Odds 'n' Ends

 My doctor is 95% certain I have strep throat. (Still waiting for culture results.) Damn.  I should only be contagious for another 24 hours, and the fever has abated, but I still feel awful. I have not had strep in years, I have no idea where I got it, and I just hope I didn't give it to anyone in the past week.  Note to self:  next time you might not want to wait a day to contact your doctor when your temp does not go below 102.5 in 12 hours, in spite of pumping yourself with Tylenol and/or Nyquil. And hitting an impervious to drugs 103 with a very sore neck is definitely a bad sign.

The small bright side in all of this is I can eat as much Ben and Jerry's as I want (which is not really all that much -- I lose my appetite when I run a fever) and not feel guilty about it, and the Rocket Scientist brought me red beans and rice from a local Cajun restaurant last night.  He also reported that a) the food is relatively cheap, b) they have a bar where I could possibly just sit and drink cokes and c) they have a big screen television where they will be showing the baseball playoffs.

Speaking of baseball, the latest attempt by teams to extort money infuriates me.  The Braves, Rays, and Giants -- the only three teams in the playoffs that anyone in this house cares about (the Giants only because they are playing the Braves) -- have all pulled their tickets from their websites.  The way to purchase playoff tickets is to pay a nonrefundable deposit on season tickets for next season.  Right.  Like the Braves' fan in the house is going to pay a deposit on season tickets for a team he actively despises.  We had been planning to splurge and get one ticket for a game during the division series -- that's not going to happen.  Likewise, were the Rays to end up in the World Series against the Giants, we were going to buy one WS ticket for the Rays' fan in the house.  Likewise, she has no intention of ever even considering buying season tickets for the Giants --- she probably dislikes them even more than he does.

Of course, given the Rays 4-0 loss to the Rangers yesterday, that latter scenario may well be moot.

Although I still feel awful, my head has cleared enough today that I did an online skills evaluation provided by the NOVA Connect Center.  I still cannot get the MS Word and Excel evaluations to run, in spite of the nice young man at the job center insisting that they should run on my Mac.  They won't run, dude. Unfortunately, I cannot go tell you this in person, yet.

So, last week I did an InDesign CS3 assessment, and a Legal Assistant Assessment, and today I did a Paralegal Skills assessment. I got 50% on the InDesign assessment, which sounds awful, until you realize that I used the program for all of about four months eighteen months ago, and the global average on the test was 51%.  I am pretty certain I could pick it up quite easily.

As far as the Legal Assistant Skills, I got an 80% (global average was 70%).  In the Paralegal Skills, I got 88% (the global average was 70%) which put me in the 90th percentile.  It's been twenty years since I looked at this stuff, and I still did well.  So, if I had to, legal-related jobs are a possibility. (I would have to renew my bar membership -- including paying back bar dues -- in order to actually practice law, which I am pretty sure I am no longer competent to do.  I wouldn't hire me to represent me, that's for sure.)

I am waiting until my head clears a little more to do the "Persuasive Writing" evaluation. 

I wish there were some way to forward these results to perspective employers and say see?  See how smart I am?

While sick I have been spending time on Facebook (along with watching old movies), and have run across a number of links I just love:  Indiana Jones loses his bid for tenure,  John Scalzi (the science fiction writer) takes down Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and, finally, an important scientific paper.  The Scalzi piece has me thinking about writing something about what literature informed my political views, but I haven't crystallized my thoughts yet.

Today, I will do job-search related work, and nap a lot. 

So, what's up in your world?