So today I figured out another reason to work out. I was reading a magazine while on the StairMaster (what else am I going to do, visualize my calories burning?) and I had a hard time holding up the copy of GQ I was looking at. Either I have to pick lighter magazines, or I have to work out more. I’m not sure why I decided to look at GQ for the first time since college, but I did see a lot of nice suits I’m not going to buy. Actually it was tuxes in this issue.

So I’m still against the huge monstrosity in the gym, but I did end up talking to the guy who invented the thing. I love talking geeky things with people. Sounds like he’s only made a couple of these things. It’s neat and all but who can afford it?

And look how much space it takes up.

I’ve got nothing to say besides I didn’t want to be at work. And the gym still has the stupid bicycle stuff in it. I suppose that’s it.

They keep moving the mats around (where you can do your stretching) because they’re adding these stupid bicycle stands with computer monitoring. Not the ones for spin class, but the kind you have to hook your $3,000 road bike up to so you can see how hard you’re working. Anyway, they rearranged the mats again but then put in this ridiculous 20-foot-long computerized bicycle treadmill and there’s no longer any wall space to do any standing stretches or ball-squats. I complained to the owner, but I don’t know if it’s going to do any good. He’s a bike geek and it doesn’t matter to him that only 12 of the hundreds of gym members are going to care that he’s taken up so much floor space with his silly bike crap. In the mean time the Stairmaster skips and squeaks, the grips on some of the cable-row machines are coming apart, and the cables are frayed.

OK, enough kvetching. I guess I’m just sore that when I did my ball squats I had to do them facing everyone since the only wall is the 2 feet between the mirrors and I was standing underneath the TV monitors. I felt stupid, but it was that or nothing. Stupid gym, anyway.

Instead of fixing a program for my sister (for her work) I ended up reading a book all day long. I’m caught up on all my Kay Scarpetta mysteries now. I’m not sure why the last book I read built up and then had a half-assed conclusion but lots of mysteries are that way. I did make it out of the house to have a chocolate malt with my friend Il and mow the lawn, but the rest of the day was pretty much all reading.

Now what?

Today I went up to the Mike & Key Amateur Radio Club swap meet in Puyallup, Washington. It’s about a two-and-a-half hour drive from here and on the way up I was complaining to my friend Greg that people bring computer junk instead of radios. Of course that meant the only thing I bought up there was a piece of computer gear.

We left because Greg bought something that was too heavy to haul around and then drove around looking for a place to eat. We ended up in Olympia, at the only place I know to go down there, a seafood place on the water that I think is called, “The Oyster House.” As always the seafood was excellent. Sometimes I forget how great fresh shrimp is. I had the combo basket of fried stuff (clam strips, popcorn shrimp, shrimp, and halibut) and we also has some raw oysters. Finally drove the two-and-a-half hours back and it was time to take a nap.

I sort of got kicked out of a convenience store for looking at all the Diet Pepsi bottles to see if I can see the winning bottles. If I think about it, if I spend $1.34 for a Diet Pepsi at the and one third of them are winners, then on the average a bottle would be like ($1.24 x 3 – $0.99)/3 = $0.91. But I’ve gone and screwed the pooch on that one since I’ve cherry-picked the winners out and now all the bottles are losers. Even without trying to win anything, Diet Cokes at the pharmacy are only $1 and there’s a cute pharmacy tech there.

So, on Tuesday I saw that the cute librarian is incredibly pregnant! So I’m guessing that means she’s already involved with someone and that now my other librarian friends can’t harass me for not asking her out. She has been sporting a huge rock on her left hand for a while. Then I saw another woman who lives nearby with some huge dude (she’s like 5’9″ and he made her look small). The next morning I saw the bartender at the local bar with her incredibly good looking boyfriend (movie star good looks, not just average good looks). So there’s three fantasy women off my list. I don’t fantasize about married women, either. Well, maybe sometimes, but they have to be porn stars. HAHAHAHA.

Oh, wait, was I supposed to buy the “Los Lonely Boys” CD?

The next-door neighbor kid got a car recently. It’s a 2-door Camry, but there are scrapes on both sides. I keep thinking he’s going to hit my car, since he parks in the spot in front of me and gets pretty close. Today I found my license plate holder is cracked and the paint on the front bumper is crackled. If he doesn’t fess up, I’m just kind of hosed. I called next door and asked his mom if she knew anything about it. She told me she knows her son is a bad parker (sometimes he’s feet from the curb) but she also knows that it could have been someone else and neither of us can just blame her kid.

Arrrgh.

Oh, well. It’s just a bumper. I guess I don’t have to pay several hundred dollars to get it fixed.

I hang out with gun owners and really, there’s no good reason to buy a cheap gun. A gun propels a bullet by creating a controlled burn of smokeless power creating rapidly expanding gases. There’s a technical difference between the fast burn and an explosion and, honestly, I don’t know what that difference is. Probably something to do with control. In any case, you don’t want anything going wrong when there’s something capable of blowing up in in your face. If you need to use a gun, you don’t want it to screw up.

In any case, there’s a bunch of stuff I buy at the gun store, and it’s usually not guns. There’s this $1200 H&K pistol I’ve wanted, but I can’t justify buying it since I’ll never use it. But I have bought an expensive flashlight or two. They’re usually the size of a magic marker and brighter and more reliable than a 4-cell Maglite.

Today, I bought an expensive pocket knife for $180. My gun-owning friend Greg has several Benchmade knives and I thought I’d get one. I got an “automatic” which is illegal in many states, but not in Oregon. I don’t know why automatic knives are outlawed. You need to get awfully close to use a knife and what keeps someone from carrying around a kitchen knife? Anyway, in my case, I now have a fancy, expensive box opener that is illegal in most states. OK, someone send me a box to open.

It’s that time of the year again, where I get to enjoy all the itchy eyes and sneezing. Something else to look forward to.

One thing I was asked repeatedly at speed dating was, “What do you do for fun?” Honestly, I couldn’t describe what I do for fun to anyone but specialized geeks. Building radio gear. Getting on the radio from time to time. Reading books (less specialized, except I tend to read a lot of mysteries). Playing with my computer.

One of the women asked me if I had a metal detector, because her ex-boyfriend had one. I thought I was on the top of the geek heap with the ham radio thing but the metal detector question made me slightly introspective on that point. I think I decided that a metal detector would make me a creepy old man, not a geek. (At least my ex-girlfriend has told me that I’m smart, funny, and kind. I wonder what she says behind my back. 🙂 )

In any case, I followed my sister’s two instructions. I don’t know if I pissed anyone off (instruction #1 don’t piss anyone off) but I tried not to, and I didn’t talk about porn (instruction #2). However, one of the women told me she rented some Japanese demon porn anime. I don’t know what was up with that, but it didn’t bother me much. At least no one told me they were in favor of making Oregon a red state. Any right-wing sentiment would have sent instruction #1 out the window.

I finally caught up on watching two weeks of “Alias,” two weeks of “Numb3rs,” one “Without a Trace,” “Committed,” and “Scrubs.” Now I can move onto other pursuits. I finished the latest Patricia Cornwell mystery (with ME Kay Scarpetta) and now I’m filling in the ones I missed in between. And I can start surfing google to see if I can find goofy songs like the 50 Cent and Nine Inch Nails remix called “50 Inch Nails.”

I got some weird songs (mostly from the 80’s) because I’ve been scoring free iTunes from Diet Pepsi, including “Talk to Ya Later” by the Tubes, “Dance and Shout” by Shaggy & Pee Wee (a remix of the Jackson’s “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” which i also got), “Stepping Out” by Joe Jackson, “Best of My Love” by the Emotions (a 70’s song?), another copy of “I Want You to Want Me” by Cheap Trick since I’m not sure the ones I had before were legal, and now I’m trying to decide what else to get. Charlie Sexton vs. Marshall Crenshaw. Modern English vs. Split Enz. You get the idea.

I did spend most of the day doing what I did most of the weekend: sitting in front of a computer and typing. At least I was getting paid for it today. Unfortunately, it was one of those Mondays that kind of came and went and I can’t even tell you what I had for lunch without having to think about it for a while. (Half a grilled cheese & tomato sandwich and a bowl of Hungarian mushroom soup. They had Tomato Basil on the menu board, but they lied.)

In any case that’s about all I have to say. I was quite tired because it’s hay fever season and that always makes me tired. My server, or probably more properly my sister’s blog server, appears to be working now.

Do you know that the latest fiasco (which led to me sitting in the basement typing all weekend) was because she couldn’t upload a picture, and it turns out she couldn’t upload it because the file name had spaces (OK) and single quotes (not OK) in it? Yeesh.

On the weather front: warm and annoyingly nice. It should be raining. On the romance front: bleak and inconsequential.

I have a faux girlfriend, a friend who is a girl, who is also single and we have dinner once in a while. Anyway, she had some suggestions for our mutual plight, but it wasn’t the suggestion I was hoping for. She think we should look to India to find our romantic entanglements. Great. not only is my job going to India, but she thinks I should outsource my romantic needs there as well.

My sister thinks I better find someone F.O.B. or I’m lost. Nice that she seems to think about the same thing.

So I think my server might be getting back to normal soon. After a week of crashes, someone mentioned some new code implementing TCP SACK. Lucky me, I rebuilt the system after those changes were made. I was given a work-around and if I’m lucky my sister’s web site will stay up and I won’t have to hear any grief from her. Yep. Another weekend full of fun and excitement and typing at a keyboard in the basement. Woo.

My boss has studied a lot of the “fast seduction” and “get a girl tonight” kind of books and likes manipulating women for his own amusement. He found out that I didn’t do so well at speed dating and said if I didn’t read the instructions and buy into this whole smarmy control structure, that I’d be fired. (He often “fires” me for the songs I have on my iPod which includes lots of 80’s schlock.)

Well, I told my sister about this and she said, “Hah. Like you could get any of that to work” My friend Greg thinks that I’d be overcome by my honest streak (which is a way of saying I can’t keep my frigging mouth shut).

In any case, I found information on the intarweb about how to seduce women. It seems kinda cheesy. It probably works, but I don’t know if it fits into my goals in life. Those goals are a mystery even to myself, but I don’t think it includes becoming the ass-master of Portland.