Nando demo

So I’ve been listening to a lot of j-pop lately, mainly from SickOnion.com. (Be forewarned that the programming originates in Costa Rica and they have a little problem with blue language in their promos.) I found out that one of my favorite bands, Dreams Come True has a new single out, “Nando demo.” It’s the theme song from a Japanese TV show about a hospital emergency room. I’m not sure what sort of show it is, but after seeing them cart off a kid from the neighborhood in a Japanese ambulance, I don’t have much faith in Japanese Emergency Medical System.

In any case, the video is goofy, but I really like the song. I’ll have to buy the CD single from Japan and it might cost me $20 for two songs. Sure is a lot more than iTunes.

OK, so now what?

I can’t remember exactly what I was up to today. I remember the gardening, and then starting to move files around on my computer. I think that’s what I wasted all my time on. I decided I was going to move some files around because I wanted to clear out all the extra stuff off of the big disk and repartition, etc, etc. Basically, I did on the disk what I did out in the yard: various weeding.

Oh, I met the new neighbors, a pair of physicians. They seem nice enough and have an adorable daughter.

My sister signed onto her Yahoo account for the first time in years so I sent her a message. It freaked her out and she couldn’t figure out who I was. She even called me on the phone to ask what was going on.

I don’t think that torch is going to work.

How did I get so sunburned? I don’t remember being out in the sun that long. In any case, the big torch — at least the $30 one from Harbor Freight — didn’t work quite right. There’s a lot of water in weeds and you have to boil that off before a weed burns. A large leafy weed can take minutes to burn up. And then while the weed is burning, it puts out a lot of smoke and steam and if you have allergies, the smoke and steam isn’t all that pleasant.

What you can do is start fires with the torch. Not that we, on a no-burn day, burned anything.

We did finally made it to Industrial Café and Saloon and I guess the dinner chef is the husband of my sister’s grade school classmate. Perhaps a few too many degrees of separation, but still sort of friends.

OK, who turned up the heat?

So the high a week ago was 62°F. Today it was 95°F at the airport. That means it was probably a couple degrees warmer here in the city. It’s supposed to drop about 20&degF to a more civilized temperature, but for the moment it is HOT. The walk home wasn’t so bad, but I was stumbling around the gym. They had the air conditioning turned on, so it was cooler than usual, but I was still feeling kind of off. And I probably wasn’t the only one. There were only about four people there at any time. I suppose the yoga people could have been hiding in their dark room, but out on the floor, where there are usually at least a dozen people on a slow day, the place was empty.

So even after lots of sugar from orange juice and part of a Jack-in-the-Box milkshake, I’m still feeling tired. Better hit the hay early.

How to annoy the boss.

I’m not one to keep secrets, so when I find out things like grade school teachers make a lot more money than I do, or that postal workers make a lot more money than I do, I tell my boss. I think he’s reasonable enough to know that cheap labor comes with its drawbacks and unless he wants to outsource everything to someone incompetent or someone in a third-world country, he’s going to have to listen to some complaining. The past few days have been especially bad for me. Some of my co-workers (one in particular) is driving me nuts. One of my peers at work usually has that problem but now it’s my turn to be annoyed at the particular co-worker and my peer is able to ignore the irritations.

I better keep my eyes peeled for civil service tests, especially with the US Postal Service, if I want to raise my pay level. Computers are for the birds.

Another late day at work.

This time I needed to get some data off of our CEO’s laptop so I had to do it while she was with a customer and away from her laptop. Unfortunately, the process was SLOW and it took around FIVE hours. That meant I was at work until almost 9PM on a day I got there early (early for me, around 8:25AM).

Since I spent most of my day at work, I don’t have much interesting to talk about. I didn’t even get to go outside much on this day where it was 86°F today. Well, it’ll be warmer tomorrow.

The big torch.

I still feel like getting a weed burning torch and here’s a biggie! The small one I’m probably going to get is at Harbor Freight Tools. The only thing that everyone suggests is that I keep a hose running and wait until a rainy day. The weather s good now, and it’s supposed to be about 90°F on Thursday, but every good Oregonian knows that Memorial Day is coming and it’s always nice until Friday and rains on Saturday through Monday.

I should probably find something else to do over the weekend, but the fire sounds like fun.

I think my horoscope told me to start a romance today, but that’s not happening, is it?

I should write earlier.

Usually I forget about this thing, and most people on the planet wouldn’t care. But, for some reason, I have friends who like keeping up with what I’m doing. OK, so the keeping up with friends thing isn’t so weird but reading all the nonsense here is a bit off. In any case, if you’re about to complain about my pollution of the web, you’re a loon.

The reason I should write earlier is because I forget about all the stuff that I was meaning to write about. I don’t go through my day thinking, “Whoa, I gotta write about this,” but there are things, like my dream about the vampire cow last night, that I mean to write about but I forget. (The vampire cow had a big burn in its back, severing the spine, but it still kept walking towards me with it’s evil red eyes and a frightening, “Moooooo.” Surprising the things that wake you up.)

So I got to work today and they were talking about fasting and how it makes you poo or not poo. My contribution was that the volume of poo is probably related to the amount of bacteria in the gut. I even found a journal article that confirms what I remember, that about half of your poo (55%) is bacteria. I never got into medical school, and I can’t remember much of the basic sciences from my prereq classes, but I do remember random crap. Crap about poo.

Oh, and my horoscope today said something about hitting on people and getting rebuffed. Just like always, I hit on NOBODY. I supposed I waved at a girl at the gym and talked to a guy with a nice Volvo, but neither really matches my horoscope.

Oh, and a bunch of kids chastised me today. Greg’s kid told him to quit talking to me on the phone because I was interrupting their TV show, and an old schoolmate Jason’s three sons told him to quit talking to me because I was interrupting their baseball game. So, while my horoscope wasn’t correct, I still feel like a big jerk.

Unreadable blogs.

Some people are really clever and have very clever blogs full off clever witty things. Or cartoons. Clever cartoons are good. But really, blogs are kind of rambling and pointless unless you have some connection with the writer. It can even be an imaginary connection, but no connection usually means there’s no point to reading it. Or maybe you have a connection and the writing is boring and pompous or the writer is a jerk. But I guess my point is that some blogs are really boring to me and I was just trying to figure out why. I mean, I could give a rat’s ass about knitting and weird Australian candies, but I have to see what my sister is doing. I even learn stuff about knitting, things I don’t want to know. But yeesh. This one blog I was told to read? What the hell was the point.

Anyway, I’m rambling. It’s much more interesting than what I really did today.

I took a nap. Before and after the nap I did yardwork. It’s raining like the dickens up here. We’re on course for setting rain records for the month of May. We had an incredibly mild winter for us and now we’re getting deluges of rain. That’s the thing about Oregon, we usually get a nice steady sprinkle, not those downpours like you see on the coast or down south. Anyway, the rain is causing the damn grass to grow, so I went out and mowed and got the leaves off of the street with a gas-powered blower. What a mess. In the middle of all that, it started to rain. Later in the day it stopped raining so I decided to go back at it. I was trying to figure out if a weed burning torch would be safe to use in the city and I finally gave up that idea. I tried to start the the weed whacker I borrowed from Greg, but it was DOA. I ended up using the gas mower to cut down the weeds.

Oh, and I also broke out the steam cleaner my dad bought about 20 years ago and plugged it in for the FIRST TIME. It didn’t work for crap. That also got me to thinking about how slowly the drains ran in the bathrooms and I unclogged the sinks. I can describe the goo that accumulates when your dad smokes a pipe and uses the sink as a spittoon, but I’m sure you’re not interested. Also, the steam cleaner was so useless that I just used “Resolve” and a wet rag, and then used the cleaner to vacuum up as much water as I could. The little bit of water I got up SMELLED LIKE PIPE TOBACCO.

On top of all this, my nose was so plugged up last night that I couldn’t sleep.

Now, you see what I’m talking about? Why would anyone without some sort of connection read all that? By the way, propane powered weed burning torches are only about $15 – $20US at Harbor Freight so there’s still a chance I’m going to try one out.

$12, 4 movies, and no nekkid women

OK, so that’s an exaggeration. One of the movies, Badder Santa had a stripper in it.

My buddy Greg wanted to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy today, but when we got to the theatre I saw that Star Wars: Return of the Sucky Movie had no line! So of course I dragged Greg to see it. It wasn’t that bad. The best part was that I was expecting it to be bad, so it dodn’t take much to impress me. I had major problems with the science, but it surely didn’t suck as much as Ewoks or Jar-Jar Binks.

As soon as we left, of course, Greg noticed that The Hitchhiker’s Guide was starting in five minutes so we went into to see that too. The best part was that we missed all the dumb advertising before the movie. I think that’s a movie where you need to read the book first.

Of course, after I got home I watched Badder Santa and then Blade Trinity. Too much sitting today.

So sleepy.

The day after staying up too late, I’m often running on adrenaline so I do OK. The day after that is the one where I’m dragging around. I don’t think I did too poorly at work, but that’s just because they provide free coffee.

So last night I went to bed a little early. Just barely. And I also remembered to take my “Atomic clock” back upstairs. It sets itself via radio, and the radio sends signals from the National Bureau of Standards atomic clock in Boulder, CO. It was inside the house, however, and didn’t really hasn’t been quite right since the change to daylight savings time. Somehow, I hit the alarm button and the geniuses who make alarm clocks have them default to an alarm time of 12:00AM. Since the clock was off by an hour (PST vs. PDT) it started beeping at 1:00AM.

Because I only had 3 1/2 hours sleep the night before, and because I’d been asleep for an hour, my brain could not figure out what the damn noise was. I flailed around until I hit the snooze bar, but that just postponed further beeping for ten minutes. I finally had the sense to wake up and turn the alarm off after the alarm went off again. Keep in mind, I never use the snooze button, because when the alarm goes off I have to switch it off and switch the radio back on so NPR can give me my left-wing liberal marching instructions for the day.