So apparently mom now has a blog. Which is an interesting occurrence since she has difficulty accessing her email from any machine but the one at home. Upon creating it, Erin immediately broke in and made a post.

Erin, Sawyer, Mollie and I went up to Rexburg from Friday evening to Saturday night. We left Provo around 6, and arrived at the Days Inn at about 11. We stopped in Pocatello for dinner at Dairy Queen; Mollie's choice. The food was pretty crappy, but the best part was when Mollie asked for sauce to go with Erin's chicken fingers meal -- that costs extra. How much extra? we don't know, that was all the girl said. I guess there must be some kind of massive sauce shortage or something that they have to charge extra for it.

The purpose of the trip was to see Megan perform with the symphony orchestra in their annual Halloween concert. It was fun, though I would have preferred a bit less random talking between songs. The first song was played with a strobe light flashing the entire time (the only light in the room). Now strobe lights can be fun and all; but they get a little obnoxious after about 2 minutes straight. I started playing a game where I'd tried to blink in syncopation with the strobe light so that my eyes would miss the light and be happy to be just sitting in a dark room; or to blink during the dark so that it seemed like the room was always lit. I got it to work a couple of times, but it's trickier than you think.

After the performance we went to dinner at Applebee's with Megan, her boyfriend, Chad, and his younger brother. The most enjoyable part of the meal was watching one of the waiters tie balloons to the aprons of other wait-staff while they weren't paying attention. Then they'd be walking around the restaurant with balloon in tow.

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FreeRice.com:
For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice to a hungry person through an international aid agency.

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Here's a fun image I created in the GIMP today. I've been playing with grayscale work trying to come up with some more images that we can hang in our living room to go along with the current set of grayscale / single-tone pictures we have.



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In other news: TheBackwardsChef.com is up and running again.

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Thursday morning I woke up with a mildly sore throat. It wasn't much of a big deal so I went to work/school as usual. I got home around 5 that evening and crashed hard. Within an hour my mildly sore throat turned into a severely swollen and sore throat, a headache, muscle aches, joint pain. My lymph glands (apparently they're not referred to as 'nodes' anymore) in my neck were swollen, and my tonsils were gimongous, with white patches on the left side. The swelling was so bad that it was excruciatingly painful to swallow my own spit. Forget about eating and drinking, from Thursday night to Sunday afternoon I forced down the equivalent of about 1 normal meal. I went to the store and bought menthol-eucalyptus throat lozenges, chloraseptic spray, and cold syrup. All of which did absolutely nothing to help.
Sunday morning I woke up about 5 am unable to 'sleep' anymore (every time my body tried to swallow my spit I'd wake up from the pain). I called the health insurance company to get authorization to go to an Urgent Care clinic, but their service reps don't work on Sundays. So instead I called their nurse hot-line and she told me to go an Urgent Care facility to get looked at and then notify the insurance company Monday (oh, I'm going to do that right now; hmm, apparently I don't need to notify them of going to an Urgent Care facility). So I waited until the Urgent Care facility in Orem opened at 8 and went to get looked at. The rapid strep test came back negative, so there was nothing she could really do for me. She did give me a prescription for "magic mouthwash" which is a cocktail of benadryl, maalox, and lidocaine. It was supposed to coat and numb the irritated areas of my throat, by had absolutely no effect.
Sunday afternoon while watching the afternoon session of conference one my lymph glands started to hurt, so I decided to try to choke down some Ibuprofen for the pain. Much to my surprise the Ibuprofen not only took the edge off the pain, it also reduced the swelling so far that I was able to eat a real meal, including nacho chips! So, since then I've been living off of ~400mg of Ibuprofen every 3-4 hours. It takes me down from "excruciatingly painful" to "moderately uncomfortable", or maybe that's just because I've already spent 4 days miserable with very little food.
Today the Ibuprofen doesn't seem to be quite as effective, I may have to up my dosage.

I know at least 2 other people with the same symptoms, it's awful.

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