Panic at the Discold

Starting sometime last week, around Monday or Tuesday, I started feeling a fluttering in my chest. The feeling was the feeling you get when you are extremely nervous or when you have a lot of anxiety. I didn’t think anything of this at first because who hasn’t felt that feeling every once in a while. But it kept happening. Over and over. Several times a day. It was starting to freak me out a bit. It was almost as if I was having miniature panic attacks for no reason. But I wasn’t. My heart was beating normally. I wasn’t feeling anything else besides these bursts of fluttering several times a day. I figured I’d give it a few more days before I would make an appointment with a doctor.

Last night I finally voiced my concerns with a couple of people. My friend Trix told me to make an appointment with a doctor right away. My friend Brittney reacted a bit differently. I told her what I was feeling via IM and her response was one of shock. She was feeling the exact same thing I was. I thought this was very odd but didn’t really think anything of it. I decided to tell my mom what I was feeling and that I may need to see a doctor. As I’m telling her, her eyes get wide and she tells me she has felt the exact same thing. This was really starting to get weird. What was causing this feeling in people? Especially Brittney, who lives in Wisconsin. This is too much to be a coincidence. My mom then goes on to explain how it freaked her out at first as well but then she overheard two ladies talking about having the same exact feeling. What is going on here? Why are all these people feeling this and why haven’t I heard something about this from others? It turns out one of the ladies my mom overheard, and her husband, were feeling this and went to the doctor. The doctor told them that because St. Louis has had such a warm winter with temperatures well above the norm, our bodies didn’t know how to react last week when the temperature dropped to zero. I mean, we’ve had weather in the 50’s, 60’s and even 70’s when it should be in the 20’s and 30’s. As it so happens, the feeling started when the cold hit, but I would have never attributed it to the weather. My friend that lives in Wisconsin hasn’t had a warm winter. But the temperatures have been record lows, so I would assume it can do the same as it did to me.

I’m going to keep monitoring just to make sure it’s nothing else, but a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders when I found out others were having the feeling and that it was all caused by the weather. Very strange.

Writer’s Block

I’ve not posted anything in a while. I just haven’t had much to write about and when I have had a topic I’d begin to write but half way through I’d stop not knowing how to end the post. Part of the reason for the block has to be having a busy weekend. While it was a 5 day weekend, I stayed busy reading the new Dean Koontz book, watching The Wire, and just hanging out. I also haven’t had anything to write about. Nothing eventful has really happened lately and I’ve been out of touch with the news of the world a bit. One thing has happened that I’ve heard about. Apparently Charter and KMOV have reached a settlement. I’m betting Charter had to come to some agreement for payment, which I still think is just wrong, but oh well, what can you do? Anyway, hopefully the writer’s block will go away and I’ll have something more to say soon.

Pieces of Shep

Inspired by my friend Trix, I decided to let you, my loyal reader(s) in on some pieces of me that you might not know.

I collect the board game Monopoly.  I’ve done this for several years.  I have only purchased 1 of the 20+ versions of the board game I have.  I didn’t intend to start collecting them.  It is my favorite game and one year for Christmas I received 3 or 4 versions from various family members.  Since then, I’ve been getting them on a regular basis as gifts.  My favorite has to be the St. Louis Cardinals version or the Classic version that comes in a wood box.  The only one I purchased for myself was an edition from 1935, which is the first year they were mass-produced by a game manufacturing company.

I have a BSEd in History but I work as a web developer.  Finding a job teaching high school social studies is hard as it is an overpopulated field.  Will I go back to teaching?  I’m not quite sure yet.  I also work part time as a teacher for Sylvan Learning Center.

The worst job I ever had was working at my family’s restaurant. It was the summer before my freshman year of high school.  Most of the time I did maintenance jobs around the building.  This was not an easy task on a building that was built before the Civil War.  When I wasn’t in the blistering heat (that was a hot summer!) doing maintenance, I was in the kitchen either cutting strawberries or wrapping potatoes in foil.  Fun stuff, I know.

I love the TV show Saved by the Bell.  Yeah, if you read this blog, you already know that.  It’s a guilty pleasure of mine and reminds me of a much simpler time.

The only movie to ever scare me as a kid was The Exorcist.  That movie was ahead of its time.

I wish I was still in college.  I love the college environment and would love to go back.  I also love learning and would love to take all the classes I wanted to while I was in school but didn’t have the time to take them.  I would also love to teach at the collegiate level.  I’d need to get my PhD in order to be a professor in history though, and I don’t have the time or the money for that right now.  I don’t even have the time or money to start my Master’s.  Some day…

Well, there you have it.  Some things about me you might not have known.  I hope you learned a little more about me and now realize I’m more awesome than you once thought. ;)

Desktop Mail Clients

With the advancements in webmail, I’ve never seen the need for desktop mail clients. I mean, I understand the need for Outlook, or a similar mail client, for work email where you’re constantly sending and receiving email and integrating it with calendars and tasks, but for personal email for accounts at Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail, I never quite understood it. The interfaces of those clients are great and I don’t know why someone would choose a mail client instead of the webmail interface. With the ability to add extensions to Firefox to notify you of new mail, you don’t even have to login to check to see if you have new mail. The major webmail services tend to offer all the features you want from a mail client built in to the web interface. That being said, I’ve decided to give the desktop client another go.

For one of my websites I’ve decided to use my host’s email. Instead of constantly logging in to my host’s webmail system, I decided to set up the account in Thunderbird. I’ve never had anything against Thunderbird, and I think it’s a great app, but like I said, if you’re using something like Gmail, I never saw the point. Well, I’ve been using it for a couple weeks and it’s fine. I don’t get much mail on that account so my opinion is mostly neutral. I have decided to add my Gmail account to Thunderbird to give it a go. One reason for this was because Gmail has been throwing me a lot of errors lately when I try to do something and I wind up having to close the window or tab and open Gmail back up. I won’t need to do that with Thunderbird. The setup is easy and Google provides perfect instructions for optimal integration with Thunderbird. I’m still not sure I see the point. Gmail is just as easy to access via my Gmail notifier or Google Talk, so I don’t save any time. I do kind of miss the threaded view of Gmail, but that’s not a deal breaker for me. Will I stick with it? I’m not sure. I’ll try it for a couple weeks but I have a feeling I’ll be going back to regular Gmail.