I noticed the telltale bumps of poison ivy on my left foot about a month and a half ago, but stupid me didn’t really care. It didn’t itch, surprisingly, and I always had something better to do than buy some calamine lotion and doctor it. That is, until I noticed the same bumps appearing on the lower part of my palms. On both hands. And the sides of my fingers. And this is sounding really gross, I know, and it is, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not as bad as you’re probably thinking. Don’t picture yellow ooze-coated lumps the size of M&M’s, but instead lumps about the size of sesame seeds that have no ooze whatsoever. …Wow, that’s still pretty gross. However, I was duly horrified by this and you’ll be happy to know that I’ve bought some of that Calagel stuff and have been applying it frequently to both my left foot and both my hands. My dad assures me that poison ivy can’t spread by the bumps, but only by the oil itself, so I guess I just picked this up at the same time I got it on my foot and it’s only now manifesting in bump form.

Now that I have you all appropriately disgusted, I’ll go on to say that I’m spending the weekend at my parents’ house. It’s been pleasantly relaxing so far, as I’ve just watched some Boston Legal with Mom (awesome, awesome show–Alan Shore is one sexy lawyer) and fiddled online. (You know me, always fiddling.) I have been plagued by the idea of IDEA Lab (pun intended), because it feels like I’ll never have my work for them complete. I thought I made it clear that after the summer I would no longer be working there, because I’d be back at Lexmark. There was apparently some confusion, so my work load went from a thing or two sent via email every few days to long lists of changes and problems sent daily. My boss is now sufficiently happy with it, but there was a problem in IE (as in the whole site looked wonky, but he thinks it’s a cache problem as it looked fine earlier on and I haven’t made any big layout changes). Then of course I have to actually deploy it. This involves backing up their current stuff and then being extra, extra careful with deploying just layout changes, and not copying my old copy of the content over the stuff that’s been kept updated all along in their live version. It’s all very frustrating as I thought I had finished with things on Wednesday.

My LXer redesign has also been stressing me a bit, but only because I want those guys to have the new layout ASAP, and I feel like a bum not getting to work on it this weekend. Why can I not work on it? Because my dad is a crazy zealot, dear sweet man that he is, and refuses to let me install IE (via IEs 4 Linux–a real lifesaver for the Linux-friendly web developer) on any of our boxes. I can work on the 508-compliance bit of the layout, though, so I’ll probably do that.

Then of course there’s also the stress of final grades. My physics final actually went really well yesterday but that doesn’t stop me from worrying whether I got a B (as I hope) or a C (as I fear) in the class. I already know I got an A in public speaking because I stopped by the guy’s office and picked up a copy of my final grade sheet. While I was there, he also told me that the persuasive speech I gave yesterday was “the best speech of the semester,” which tickled me so much I had to go send my parents and Todd an email saying as much. I’m a sucker for academic praise.