my allergy is pretty mild, i just get sick to my stomach, feel hot, feel a little short of breath and then after cramping and stuff subsides (after dosing myself with pepcid or something) i feel like my innards are bruised for around a week after. it’s not pleasant, but accidental exposure has yet to kill me or anything. it took a long while for me to get used to checking labels for eggs, and realizing that in a lot of cases, when a company prints food allergies, they will leave eggs out of the bolded text. that means i have to actually read whole ingredient statements to ensure i’m not going to unwittingly eat some eggy deliciousness and feel like death for a few days.

there is an upshot to this particular food allergy though- a *lot* of the stuff with egg ingredients in it is really unhealthy. things like hot pockets, mayonnaise, salad dressings, pastries, doughnuts, lots of pies, quiche, most everything served at denny’s, pancakes, waffles, candy bars with nougat, TONS of stuff. by being forced to cut egg ingredients out of my diet, my diet improved a lot, i’ve lost a lot of weight and i do generally just feel better. i think that last part is twofold – one is obvious, no eggs in my diet, i feel less shitty. the other part is that i eat fewer shitty things, so my body is happy more often.

aside from the obvious, it also has some negative factors to it as well. i’ve never been a huge dining out kind of person, but the lack of allergen disclosures from many restaurants, and unwillingness for lots of bigger places to disclose whole ingredient lists makes me too nervous to want to eat at any more than a few trusted places. state and local governments all over the country have been worrying about trans fats (which very few companies still use as an additive anyway due to all the negative press) outright banning their use, but totally neglecting encouraging restaurants to disclose common food allergen ingredients on menus or in other easily visible places. this is also irritating as all hell to me, and i’m sure to others with allergies significantly more severe than mine (nut allergies especially, since those seem to cause analphylaxis reactions pretty frequently…)

on saturday, catherine and i went to jason’s deli. i’m not a huuuge fan of jason’s, but i do like some of the things they serve, especially the vegetarian sandwiches and whatnot. i ordered some zucchini grilled panini type sandwich on whole wheat bread because it sounded awesome. ordinarily, i’d consult my phone and look up their allergen chart and double-check that it’s safe. reading what they stated was on the sandwich – red pepper hummus, muenster cheese, zucchini, tomatoes, i figured i’d be alright and didn’t bother to look. when our food arrived at our table, i had a moment of apprehension and consulted the allergen chart on my phone. it indicated eggs as an ingredient for this particular meal. i was dumbfounded and annoyed. i investigated further and noticed that the bread of all things was the culprit.

in all the years catherine and i have been grocery shopping to avoid egg ingredients, we only really encountered eggs in bread a handful of times:

- gluten free bread (duh, eggs are a binder here)

- sweet bread (duh again)

- croissants and other flaky breads (duh once more)

so ultimately, by dumb luck, i happened to check jason’s allergen guide, only to find out that i could have made myself sick eating a sandwich that seemed totally innocent and free of eggy-ingredients.

yup. food allergies suck.

2011 went by way too fast. we had some good stuff and some bad stuff going on, just like always. more good stuff than bad, though. we were able to keep our house, cadie’s dad kicked cancer in the nuts, ~250 sq mi of my favorite part of NM went up in smoke, i acquired a couple new toys and i started an IT and infosec consulting business.

in other news, i deleted my facebook account because i was tired enough of it to do it finally. cadie had successfully thwarted my attempts to delete it over the years, but i just couldn’t rationalize trying to keep up with it. i wasn’t getting much out of it anymore. i only really interacted with a handful of people, most of whom i talk to or interact with on a regular basis without facebook. so, for now, you can still find me at ze twittar and now on google+. follow / add me on either if you want.

Also, can’t really say I’m surprised that the federal government has yet to publish this data in a human-readable format. (i.e., a way that anyone who *isn’t* a biophysicist could read). Next time I fly, I might have to stuff some radiation exposure badges in my pants or something to see how much I’m exposed to.

so i’d been thinking. i wanted to learn python, i own several python books, but i’ve been having a hard time getting in to it. i’ve got javascript experience from working with palm’s PDK and mojo framework for webos, and while i enjoy it, i don’t have a new device running a more modern version of webos than i have on my pre, and getting a device that doesn’t support t-mobile’s 3g/AWS freqs is out of the question.

what i’ve decided to do instead is pick up a “bricked” (i.e. failed update rendered it bootless) windows phone 7 device. in this case, it’s a t-mobile HD7. i plan on trying to get into .NET, XNA and silverlight to try and learn to build applications for this platform. i watched a few different auctions on ebay, hoping to snag one for real cheap and ended up paying around $30 for a “bricked” HD7 like new in box. coupling this with my ccna/ccnp studies and my regular off-work activities is helping me feel a bit more balanced and a bit less “tired” of everything.

since november, we’ve been waiting to hear anything from the legal representation retained by the title insurance company on our behalf. there was a hearing in our favor on 3/2, a court order issued on 3/16, which took effect on 3/31. so, bearing that in mind, the house is actually ours now, which is a good thing. not so good, though is that there could be an action in another court that could call the court order into question. however, this does mean that we can finally finish painting and continue about the business of making the house our home.

there’s no incentive to exceed expectations, nor is there much encouragement to do anything outside of a narrow subset of repetitive duties. infrequently, there are short bursts of frenzied, thought-provoking stuff to do, but I enjoy the break from mind-numbing dullness so much that I finish or fix things way too quickly.

being hired in part for a skillset I’ve yet to be able to leverage has also done its part to make me feel like my mind is falling into disuse. I’ve found that work is such a demotivator that I rarely have any drive to do anything, even at home.

I really need a change, or I’m going to go insane.

i got married at the end of last year for tax purposes. we’re always practical when it comes to our relationship, and that practicality extended into tax benefits for 2010+, and since we own a home together, we also figured it would be significantly easier to file stuff and do things as a married couple.

there hasn’t been much interesting/awesome music released this year, so i’m happy that the bad wife is so awesome. it’s just as visceral and emotive as any of julie christmas’ other bands, with more of a focus on her vocal talents.

candor / clamor is a 7″ 45rpm ep with 2 songs, candor and..well, clamor on it. it’s short, but awesome. lots of really cool instrumentation in both tracks.