caracolina

Yesterday and today I had doctor appointments in the morning. Yesterday was my yearly physical which is really just our “family” doctor asking my a couple of questions, recording my vitals (weight, height, blood pressure) and poking and prodding me in a few places. As usual I forgot to ask if my weight is different from last year, (although I tend to blame any weight gain on key chains, loose change, screw drivers, power tools, etc. in my pockets anyway) but I’m pretty certain I haven’t shrunken. I vaguelly remember being disappointed that I didn’t make the full 5’5” last year. Maybe next year I’ll remember to make more of a stretching effort in front of the measuring stick?!

Today’s appointment was at our dentist’s. I can’t believe we’ve been seeing this guy for so many years now! He’s made a small fortune on my crowns about 8 years ago and since then I’ve been able to stave off ye olde drill by brushing and flossing semi-regularly. Until now, that is. Tooth decay finally got me, but luckily it was really no big deal (unless you count the double-dose of lydocaine that was needed knock out my jaw). The good doctor ripped out my old “silver” filling and replaced it with some new stuff. It is sad to see on my x-rays that I have maybe five or six teeth left that have no fillings at all.

 Come to think of it, I wonder why I don’t get a copy of my x-rays, they are in digital format after all? I should try to remember to ask when I have my next appointment. It is already set for 6 months from now, except we always forget until they call us two days before the appointment.

Today my order went out for my very own spinning wheel, a Fricke single-treadle. The treadle part folds up for “easy storage.” I ordered it through Nikol from Yarn School in Harveyville, KS, along with a few pounds of fiber. Unfortunately it will take some time for the wheel to arrive, but I’ll get the undyed fiber first, so if I get too antsy I’ll do some dyeing experiments.

The police must be busy tonight, a helicopter is circling over our neighborhood. Could it have anything to do with that shady establishment across the street, called the Candy Store?

I thought I only had to take one more class for the associate, instead there are two more. And one of them probably can’t be accelerated. Drats!!! I just enrolled in the communications class, then I have to make a decision about whether to take chemistry or biology. I was more interested in biology, but it is 2 weeks longer than chem…

After desperately trying to focus on my economics book and study guide over the last week I braved the final today, one week before its due date. I don’t know the grade yet but I’m pretty sure I’m over 80% which would still give me an A. I’m getting to the point where I don’t really care about the grades that much anymore, luckily there are only two more classes left before I can graduate with my Associates. I’m preparing for the Arts & Humanities final in the next few days, then I’ll enroll in my last course, biology. Or chemistry. Not sure yet. I guess I’ll take whichever has the cheaper textbooks.

A couple months ago John, his mom, and his sister drove down to Willcox and brought back lots of apples, pickles, etc. While John made jar after jar of pickled cucumbers and bell peppers, I ended up slicing over 50 pounds of apples with – you guessed it – the mandolin slicer in small batches for drying.

John loves snacking on these apple rings so much that we decided to get more apples. Instead of driving to Willcox he found a Sprouts store that had apples on sale, organic apples usually run over $2 a pound, the ones he found there were only $0.6 to $0.8, some organic, some conventional, and he bought several kinds. I pulled out the mandolin again and got to work, the dehydrator has been humming night and day. Maybe I’ll be done by next weekend.

Another case of something that seemed to always work and now all of a sudden doesn’t. I have a function loadSomething, that when clicked, does only:

location.href = ‘someurl.cfm’;

And it worked fine in FF but not in IE (6). So, after a few minutes of Googling I found out that you can solve the problem by adding

window.event.returnValue=false;

behind the redirect. Now it works in IE, too. Go figure!

I don’t have a lot of friends and I don’t really socialize that much and that is fine. We have a few friends that we talk to or meet with every once in a while. Today, after I got home, for example, I finally caught our friend Mark online who lives in LA. It was nice to chat a bit and find out that things are ok.

Later, though, when John came home, he told me he had just heard that another old friend, Shyam, passed away a couple of months ago in his sleep. How sad! We had seen him shortly before at the store, and while he looked aged, we would have never guessed his health was so frail. He is the guy on the right in the picture below, Shyam’s wife Shakuntala is on the left, Jay is in the middle.

I know this is supposed to be an AFTER work blog, but I don’t really know where else to keep track of this stuff and this might come in handy again. And I might end up changing the “life after work” tagline at some point anyway.

So, here I am trying to xmlParse an incoming datafeed with location and geocode information. However, sometimes foreign characters show up. Now, as far as I know, xmlParse is supposed to encode to UTF-8 by default and the xml data clearly is UTF-8 encoded so what is going on?

At work I couldn’t really come up with anything on Google but I just tried it again from home and, bingo! Instead of xmlParse(cfhttp.filecontent) it needed to be xmlParse(cfhttp.filecontent.toString(“UTF-8”). Apparently, cfhttp.filecontent is usually a string, but in some cases it is an object of the class ByteArrayOutputStream. The reason for that is that CFHTTP looks at the MIME type, and if it doesn’t recognize it, it returns the ByteArrayOutputStream.

Therefore, if you don’t know what you’re getting, try this (not sure why that second double quote doesn’t show):

<cfif cfhttp.filecontent.getClass() IS “class java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream”>
     <cfset xmlResult = xmlParse(cfhttp.filecontent.toString(“UTF-8”))>          
<cfelse>
     <cfset xmlResult = xmlParse(cfhttp.filecontent) />           
</cfif>

Here is my source, way better explained. Thanks, Roger!

I’ve started my lunch walkies about a month ago and really love them. I’m out for a little less than 30 minutes and cover probably a bit more than a mile. I can’t complain about the weather, of course, and I love those little moments of discovery I keep having every time I walk. Today I spotted mushrooms in a freshly watered lawn, lizards, a flock of quails, a dragonfly and a monarch butterfly.

In the beginning I was listening to music, but have since then switched to audio books which I can’t listen to while I work. I have started two books, one is a history of Germany between 1850 and 1930 and the other one is Ecce Homo by Nietzsche.