I thought it was even more likely to be fraudulent after I saw the seller put up another instance of the same thing, the same day my auction closed. But I held out hope.

Today I got my Pump It Up USB soft pad, two Pump It UP PC games (Evolutionary-US and PREX3, FYI) and my “Complimentary Music CD” (which turned out to be the Banya Original Collection game CD), all perfect and untouched (though Banya wasn’t in the original game case).

I’m in shock. I’m in awe. I’m in ecstasy. But even in my current off-the-wall state, I have come here to report to you, my loyal readers (all two of you) that there is currently a(nother) bundle of PIU Evolutionary, PREX3, Banya, and USB softpad, with a starting bid of $97.01.

When I came to Seattle, I began working through all the doctors’ appointments that I hadn’t had while in school. I saw a doctor, a dentist, maybe some others I’m forgetting. I also heard that even if you’ve never been sexually active, you’re “supposed” to get pap smears starting at 21. So, despite my new GP telling me the medical types claiming this didn’t really know what they were talking about, I faithfully scheduled a pap smear for the week after I turned 22.

This has since come to be regarded as a very bad move.

The exam, particularly the speculum and scraping, was the most painful experience I have ever had. Forget getting my toe sliced down to the bone, the spinal tap and stitches without anesthetic. This made me understand for the first time how pain can be a motivating force in people’s lives.

Afterwards, the nurse practicioner decided that maybe I had a yeast infection, so she put me on Fluconazole. I had some pretty odd reactions to the fluconazole - because these included abdomenal pain, and because I was still having stabbing pains in the vagina a week after the horrible pap smear, I went back in for another exam. She decided to test me for STDs, kept me on the fluconazole, assured me that the tears and cuts in my vaginal wall “would heal up very well,” and pooh-poohed my concerns about possible liver damage from the meds: “That only happens to people who’ve been taking high doses for months.”

I found another gynaecologist. This one actually concurred that the vagina should heal very well, but told me I had no signs of any yeast infection, nor were there any signs noted on the paperwork from the previous gyn (!). She told me that I should be just fine, but that I “probably” had PCOD because of my long (6-week) menstrual cycles & the painfulness of the pap smear, and that if I was concerned about serious damage or possible other causes for the abdomenal pain, she would refer me for an abdomenal ultrasound. I decided this was probably a good idea, and went in for it next week.

The ultrasound wound up taking me away from work for the entire day, mostly because I took (well, surely must have taken) down the wrong building to show up to and had to be postponed by five hours since I would have been 15 minutes late. When I did get in, though, I was glad I had, because the ultrasound tech was very helpful, and told me:

1) Her first pap smear had also been very, very painful, and it had gotten better after she had become sexually active and had them a few times.

2) There were no visible signs of PCOD, save for a single “larger-than-usual-for-this-point-in-menstrual-cycle” ovarian cyst.

3) The liver seemed like it might have suffered a little trauma (unusual blood flow, apparently?), but that it was seemingly fine. It’s interesting to note that I didn’t even mention to them that I’d been placed on a liver-damaging medication - they spontaneously decided my liver was worth looking it.

Fast forward to today, half a week later. I was in training from 9:00-4:30, and by the time I got home about 5:15, there was a message on my voicemail from the gynaecologist. “We need you to call us back to discuss your test results.” Unfortunately, they close at 5:00. On the up side, the on-call doctor was kind enough to call me back within a couple of minutes of my paging him; on the down side, he couldn’t actually help me, I would “just have to call back tomorrow morning.”

Unfortunately, you don’t get “the call” if your test results are *good.* I’ve narrowed it down to the following options:

• PCOD or interstitial cystitis
• Endometriosis
• Worms
• Positive STD result from one or more of the tests
• HPV (? - did they test for HPV?)
• Pelvic damage from exam (or preexisting)
• Intestinal defect

Probably the *best* possibility is that I somehow managed to contract intestinal worms, maybe by failing to wash my hands after using a public restroom - because we all know how fond I am of public restrooms.

The best plausible possibiliy is that there was a false positive on one of the STD tests. This would probably require further testing and perhaps disclosing the names of my past sexual partners so they can be harassed (all 1 of them).

Next best is endometriosis. Even if I don’t actually have it, I’ll need to go in for a vaginal ultrasound, which will involve more shoving large devices into my vagina. It just goes downhill from there.

And thus, the fact that I am sleepless and anxious enough to try to kill time by writing obscenely mundane, detail-focused blog posts should make perfect sense to you now. I was hoping I might be able to sleep because I’m fairly sick (cold? flu? mono? MSNMessengerItis?), but no such luck for now.

The final irony: the trainer ended today’s session by exhorting us to “get plenty of sleep tonight,” because tomorrow’s session was going to be “exhausting.” I just pray I manage to reach them in the morning *before* class starts, or I’ll not only be clinging to consciousness, I’ll be clinging to sanity.

So I’m breaking the retrospective into multiple bits and writing/posting them from time to time, interspersed with any new commentary (read: whenever I feel like it).

P.S.: Pop’n and kool-aid do not mix.

There are overpriced copies of PNM 1 & 2 (PS1) which might be nice if you’re desperate.

There are copies of GFDM:V2 and GFDM:MPG for PS2. There are always copies of those up, of course, but the difference is that these actually have starting bids of $6 ($12 shipped). Good games, so if you don’t have them, consider picking them up.

That’s pretty much it. Well, that was fun and pointless. Until next time!

Mind, it’s never done this to messages from other corporations and their contractors. Even other potential employers. Just Microsoft. (Though it has apparently failed to send my outgoing messages to addresses at my alma mater.)

Intellectually, I know that this is just some strange bug, but it’s hard to tell that to my sense of pattern recognition. Why do you do this, GMail? You have to admit that it doesn’t look good for your creators. “Don’t be evil,” my foot. I bet that lasted in the register of cute ideas as long as Clippy did, huh?

Can I point out, for the umpteenth smug time, that I’m really glad I’m not going to work at Google? I mean no disrespect, but I prefer products that occasionally leave beta.

Now I just have to find an alternative provider for personal e-mail services. Wait, I’ve been through this before…

The problem is, I’m playing a game of Werewolf with a bunch of people I’ve never played Werewolf with before. This is not conducive to actually doing anything intelligent during the game.

___

I still haven’t heard from relocation. For that matter, I haven’t heard from the background check people. Please excuse me while I go crazy.

___

Oh, yeah, and I haven’t found anything for my dad for Father’s Day, either. (Except a card.)

I fail at life.

Anyway, I figured I might as well start linking stuff.

Admire the virtually nonexistent scores!

They divided my gift as I instructed them to.

I’m happy with this - it means I can still donate money to the parts of the school (i.e., faculty) that do so much, without worrying that it will get filched by the parts (i.e., administrators) that don’t.

So, welcome to the first ever semiweekly Bemani eBay digest post, wherein I randomly pull out the things that are rare/reasonably priced and blather about them uncomfortably.

The coolest thing this week is probably the full set of Keyboardmania gear with starting bids of $0.01 each. In other Super Session news, there’s also one of those cute little keychain GuitarFreaks games if you’re into that sort of thing.

Next up is the Domestic DDR pile. As usual, all US DDR games are plentiful. As is not usual, this seems to be a good week for DDR: Disney Mix - there’s one here as well as the one here that I mentioned a bit ago.

Beatmania: there are a couple of CDs for the actual arcade games - meant to be popped into that JAMMA setup you surely have lying around. I wouldn’t mention this except that one of them is Beatmania III, which I always seem to have difficulty explaining to people. (”No, really, there was one with a pedal!” “Sure there was…”) There are also a few (5key) 3rd mixes, 4th mixes, etc.

Import DDR: eh, someone has DDRMAX2 and EXTREME JP package up for sale. Good deal if you don’t have either already, since they’re great games.

Pop’n Music: two full sets worth of the Dreamcast games, ending in two and four days, and a non-BH Pop’n 10 for $30.

And I almost forgot to mention this week’s Para Para Paradise firesale. Most game/controller sets are up for $75-80, down from a standard price of $100ish.

Here’s this guy who’s done the layout component of a generic theme and uploaded it, allowing us to just fill in the graphics we want.

Here’s the official guide to writing themes.

Here’s the set of themes kept on file at WordPress. By the way, the one I’m adapting for Happy Sky is called JustBlue - it should be near the top in that display.

Post to be updated as more links reveal themselves to me.