My all day stomach ache.

I’m sure it’s not megacorp poisoning me, even though I ate every meal there for a week now. And today I even ate lunch with a friend and my old boss. He did point out that you only get two chances to work at Megacorp, but mostly we talked about the same sort of crap we always did. Non-boss/employee stuff.

I had to skip my trip to the gym because of my stomach ache, so I fired up the company laptop and completed some more required corporate training. You know, stuff from a fully staffed HR department and even available online. Yikes. Or is it yipes? I can never remember.

Cranky ham radio meeting.

So my weird meeting is on Thursdays from 6PM until after 7PM. I let on that I’m not exactly busy, so I’m going to get slammed soon. I had my first one-on-one meeting with my manager and he told me that I should enjoy it while it lasts because we both know that I could be buried soon enough. He seems like a nice guy. Never as nice as my old boss, but the pay is a lot better at megacorp.

 Anyway, the ham radio meeting is the last Thursday of the month. I left a little early, only to have traffic be the worst I’ve seen so far. It’s been taking me 35 minutes or so to get home, and today it took an hour. And then I had to go straight into the meeting, and then it was rush to the ham radio meeting. No time to eat, and I was cranky. Usually I’m fairly surly about the guys who like hearing their own voices, but today it was especially bad. A new jackass who isn’t even really a member decided to give me grief about wanting to adjourn the meeting, and I wanted to hit him over the head with a pipe. Well, they don’t exactly have pipes in the pizza place we have our meetings in, and I was much too busy preparing all the checks we get for tomorrow’s deposit. Aiigh.

I suppose that’s enough complaining for tonight. I’m going to get some grief tomorrow at work for letting on that I’m not as busy as I could be. If I could only keep my damn mouth shut.

Today I almost passed out.

I got to work today and I just had one constant feeling that I should really be asleep. I thought I was coming down with something. Or maybe eating in the cafeteria was poisoning me and the antidote was in the coffee. I felt a little better after eating something, but I was still quite tired.

 So my days are pretty much consumed by my commute out to megacorp and then back and I can’t think of too much more going on right now. Except that I don’t have the sense to go to bed early, so I’ll be zombified again tomorrow. Maybe if I got some common sense. I wonder if they sell that at the company store.

If you’re wondering about Supereggplant, she’s fine.

Unfortunately, she didn’t listen to my mild suggestion to stay away from Comcast. Usually cablemodems work fine, but Comcast has no business pretending to be an ISP. They’re either understaffed or just clueless when it comes to data services. In any case, her office and her computers are set up, but Comcast told her to call them later because they didn’t know what was wrong with her service. Clowns.

Every thing looks well at Casa de Eggplant, though the dog was growling at my dad. At some point she blamed it on him, but apparently Dede growled at some knitter/craft person lately, too. I think Dede is as cranky as Mariko.

Everything is going well at my new job at Megacorp, too. It’s starting slowly, and fortunately they didn’t tell me I was two weeks behind on my first day. The slow start won’t get me promoted, but it also won’t drive me insane.

Bar-b-q

I remember weird potato chips with some sort of barbecue nomenclature like “Bar-B-Q.” I could just be misremembering since I’ve been pretty darn tired and cranky for the past couple of days. I keep waking up at 6AM, like I was doing to head to work, but I’ve been staying up late watching TV or just screwing around. Plus I had to help move all those boxes around yesterday.

In any case, I spent the day up at Greg’s for another rib feed. He has a smoker and puts 3 or 4 racks of ribs on the thing and we all hang around drinking cheap beer and eating ribs. It keeps us in touch with friends and some of Greg’s co-workers. Usually he breaks out the machine gun (which is more fun to shoot than you’d imagine), but this time he had a bunch of people up on one of his daughter’s horses as his main attraction.

On the sister front, she can’t remember my phone number and keeps using up my cell phone minutes. Oh, well, I have a bazillion evening and weekend minutes I never use up anyway.

Moving day.

First, a clarification. David, my trainer, just bought me dinner as a thank you for being his student since this was my last session. Plus he had to go back and do some work at one of his many other jobs, so he had to get something to eat anyway. I had to put in the disclaimer because of harassment from my sister and Megan.

Today was the day we unpacked the truck at my sister’s new house. At first I was annoyed that my brother-in-law wasn’t doing anything, but I found out he was sick as a dog. He was in a daze, just kind of stumbling around. On the other hand, their dog seemed fine, quiet and well behaved. I’m not sure there’s much difference between owning a basenji and a cat, however.

We got the truck and trailer unloaded fairly quickly and were finished about 1:00PM. After lunch I volunteered my friend Greg to help buy the electrical outlets, etc, for my sister’s office. The guy cutting the holes in the wall for the outlets kept sending me back to the hardware store because the outlet box was the “wrong volume.” What he meant was that it wasn’t tall enough for the hole he cut. Unfortunately, after being sent back to different stores for different brands of boxes, he found out that HE had the oddball sized box, and all the different things I was buying were the same size.

In any case, Peter and Mariko are now in their house full of boxes and I think anyone normal could be unpacked in a week or so. My nutty sister will probably do it in two or three days.

Trainers can’t do much when you’re pooped.

Holy crud. I was just pooped at the gym today and unable to do much at all. It was the last of nine sessions and I’m still sore from some of the exercises. My trainer bought me some interesting sushi afterward making me think I need to go to the weird sushi places more often. It was quite Korean in flavor, spicy, and crunchy, and something my parents would never eat.

Before you get any weird ideas, he bought because I didn’t have my wallet with me.

I also lasted a whole week at my new job! So far, so good. Plus, I got my processor upgrade installed. Take that new company I work for!

I’ve got cuts all over.

Little stinking paper cuts all over my right hand and even my nose. That’s the bad part. The good part is that I got my new laptop at work, after a four hour long indoctrination on how to be careful so that no one will try to steal it. Mostly common sense and more than a little tedious. Putting in passwords, holding your head just right so the software actually works, etc. They never warn you that the cardboard box is the most dangerous thing they’re giving you and the edges are darn sharp. I didn’t notice until I saw the blood on the cables.

I’m also trying to upgrade the processor in my main computer (a Mac G4 AGP 400MHz) and it’s giving me fits. So that’s about it for now. Wish me luck.

I ain’t got nobody.

So, what, one of those online dating services, one that someone convinced me to spend twenty-five of my hard earned dollars on, changed recently to something more abhorrent. Well, at least I can’t tell how they improved it besides making it harder to find matches. In any case, I looked to see how many people had viewed my profile and you can guess that the number. It was less than two. Friendster changed, too and it also tells you how many people have viewed your profile and the number there was less than one. Oy.

Well, I’ve also heard the question, “Why haven’t any of your friends set you up?” and I think the reason is liability. My sister had me meet someone — for no real reason that I can think of since the person lived hundreds or thousands of miles away from me — and this person started yelling at me. Heck, I just made fun of Lake Zero (or as the locals call it, Lake No-negroes) and she just about bit my head off. Even my friends FROM Lake Oswego tell me it’s a snobby rich community. It’s really just my luck.

I think my subconscious is probably having its way with me, too. I was imagining a blind date with one of the women from the gym while I was climbing the infinite stairs, and all I could see in my mind is the woman crying because I’m the best she could do. Even my imaginary love life is taking a turn for the worse.

All I can say is: I think I need a new wristwatch.

I am ungreen.

So I had this wonderful plan to walk to the Max (our light rail system), ride Max to the station closest to work, and then ride the shuttle from the Max to my place of employment. That would be 30 minutes to the station, 35+ minutes on the max, 10 minutes on the shuttle, and there’s no guarantee I wouldn’t be waiting at one or more of the stations. So, instead, I’ve been getting up a little early and driving to work. That takes 35-40 minutes each way, since I’m going a little before the peak.

I kinda feel bad about it, but not bad enough to spend the extra hour and a half commuting each day.

Some people aren’t making any sense to me.

I think I’m included in that because I had to get up at 5:45AM when I’m used to getting up at 7:15AM. If you think that’s not big deal, just think how you’d feel if you had to wake up 1 1/2 hours early and then DRIVE 45 minutes more than you’re used to. I used to just walk 1/2 hour to work. And after a job where I had no meetings I was in seven hours of meetings in one day.

So back to making no sense, I was going to say something bad about my sister but I don’t have the energy. She’ll be here soon enough. But someone else called my cell phone Saturday while I was in the impenetrable woods of Scappoose and left me a message, asking me to buy her a CD. Since I listened to the message in a dark car, I erased it by accident. I called the person’s cell phone on Sunday (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) and asked which CDs she was talking about and I got NO RESPONSE. So I’m not obligated to buy every frigging CD in the city and send them off to EBFE, am I?

Oh, and look, a gift for my awful sister!