I figured out what was giving me the shits so bad earlier this week. Maltitol.

See, when the candy company makes sugar-free candy, they have to put something in instead, right? Sometimes it’s aspartame, sometimes it’s Splenda, sometimes it’s sugar alcohol, and sometimes it’s maltitol.

Turns out, maltitol has a laxative effect. Which is putting it mildly since, for me, it has more of a Montezuma’s Revenge bent. I ate a candy bar with maltitol in it at the hockey game last night (which was AWESOME, by the way) and about 20 minutes later I was making a break for the bathroom. I almost didn’t make it home in the car, either. Terrible, terrible, terrible.

So now I have to figure out what kinds of sugar-free treats I can eat that don’t have maltitol in them. I think I found some jelly beans, but I’ll have to check the package again to be sure.

I woke up this morning at 2:00a and couldn’t go back to sleep, so after laying in bed for two hours staring at the ceiling I decided to get up.

I sat in the living room, reading various periodicals that have been piling up for months, finally getting to the Hollywood gossip folks crave. My tiny cat helped me read by burying her face in my neck under my chin and slobbering while she kneaded (no claws = safe). She does that every once in a while and I’m not sure why, but it’s damn funny.

Jenn got up at her usual 6:00a and came out to tell me it was time to get ready for work. I hopped in the shower, cranked up the heat, and stood there, unmoving, for probably 20 minutes. There’s something about a hot shower when you’re sick.

Eventually I got my clothes on, grabbed my bag, and headed out the door. On the way to work I stopped at the store to get some DayQuil, decongestants, and Pepto-Bismol. It was a hard drive because I was tired, but I took a 15 minute snooze in the store’s parking lot and felt at least a little better.

And now I’m at work, working on the product demo project that I’ve been assigned to. I took some time yesterday and this morning to do a bit of an overhaul on it because I was developing quickly and not providing a very good back-end design. I’ve now entirely separated the business logic from the UI so maybe sometime they’ll be able to reuse my UI in a more robust demo.

My throat is dry, my sinuses are clogged, I’m tired and achy. Yeah, I’m sick. It really sucks, too, because I was supposed to get my allergy shot today but you can’t go in when you’re sick, so maybe Friday.

I have a 3:00p - 4:00p meeting today… I think I’m going home right after that.

I never thought I’d say it, but I am so sick of cheese it’s hard to even put into words. I’ve had more eggs, cheese, and meat this weekend than I care to describe, and I’m only five days into this stupid Atkins bullshit.

Then again, according to the scale this morning, I’ve already lost six pounds, so I can’t say it’s not working.

I sat up from 2:20a to 3:10a today on the toilet shitting my guts out. Every time I thought I was done, more showed up. I have gas and I’m afraid to fart because I may well blow my pants full. Somehow I think it’s my digestive tract revolting against my new diet.

Oh, and I think I’m getting sick - my nose is all plugged up and my throat is really dry regardless of the amount of liquid I drink.

Sigh. What I wouldn’t give for a piece of toast right now.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I have no energy. No carbs = no fuel, baby. I wake up tired, I run through the day tired, and I get home tired. I woke up Sunday morning at 9:00a or so and by 11:30a I was ready for a nap. Seriously. I’m dead on my feet right now, too.

If Dr. Atkins wasn’t already dead, I’d fucking kill him myself.

Jenn and I rented the game Starsky & Hutch for PS2 this weekend, which is cool because one person drives the car while the other person shoots out the window. Cooperative two-player game, right? Well, then we ran into the problem where you can’t shoot very well using the standard controller because it’s too hard to control the crosshairs. But the game supports a steering wheel and a light gun controller…

…So I went to the mall and bought Time Crisis 2 with the Guncon 2 light gun controller. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on my big TV, so I had to take it into the bedroom to play on the smaller one. Bah. They need to fix that shit.

Either way, now we can get about halfway through Starsky & Hutch before it gets too hard. The Time Crisis 2 game is the bomb, though, so if you have a PS2, you definitely need to get it.

I’ve run into my first major issue with Windows Product Activation, and as far as I’m concerned, this is fucking ridiculous.

I took the last two days to build up my new desktop workstation here at work. I installed everything, configured everything, set everything up just so. Worked great.

After all that, I was given a larger hard drive to install. Cool, right? So I ghosted my existing installation, swapped drives, and put the ghosted image onto the new drive. Done.

Boot up, log in, and… Windows can’t validate my license. My volume license that shouldn’t need validating.

I’m running a repair on the installation right now to see if that fixes it. If it doesn’t, well… I guess I’ve got a project for the weekend. I can’t allocate any more time to it next week, and I need this thing running by Monday.

Fucking hell.

I’ve posted the pictures for the Enchanted Forest trip in the MildPeril Gallery. Check them out!