Month: April 2011

Did I Have A Mini Stroke?

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily Blog2 Comments

Ok I know someone is going to call me a hypochondriac but this happened to me last night and I want to know what happened to me.  I might have had a mini stroke, at least that’s what someone told me.

Last night I was watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on SyFy channel and I sneezed.  It wasn’t a small sneeze, it was one of those sneezes where you scream AAAAAACHOO nearly at the top of your lungs.  Right when I sneezed, my left ear popped.  You know how when you are driving for a long time going uphill and through mountains and your ears start feeling clogged up?  It was like that but in my left ear and worse than driving uphill.

I thought it would stop and my ear would pop back to normal but it didn’t.  Everything around me started spinning so I sat up.  I was looking at my desk chair and it was just spinning out of control, but it wasn’t the chair, it was my eyes, I could feel them spinning.

I sat there on the edge of my bed waiting for it to stop, thinking “what am I going to do if this doesn’t stop?”  I started yelling cuss words, although that didn’t make it stop lol.

Gradually the spinning started to slow and my ear slowly started going down, you know like how a balloon deflates from a tiny microscopic hole?  It went on for about 5 minutes or so.  I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t move past sitting up because my balance was totally off.  You know, the inner ear thing.  It even took me a couple of minutes to sit up because of my balance.  I can’t imagine if I had to get up, I’d probably walk in circles and not get any where.

So, what was that?  Did I have a mini stroke or what?

My House in Lord of the Rings Online

On By Michel McDonaldIn Games, LOTRO2 Comments

I have been having so much fun playing my hobbit in Lord of the Rings Online the last couple of weeks.  I even bought a house for 1 Gold.  Although, I had to get my farming skill up to the highest it could get in order to make the money to buy the house but it was fun to farm.  It really didn’t cost me that much to farm and I didn’t have to kill anything to get any of the ingredients either (which is another form of farming).

So my house is a standard house with 2 rooms, you can see the main picture has me standing in front of the house then the 2 little pictures of the living room and bedroom.  No need for a kitchen or a bathroom since I would use my cooking skill just standing anywhere and video game characters have no reason to use the toilet, this isn’t the Sims after all.

I have to keep paying the game 50 silver a week to maintain the house but it doesn’t take that long to make 50 silver, actually it’s very easy and I have plenty of it.  I can even pay 5 weeks in advance so if I know I’m going to be away from the game for long periods of time, I won’t have to worry about my house being abandoned and having everything in my chest auctioned off.

The only point to having a house is for the extra storage, the chest.  Also you get a discount on the merchants in the zone that the houses are in.  Other than that it’s purely for show.  It’s fun to have and to decorate and to invite your friends over to look at.

One of the issues that I have with this game is that when I exit in a well populated area then when I get back in the game, all of those graphics make the game crash.  So if I log in to the game in my house then there aren’t all of those graphics to crash me.  I can log in, leave the house and go play.  So that’s a very good advantage of having a house, for me anyway.

DUI Check Point

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

It’s Friday and it’s also April fool’s day so you know people are going partying tonight to celebrate… er um… pranks?  We were on our way to Hometown Buffet tonight with a family friend of ours and we happened to get trapped in a DUI check point.

There were traffic cones in front of 2 of the neighborhoods so you couldn’t turn into them to get out of the trap, you were forced to go ahead.  It wasn’t clear that it was a DUI check point right away when there was opportunity to turn into the AM PM, Taco Bell parking lot or the freeway so from a distance it just looked like there was construction.

So there was just 1 lane and then all of a sudden it turns into 2 lanes, there is a police officer with a stop sign signaling for people to go into the right lane with another stop sign or allowing them to go on past the check point.  They were using the church parking lot as their mini police department and it was full of cars too.

We were lucky to have been let go and not be checked because that definitely would have ruined our night lol.  I guess they profiled us because Darrin didn’t look young and he was wearing a dress shirt and a tie.  I think if he were wearing a regular t-shirt like I was and if he were a bit disheveled he might have been chosen to get checked.

As we were passing we could see people in handcuffs, and that was only at 6:50pm.  Imagine what may have happened later tonight.  As we were coming home we saw that people were still being arrested and they were towing cars.

It’s funny, I have never in my life gone through a DUI check point, granted I don’t drive but still, even as a passenger I’ve never been through one.  In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever seen a DUI check point.  It was a shock to see there were so many people being stopped and how many cars that were sent to the church parking lot.  You know that if you got sent to the parking lot you are in trouble.

So is this a lesson for people?  Don’t drink and drive, and that’s not an April Fool’s joke either.