Running into all sorts of people today.

On the way to work, I ran into a guy I sort of know. He’s an account manager at a firm that makes legal copies and he has a band called Pillowfight and they’re playing on Friday. Then, on the way home, I saw a woman who was in my bioinformatics class (and who had my co-worker’s mom on her thesis committee). Finally, at Fred Meyer’s (a local grocery chain owned by Kroger’s) I saw the old volunteer outreach coordinator from Cascade AIDS project.

Funny how I was trying to prevent something that diminished white blood cell counts and now I have too many white blood cells. OK, so it’s not so funny. Perhaps it’s ironic. I haven’t quite decided.

Nobody probably noticed.

I didn’t post anything yesterday because, what did I do? Played with my computer, trying to get it to run software to program little tiny computers like the ones I used to design at Mitsubishi Semiconductor. The ones used in VCRs to blink the display “12:00.”

Anyway, not much happened then, or tonight. Went to the gym and it was fairly full. Not a surprise, since it’s Monday and also because it was raining fairly hard. Finally, it’s raining in Oregon.

I think THEY are doing Speed Dating again tomorrow (they being my friend Ted, actually) and I enjoyed myself at the first one. However, I also think that the only thing that will happen if I go to Speed Dating is that I’ll end up $40 poorer. Sure, I’ll get to meet a bunch of new people, but I’ll never see them again. What’s the point in that? I might as well just burn the $40 and watch TV. Maybe I should try to sign up for eHarmony and see if I get a rejection letter like my friend Ben did.

I finished the radio thingy.

I haven’t really tried it out, which means I really haven’t tried talking to anyone yet. Just hooked it all up and listened to a bunch of people from all over the US. Then I started playing with the computer instead.

Then I watched a bunch of weird cartoons on the Cartoon Network. I’ve always liked cartoons and comic books (just ask my sister) and there’s plenty of weird ones they play on Saturdays. Several are from Japan, and I think they don’t make any sense in the original Japanese. They add some story when they translate it to English, and that’s why you see cartoons like Speed Racer where they’re talking as fast as they can so they can fit in the explanation.

Oh, well. More computer tomfoolery tomorrow.

I can’t believe you’re reading this.

Especially since it’s Friday, and if you’re bored enough to read this then you’ve probably been bored enough to read this in the past and know that Fridays are boring gym nights and I’m also building this ham radio kit.

(To those in the know, I’ve decided that while I’m a 100W kind of guy, building 100W radios and tuners is the pits. QRO is fun for the big parts, and QRP is fun because everything can be manageably small. 100W is about the point where things aren’t big enough to need a hammer for all the parts but it takes some imaginitive bending and chiseling to get things done right.)

Anyway, work is work and of course the most interesting part of the day was probably the gym. The weird part is that I finally talked to the woman who most resembles my ex. That sort of frightens me. She looks like my ex but much more buff. She was having trouble with her iPod shuffle and I suggested that she take it back and get one that works. The weird thing is another woman came in who looked like someone else I went out with in the near past and — you probably knew this — I haven’t gone out with that many women.

And as you’ve guessed, I worked on my radio.

OK, time to see if I can catch up on my sleep.

Time to hide in the basement.

I thought I spent a lot of time in the basement tonight, putting together more ham radio stuff, but I realized that I was limited by my “need” to watch Joey and Dragon Ball: GT. So I thought I was slowing down on the building pace but I only put in a couple of hours. (In the past, I represented the US in an International electronic assembly competition. I don’t remember how well I did, and think I might have come in dead last, but I do know I didn’t win.) In any case, I was good at this at some point, good enough to be sent to Linz, Austria.

Ah, well. Now that I think of it, I was a day late and a dollar short there, too.

Time to try to get some sleep. There’s a Japanese saying about springtime and sleeping like you were dead or something (which doesn’t sound all that great when you say it in translation) but I’ve been having troubles getting up lately. This morning I woke up in a panic, thinking it was mid-morning and I was late for work. My alarm hadn’t gone off yet. In any case, I’m probably going to end up screwing around until late and then drag into work. It’s just the way things are.

More fun at the gym.

So the friendly girl at the desk is off for a semester in Italy, so now we’re stuck with surly. Actually, that’s not true, but Jenny was the friendliest one. I can’t remember the name of the thin blonde woman at the desk, but she’s a knitter (made a keyhole scarf) and so I suppose that’s worth something to someone. I usually walk by Lint on the way home, and it probably matters to them.

I got another ham radio kit today, so now I have something else to do besides ruining my sister’s blog. Or at least the computer it runs on.

Waiting game.

So we stayed late at work watching one of my co-workers play a passive-aggressive game of delaying the rest of us. I don’t deal with that crap very well, so I ignored it. Made me late for the gym.

Well, late for the gym isn’t such a bad thing any more. A lot of the people seem downright surly. The new woman “at the door” doesn’t even care if you show her your membership thingamabob. She’s off in her own world and doesn’t care. She’s got that certain-Asian-woman “treat me like a princess you dumb men” thing going on. Of course, Asian guys never get along well with those kind of women because we don’t fall into their definition of prey. They’re usually looking for the white boys with yellow fever.

Happy Birthday Ma!

I got her what she wanted for Christmas, too, lottery scratch tickets. Well, what she really wanted was WINNING scratch lottery tickets, but that’s kind of hard to guarantee. I don’t know what I did the rest of the day. It took all day, whatever it was.

Yay, dinner party.

So I went to my friend Kim’s house and her husband Raffaele makes great pasta. Kim and I always lead each other onto misadventures involving too much drinking but I think I was OK this time. I brought two bottles of wine from Bishop Creek and two half-cases of beer and ended up bringing all the beer home with me. And this time the beer was still in the bottles. Lots off different kinds of grappa with dessert including lemon and milk grappas which I don’t thing are sold in this country.

And of course the company was great. I missed watching “The Incredibles” with Kim’s niece (the daughter of a high school friend, proving Portland is too small once again) but that’s OK.

So the new hay fever medicine works.

I ran out of Allegra, so I went with Claritin. Actually, I went with the over-the-counter version of Claritin, loratadine. It works great on my symptoms, better than the Allegra, but it makes me feel a little dopey. I’m dopey enough as it is, thank you very much.

So I made some crack about the StairMaster at the gym. Man, there are some humorless people there. And annoying ones, too, getting in the way of the equipment and being brusque. All the friendly ones must not work out on Friday nights.

I think I may have to start risking the jay-walking fine again. In downtown, you can either violate the traffic laws by waiting for a clear spot and crossing, or you can take your life in your hands by waiting for a “Walk” sign and dodge the cars that try to run you over as they make turns. There’s been a recent crackdown on jaywalking and they’re handing out $97 tickets so I’ve been doing the legal and dangerous crossings lately. But I almost was hit three times on the way to work. It’s not worth it. I think I’m going to cross when it’s safe.

All day, all night, all computer.

After sitting in front of a computer all day, I had to come home to work on some computer stuff. Nothing is quite complete, so I can imagine doing this again all weekend. I’m slowly getting things back on the “backup” bandwagon so I don’t lose any of the data off my computers. We’ll see how far I get with that.