and they could only find one place they could both draw blood from and put an IV into as his arms and legs were that swollen. He was really struggling and his alarms were going off all night. They also had a couple of floor fans on him trying to keep his temp down. So between my pain/discomfort I also had the fans, the alarms, the guys breathing and the stroke guys toilet habits keeping me awake almost all night.

One thing I’ll say though is they like to keep you fed. From the moment I got ont he ward until I left just before noon I think they must have gave me four meals! And thats not including tea and biscuits.

So anyway here I am now trying to find things that I can do that won’t wind up Vonnie or kill me. I’ll likely be off work for at least a week and depending on how I do at my GP’s on tuesday I may be off for another week as well. Just going to the shops knackers me out thanks to my breathing!

I've sat since my own hosted blog went down wondering whatthe hell I've done with my backups. I've remembered now though.

I've deleted them. All of them.

You may think this is a bad thing but I'll tell you why. Those of you that read this will know that I never use LJ. I can't stand the structure/look and I can't stand how limited it is with it's features. But because I get more folk reading my LJ than my actual site I decided a wee while ago to cross post my ordinary entries here as well but direct all comments over to my own site. Not that many of you commented on it anyway but thats not the point
The point is though that the plugin that allowed me to cross post also allowed me to transfer over all my previous posts as well. Due to the age of my blog though it was going to take a long time to do so I never really got around to do it. Then I remembered that I accidentally started the process one day at work and a few hours later it had 'backed up' most of the blog to LJ. I think I've got from 2005 onwards on here. I've also got what little I had from before then backed up as text files on my laptop but that only covered me until early 2007.

Woohoo as they say.

I'm still working on getting my domain back up and running so we might see it back up bofre I go back to work
Talking of health I'll try and update later on the last few days. Most folk will be bored by the length of it but my next post should hopefully cover my brush with an ECG machine and my encounter with Darth Vader.

I've been trying to sort out my apocrypha.co.uk domain so that I can get my blog back up and running but I'm hitting snags at every turn.

First off I couldn't find the domain on any of the sites I use for buying them. Eventually I remembered that when Mark first started hosting my site rather than use my own server we moved it over to his account to make nameserver changes etc easier any time he updated his hosting. If I set up an account with the company he uses it should be the work of two minutes to transfer it back over to me and from there move it back over to my usual company.

Then once Mark managed t find the signup page which was hidden somewhere that neither of us to easily find it I hit a snag. You need a valid credit/debit card to create the account. Thats never been a problem before but apparently my debit card is out of date despite its expiry date being in 2009. Every other card I've tried with them has had the same problem and now I'm waiting on them getting back to me. I've been waiting since Saturday night and still nothing so I think I'll be nudging them later on today if I've still not heard anything.

I've also got to work out how to organise my my hosting. Currently all my sites work from the one hosting package with the separate sites being registered as addon domains. My problem being the base domain name isn't what I want it to be and is going to require reinstalling one of the blogs from scratch and a bit of jiggery pokery to get it all on an even keel. Basically more time and money than I have at the moment. Joy.

It seems my blogs webhost can't pay its bills on time.

I *think* I have a backup somewhere thats got everything up until March but anything after that is a goner. Now the question is what PC did I make the backup on? I installed a DB backup plugin on my blog from work so it may be on my laptop but I can't see it.

Either way normal blog services will return once either I move everything over to my own server or the webhost gets its finger out and pays its bills.

Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

Right my brains fried thanks to work, home and lack of play so I’ve came on here for 5 minutes just to throw together a brain dump and get away from payroll work for a wee while.

I feel about 2 inches tall. I won’t go into the whole story but whilst I ran to the toilet yesterday Nairn got his hands on a steak knife and cut his hands. The cuts aren’t that bad but both of them are between the thumb and forefinger so they kept opening back up and our plasters were just too small. Ended up spending 3 hours with him and Erica in A&E yesterday afternoon to get someone to check him over and get some proper dressings on them. He’s fine and apart from when it started bleeding again when the nurse was applying the dressings he was in great spirits almost the entire time. I still left him alone long enough to hurt himself though.

Vonnie went up to see Emma in Aberdeen over the weekend so I had the babies from Saturday afternoon onwards. I’ve been on a diet for the last week but I cheated on Saturday night. We sat down and watched a DVD with some popcorn before I put the babies to bed which was entirely healthy and not at all bad for my teeth…honest.

We’ve got 2 baby ducks to add to our collection of poultry.

We should have had a better hatch rate than that but our incubator is shit. We seem to be getting a 33/66 success rate which isn’t very good. Vonnie picked up 2 more chicks from a breeder on the way back down from Aberdeen yesterday and I picked up a delivery of 6 Scots Grey eggs this morning. Hopefully that should be us and with a little luck the hens we have will start laying any day now.

Vonnie also picked up some spares for the bikes from Ebay the other day which arrived this morning so hopefully I can have the bikes up and running again pretty soon.

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Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

Vonnie managed to pick up a splashproof keyboard on ebay for buttons the other day so now I can actually type on this computer without having to use the virtual keyboard! I don’t think I’ve seen such a user unfriendly piece of software in my life, half the letters you click on don’t register so you end up with something that wouldn’t look out of place on a teenagers SMS text message.

I’ve had the last week off work with the intention of gutting this house but as I’ve actually only ended up with two days without the kids I’ve not actually got anywhere near as much done as I’d hoped. Last weekend was taken over with Erica’s birthday. It’s hard to believe that shes one year old now!

We also got stuck into the garden over the week and the hedge is finally down and after hiring a chipper on friday most of it is now being used as mulch around the garden or as flooring in the chicken run. We also were planting the flowers we had bought this week in our front garden at 10pm on friday night! Theres proof if anything of how busy this week has been. Most nights this week I’ve been in bed for 9pm which is getting silly and in fact I was in bed by 8pm last night! We also finally managed to build up the swing set that we got for the kids over a year ago but just as the storm hit yesterday we had just built the first section and were determined to get it finished. I’m still trying to work out just how stupid it was building a metal frame in the middle of a thunderstorm whilst standing next to an electrical substation. I get the feeling we may be sponsoring the Darwin Awards next year.

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