The week before Easter I landed a second job with a friend from work. He works for a company in Mesa part time, mostly remote, and they needed another Systems Admin, one that does Windows and Active Directory and stuff. I didn't even have to interview for this job. My friend just called me up when I was hiking at last Dutchman with Tio Jose and said I'm hired and wanted to know when I can start. Of course I decided after Easter would be best.
So this would be my last week only working one job. I was hesitant to get a second job because I didn't want to be away from home all the time and didn't want it ruining my three day weekends in SoCal but this one works out really well. It's a lot of work from home, work on my own hours, and when I do weekend trips or even vacation weeks I can still remote in and do my job so it doesn't hold me back one bit from visiting family. The only problem I had was that my computer was too old to do this job so I needed to upgrade. So before my Easter trip I ordered a new barebone kit on TigerDirect.
So back to Easter. The week before Easter Natalie's cousin Belkis came to visit and give us all the flu. I think it was Monday night when Adri came in the living room and said her stomach hurt then blew chunks everywhere. Natalie took her to the bathroom where she threw up again. I think she ended up throwing up seven or eight times that night. Tuesday night Natalie's sister came into town and by Wednesday morning Natalie had it too. Jasmine and I were the only healthy ones left and the plan was to leave Thursday.
Thursday I got off work at 10am just as planned and we had planned on being out the door by noon. Well we decided to hold off until Friday morning so Natalie wouldn't blow chunks on all of us in the car. So Friday morning we left for SoCal and Natalie only had to stop and blow chunks once.
Friday night we did our traditional Good Friday dinner, benotts. When we were kids we used to go to San Jose to my Aunt Peggy's house every year for Easter. One time Cassandra threw up her benott all over Jason as he sat in the bathroom combing his hair. After that she was forever known as "barf lady". We even had a song for her. Well now was my turn.
Saturday we were suppose to take family pictures. I woke up around 3 am feeling a little uneasy but I had felt that way the last couple mornings so I didn't make too much of it. By seven or eight that morning I knew that I was getting the stomach flu and we had to cancel family pictures. Not long after I filled the sink half way up with everything I had eaten the day before, including the benotts, complete with olives and pepperoni. I just couldn't let my twin be the only one to throw up her Good Friday Benotts.
This was the first time I had thrown up since Thanksgiving when I was 19, twelve years ago. It's the worst I had been sick in probably at least 15 years. I spent the entire day either in bed or on the couch and got my first real fever in over a decade. By Sunday morning I was doing better but still not great. I managed to make it to church and we even did our Easter Egg Hunt. As you can see in the pictures I put on my roller blades, we went the playground where I went to elementary school, and I hid the eggs.
Afterwards I wasn't feeling so hot again. I ate two slices of ham and had a Dr. Pepper and that was my Easter dinner. I went three days of hardly eating before we had to go back to Arizona Monday morning, leaving the stomach flu for my twin's family, who all but Jeff and the oldest girls, got it one by one 48 hours apart. At least I got better in time to drive back and I managed to be the only person that got it that only threw up once.
When I got home my new computer was waiting for me. Tuesday after work I got it all setup in two hours. I got a new ASUS board with a six core processor and 8GB of RAM. It's a huge upgrade from the one I had been using for a decade now that was barely able to view pictures and get online. I was able to put on Oracle Virtual Box and install CentOS Linux on top of that. It's a pretty sweet computer for the 300 bucks I paid for it. I can now do everything with ease. It saves me a lot of time and headache and allows me to put in extra hours every day working from home. It was an upgrade way over due. I kept putting it off waiting to build a $1,500 gamer machine even though I don't play video games anymore. Instead I spent a fraction of that and got a computer that is way more power than I even need.
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