When I’m at the grocery store, buying perishable products, I’m always careful to check the expiry dates (aka Best Before dates.) I can’t afford to throw food out so I’m always very careful not to buy short-dated stuff.

Especially milk (aka half-and-half creamer). Gotta have some widener in my coffee, or it’s all hot and black and uncreamy. So when I buy my coffee milk, I am very careful to check the date on the carton. The 10% stuff is usually good for 6 to 8 weeks, and I usually go through it in 10 days, so it’s almost never a problem. Nonetheless, I always check the dates.

(I also have other rules, such as I never take the first one or the last one… the first one is half-exposed to the unrefrigerated air in the grocery store, and the last one is suspect by virtue of hiding at the back, so I always take one from the middle.)

Anyhow, so I recently stumbled onto a new conspiracy with these so-called best before dates. See, I brought home a carton of coffee milk, and put it in my fridge. No big deal. The following morning I took the carton out, and was surprised to find that the best before date said the milk was going to expire in a week. I know it said it was good for a month, when I bought it.

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So instead of devoting what little energy / functionality I have into something important — like housework, workwork, or that sort of thing — I’ve been using it to muck about with Wordpress & my website.

Odds are, you won’t notice anything different. That’s kind of the point actually.

What I’ve been doing was first, upgraded to the latest version, Wordpress 2.9 was just released recently. Then I have been rewriting most of the files that drive my custom theme. I also scrapped my mobilized plugin, as I’ve changed my theme to dynamically adjust itself depending on whether the viewer is using a mobile / handheld browser or not.

Not that the mobilized plugin had any problems – just that it required a secondary mobilize theme, and I kept forgetting to update that theme when I did anything with the primary theme. So finally I figured, heck with it, I’ll just adapt the main theme so it can serve both fullsize and mobile user agents.

The only visible change actually is that I got rid of the fancy tag-cloud plugin, and started using the normal built-in one. The only real difference there is the tag-cloud words don’t change colour any more. No real reason for the change, just that I felt like eliminating a plugin. I’m down to only 5 plugins now, and two of those are mine.

I could probably offload another one of those into my theme functions, but I haven’t decided yet if I want to do that.

Anyhow – still not focused on the right things. And now I’m wasting time writing about working on the wrong stuff instead of working on the right stuff. This is me paying homage to the Gods of Procrastination.

It’s Friday night.

Weekend eve.

I have to work this weekend, but I don’t have to work at nine. I don’t have to work till I’m good and gosh darn ready.

And I have coffee fixings! Lots of coffee fixings! I could coffee all day tomorrow! Weeee!

Plus there’s wine!

Just to be sure it’s ok, I’ve sampled the wine tonight. It’s ok. Yeah.

Wine. Friday. Eve. Weekend.

And this time when I got my pillz there were no warnings at all!  Woohoo! I can drink alcohol, drive cars, operate heavy machinery, the works! Yay for pillz without warnings!

Roughly speaking, more or less, it’s been about a year since I started taking my mind-altering drugs – a year of cryptospam.

Originally I was just taking one of these a day. Then after a couple months, it went up to two a day. Two a day seemed good, worked well for several months. By well, I mean, you know, stable, steady.

Then lately, like end of October / beginning of November, I started having wild mood swings. One day I’d be up, bouncing off the walls, everything was cool. Then the next day or two or twelve, I’d be down, really morose, wondering what was the point of anything.

It was pretty messed up.

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I was listening to the news this morning on the way in to the office. Mostly it was the usual stuff – blah blah blah traffic blah blah weather blah blah economy blah. But there were two stories that caught my attention and made me think a bit.

First up, it seems that the pressure is on to be green and eco-friendly even after we’ve expired. Planting dead people in the ground isn’t very good, for one thing it renders large expanses of land unusable (*) plus as they decay, all the toxins and poisons that they absorbed over their lives leaches back into the environment and can potentially enter the water-table and surrounding ecosystem.

Cremation is chosen by roughly 50% of all Canadians, but this doesn’t solve the problem, it merely takes all the toxins and poisons out at once and sends it up the chimney to enter the environment immediately – plus, the process uses a large amount of energy (both fossil fuels and electricity).

So there is now a company that has pioneered and is offering a ‘green’ and ‘eco-friendly’ alternative. They will liquify the dearly departed, and then pour them into the municipal water treatment system to be purified and re-enter the environment that way.

Still, the thing that hit me was there is an enormous difference between “Let us scatter our loved one’s ashes…” and “Lets all gather round the toilet and flush the dead guy.”

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So the dentist appointment is now on Saturday, but in the meantime they told me to see my doctor to get drugs. So I saw my doctor and she gave me drugs. Codeine for the pain and somethingomycin for the swelling.

And now I’m at work and the codeine just kicked in. I can tell because my fingers and toes went all tingly and there’s just the slightest touch of dizzy in the air. Nice dizzy, not cryptospam dizzy. There’s also a nice warm two-glasses-of-wine kind of cozy sensation in my tummy.

But my *&%**( tooth still %*&&*^ hurts!

However, the tingly codeine buzz makes me a little less tense about the pain thing.

It’s been about ten or eleven months since I started taking the cryptospam pills to combat depression. If I remember to take them every day like I’m supposed to, then things are moderately ok. Nominally.

Remembering to take them on schedule is the tricky part. Memories add up and play tricks. I remember taking them, but am I remembering yesterday’s memory or today’s? Or have I just visualized taking them with enough clarity to think I actually did it?

Of course, after a day or two of uncertainty, if I’ve forgotten then it gets very obvious, what with the dizzy spells, lack of focus, discombobulation, heebie jeebies, and general befuddlement.

Wierdly, and this is appearantly not uncommon among anti-depressants, one of the potential side-effects is more depression. And another potential side-effect is suicidal thoughts. Now, when I read that, I thought it was kind of a crazy ass thing to be giving depressed people. Like, if you were taking medicine for your heart, would you want it to list ‘heart attack’ as a possible side-effect? It’s counter-intuitive. Almost like they slip that in there just to mess with those of us who have to read everything infront of us. (That’s probably another whole episode there – about the compulsive reading thing.)

Anyhow, with the funky side-effect thing – it’s not just a joke they put in the fine print, it’s appearantly serious enough for doctors to mention it when they perscribe it at first, like if you get this to contact them at once. I wasn’t too worried about it because I like to think I’m pretty self-aware. Even if I can’t always react or control things, I’m at least congizant of them, you know? Or maybe I just believe I can. Either way, it works out.

It was wierd though – back during the first few weeks on the cryptospam, sure enough I started getting these thoughts and visions of hanging. There’s lots of big sturdy trees in my backyard and I’d think about which were the best ones for fixing ropes to. Some parts of my house are really well-built and I’d think about if there were some good solid joists or whatever they call the structural things, that would be a good place for a rope. It wasn’t so much like actively plotting, more like an idle or passive thought. Like daydreaming, when you just let your mind wander. Mine would wander to ropes and places to attach them.

Although I did realize it was probably due to the drugs, it still kind of freaked me out, because normally my idle-visions / daydreams are about getting shot. I don’t really like the thought of hanging, it was strange and unfamiliar.

So eventually, after a few weeks when the majority of the side-effects were going away and I was getting used to the drugs, the hanging thoughts went away and the getting-shot thoughts returned. So things have been fairly normal in that department ever since.