My girlfriend.

So, my sister’s old classmate emailed me and pointed out that my window is just like a girlfriend. I suppose in some ways, it is. High maintenance, always demanding attention, expensive, and waking me up in the middle of the night when I’m trying to sleep. OK, so my last girlfriend actually didn’t do that; it was her cat.

Oh, and there goes the window again! I wish I could get some sleep so I can be ready to get yelled at again. My project lead at megacorp doesn’t like what I’m doing with my computer and he blames me for the trouble I’m having. The IT guy seems to think my problems with my computer are just the way things are, but I don’t think he’s prone to yelling at people like the project lead is. Mariko reminds me that I don’t like getting yelled at, and in most cases I would have given him the finger and started walking out the door, but I suppose I’m a kinder, gentler person now. Heh.

First, the repetitive bad news.

Last night it rained a lot. We’re talking landslide and flooding creeks sort of a lot. It rains all winter here, but we’re not big on volume, and this January was in the top 10 of rainfall somewhere. Just where I don’t know because I wasn’t paying enough attention during the weather report. Anyway, the sound of the rain PLUS THE SOUND OF MY WINDOW were waking me up last night. I called Pella again, and the guy knew exactly who it was. I mean, he seems nice enough but he’s not doing all that much for me. Oh, well, I figure I’ll keep bugging him until he tells me to shove it and then I’ll just have to remove the window and leave the shards in the Pella parking lot.

In any case, I’m still writing about it here because I haven’t written it down anywhere else and I may need a coherent record of what I did and how annoying the window is to me. Just in case, you see.

And that’s about it. I was going to be put on another megacorp project, but it looks like that’s not going to happen. All the same old stuff. My paychecks keep coming in and I keep staying late. It’s a megacorp tradition, after all.

Big fortunate headaches.

Today I woke up with sinus pain that developed into a headache. But that didn’t bother me at all since I was spending the day reading silly books. I don’t want to admit what the books were, but those of you who know silly books will know “discworld.” Pretty soon it’s on to the Ian Rankin mysteries I have, but I’m finishing up the “Young Adult” books I checked out first.

I better scare up some ear plugs. It’s windy tonight and the window has already been making some noises.

Double failure.

So, last night I had two failures:

  1. My window, which was supposed to be fixed by removing the covers on the electrical wires, still made noise. In other words, they’re still not fixed.
  2. My nose plugged up while I was sleeping, and this was the first time my nose plugged up at night since I started using my Neti pot.

OK, so neither was much of a disaster. Today I spent an inordinate amount of time in a gun store, because, I’m a guy and sometimes I like to make loud noises and play with guns. All we ended up doing is talking about weird assault rifles and how we own them but don’t shoot them. Not me so much, since I don’t own any rifles, but they were trying to get me to order this weird-ass looking thing that they use on Stargate SG-1 (an FN P-90). I guess they think I’m the weird-looking gun guy or something.

I finally made it to Poor Richard’s in Portland’s Hollywood district. It’s an old-school steak restaurant that’s been around since the 50’s and always had a deal where you could get a discount for buying two steaks or something. It turned out to be pretty tasty, but with a neighborhood feel to it. There seemed to be an older clientele at first but there were plenty of families with small children as well. It’s just another one of those places in town that have been around forever but that I’d never been to.

The most action I’ve gotten in years.

Today we had a going away lunch at megacorp and we went to Macaroni Grill. In the ‘burbs, it’s all corporate food and the place has really narrow aisles because it’s crammed full of suburban drones waiting for their feedings. I first sat down on the aisle and decided to move and as I reached back for my coat I ACCIDENTALLY TOUCHED THE WAITRESS’ ASS. Yeah, that’s the most action I’ve gotten since 2001.

Looks like someone sent me an email from match.com tonight. Several co-workers used to tell me to try harder on match.com, but they finally looked at the women’s profiles. Earlier today they summarized the profiles as, “Hello. I have treated men poorly for years now and this is my only recourse. You better not suck.” In other words, confirmation that most of the profiles sound unappealing. Since it would cost me money to read the email that was sent to me, I think I’ll pretend I never got it. I think I’ve had three emails on there so far, and two of them were from deep inside China somewhere. No need to be treated poorly by someone that far away when there are plenty of women nearby who work at keeping my self-esteem low.

I wonder if I’m in trouble?

I got a call today at 6:15PM from Dave the trainer asking me where the heck I was. Well, after making sure I was supposed to be there on Thursday for my twice-weekly torture session, I realized that this is the last Thursday of the month and time for me to do my official treasurer’s duty at the incredibly sexy HAM RADIO club. HAHAHA. So, anyway, I sent Dave a text message on Wednesday morning but he forgot, I guess. I just hope I didn’t screw up his schedule.

I’ve been fairly busy and I haven’t made any progress on the book front. I better polish off a couple or I’m in trouble. I think I have about a dozen books checked out. Fortunately, I think a couple are kid’s books and should be fairly quick. But, come to think of it, Harry Potter is a kid’s book and those are hella long.

I need to find some time to read.

Someone asked me what I’d read recently and I realized that besides, “Harry Potter and the Nonsensical Gobbledygook,” I haven’t read a thing lately. They could take the smallest of my college degrees away from me for doing that. I was being funny when I said the latest thing I read was the TV Guide and I think it might have been truthful. Well, to catch up on a couple of series I keep reading, I checked out a stack of books. Now I just have to find time to read them.

I guess what really triggered this recently was finding out that Sue Grafton had come out with “S is for Something-Related-to-Murder,” and rather than buying it I decided to get it from the library. I gave up buying books a couple of years ago when I realized I had a whole lot of crap in the house and books were a large percentage of the crap. I read a lot of mysteries, and those are usually resellable, fortunately, unlike romance novels.

Speaking of unsellable old books, I think I’m going to have a bonfire with my old textbooks. Burning books just feels right somehow.

It burns! It burns!

So, after spending a bunch of money on cell phone stuff (a car charger, case, and a Bluetooth headset) I finally got a package today. But it wasn’t my cell phone stuff, it was a Neti pot I think I ordered from Nepal if the markings on the package were right. A Neti pot is used in cleansing rituals by practioners of yoga, or for pouring water through your nose for heathens like me. Let me tell you, it kinda burns a little and feels like getting water up your nose at the pool. Big surprise, huh?

Weird how I can get a $10 pot from Nepal before I can get a bunch of expensive electronic stuff from Amazon.

It was reunion day at the gym. I suppose there’s all sorts of people who I only talk to for a couple minutes a month, total, but I like to chat with almost everyone (especially cute women). One person I hadn’t seen for a LONG time told me she just got back from six months in SE Asia! Wow! I need to ask her for the story when I’m not getting tortured by my trainer.

At 8PM, I was falling asleep.

And I bet at bed time, not so much.

Why? I have night terrors, but they go away after a half-hour so that probably wasn’t it. Today at Megacorp I found out I made some mistakes and I had to FIX THEM IMMEDIATELY. I said something I was told I was DRAGGING MY FEET and INCOMPETENT. Yar. (OK, so maybe they didn’t say the incompetent bit explicitly.)

So after I got home and ate dinner, I finished a last little bit of work and then I was sleepy as hell. But I know that I have to watch Kiefer kick some ass at 9PM and that’ll probably wake me up enough that I’ll have trouble getting to sleep.
Oy, I’ve got a nice cramp in my upper back now, too.

Where the heck is my Scritti Politti CD?

I seem to be missing “Cupid and Psyche 85,” which happens to be one of my favorite albums. With one iPod on shuffle and the other so full of crap that I can’t find anything, I didn’t notice it was missing. I would have gone online to buy it but I bought enough stuff today. Contact lenses, a battery for an electric screwdriver, and a USB printer adapter. I’ll probably get over my cheapness tomorrow and buy it. Then the other copy will show up and I’ll have two. Did I mention that I have three copies of “El Oso” by Soul Coughing and two of “Erasure’s Greatest Hits”?
I actually left the house today to go return an iMic that’s supposed to be used with my iPod. It didn’t work that well. It recorded the sound of the internal hard disk quite well, but you had to hold it directly in front of your face to have it record your voice. Pretty worthless if you ask me. I was lucky because I thought they said I had three weeks to return it, but it was really only two weeks and I went in on the last possible day. It was part of my grand scheme to record my window, and fortunately that’s all over now (or so I hope.) In any case, I have a recording of the sound already so I don’t have to pry open a half-working device to try to get it to work.

I’m not sure what I did today.

I went out for breakfast and hung out with my friend Greg today, but somewhere along the line I got a haircut. That usually means my head gets cold and I get a little lethargic and need a nap. I suppose I should have a more exciting life but I don’t seem to. It’s a life, anyway.

I guess it must have blown pretty hard on Thursday night when the window was buzzing. I had to retrieve some of our trash cans from the neighbor’s yard. It’s not supposed to be that windy in Portland, and it’s not supposed to be that rainy here (volume-wise) either. I suppose I can say it’s probably all the fault of Geo. W. Bush.

I knew I’d get busted.

I spend a lot of time in my co-worker’s cubes chatting because I don’t have the patience to calmly wait for my computer to finish doing whatever it’s doing. Today I spent an extraordinary amount of time in one guy’s cube because I’m a little better at SQL than he is (the blind leading the blind, as it were). I knew SOMEBODY would make a comment, and it was our manager. I fixed the SQL problem, too.

I went out to dinner with my buddy Il. It was his 42nd birthday and when I told my mom, she said it was a big deal in Japan and my grandfather had a geisha and a big party for his 42nd birthday. So I had to run around trying to find Korean people to see if Koreans did anything special for their 42nd birthday. Turns out they all said no, and my friend Sun even said, “No, it’s just something you sick Japanese people do.” I decided that I’d give into my Imperialistic tendencies and bought his a special DVD at a special store. We’ll see if it’s as good as it’s supposed to be.

Il at 42.

Oh, and they finally heard the sound at Pella and they finally came out to look at the window rather than telling me to try things. The blew on some sort of cover the electric company put over the power lines with a compressor and decided that’s what’s making the noise. The cover was some safety equipment Pella made the electrical company use before work started on the window. Let’s hope they’re right and that’s what it was.