I thought I was better.

I felt much better in the middle of the day. But my sister was right; taking a shower tired me out. And then in the afternoon I took a nap and it was all over.

I hope I do get better soon. I was told to avoid Megacorp tomorrow because of all the carnage, but there’s no way to avoid that. Still, who wants to be called in from a sick day just to get laid off? Better if you’re healthy.

Time for my daily incoherence.

So if I said I stayed in bed all day, would you think I was hung over, scared of the world, or running a fever of 101.9°F? (It was the last one.) I was down to 99.2°F at one point, but I’m back to 100.0°F. I’m the most coherent I’ve been all day. I finally had to get up to drink some more water. I think I’ve had two glasses of water, a dozen Chicken-in-a-Biskit crackers, and four Advil today. Oh, and a half-cup of coffee to see if that would stop my head from splitting open.

I wonder what I have? My throat hurts a little, my head hurts a lot, I’m running a fever, and my nose isn’t any more congested than usual. The best part was last night when I had the chills and was shivering AND I felt hot! Oh, and even worse, I think someone mailed me some cookies and I haven’t had the energy to open the package!

Every time I think I feel OK, I lie down and it’s several hour later. Well, I like naps, so I suppose it’s OK.

Time for another nap!

Stomach ache.

I was having trouble doing much of anything at work because of yet another stomach ache, and the funny thing is that I forgot about it while I was at the gym. Not that anything very exciting happened at the gym. I don’t think I even talked to anyone other than to say hello. All very odd if you ask me.

At Megacorp a friend who is a 21-year employee was telling me that he didn’t really care what happened. If he got canned, he’d get another job. Fine morale at that place. I got a call from an outside organization related to work who wanted to know if I’d take more of a leadership position, but I had to tell the other organization that my project lead seems to think that he owns my immortal soul. Ah, life.

Cotton mouth.

Well, I felt quite dehydrated yesterday. I don’t think it had anything to do with the night of drinking, or the 1.3 mile walk to the hardware store in 95°F heat, or the run up the stairs of death in the same heat. It must have been something else.

In any case, I was feeling too good about myself, what with the impending doom at Megacorp, or the lack of anything interesting in my social front, so I decided to temper my good feelings with another trip to an online dating site. Same people. Same lack of response. Good to see that you can count on some things.

Time to see if I can find my copy of, “I Don’t Like Mondays,” by The Boomtown Rats.

It is too hot.

I missed yesterday’s post because my friend Reid wanted me to meet his 24YO babysitter. He likes screwing with people and he kept telling me how cute and available she was so he could introduce me to her and say YOU CAN NEVER GO OUT WITH A 24YO. WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? Once he took me on a pub crawl to meet women, and when I actually had someone talking to me, he started saying, “HEY, WHAT IF WE WERE SERIAL KILLERS? NOBODY WOULD KNOW.” He kept it up until the woman left (which didn’t take very long, as you can imagine.)

We stayed out way too late because one of the parts of the torture was to show me how late a 24YO can stay out compared to an old guy.

In any case, yesterday’s post would have just been something like: Why is it so <deleted> hard to find a <deleted> bucket? I bought a cheap <deleted> sponge mop at <deleted> QFC, but they didn’t have any <deleted> buckets that were big enough for the <deleted> head of the <deleted> mop. I went to the <deleted> hippie neighborhood food co-op and the <deleted> didn’t have any <deleted> buckets. I went to <deleted> Trader Joe’s and the <deleted> didn’t have any <deleted> buckets. I finally had to walk to the <deleted> hardware store and buy a <deleted> $10 cheap <deleted> Rubbermaid bucket. Next time I’m going to the feed store and buying a <deleted> horse bucket.

Boy howdy, I really got nothing.

Tales of a gym rat.

Well, I left work early ’cause Dave the trainer wanted me to show up early at 5:30. Turns out he wanted to get two of us at the same time, so he could make DOUBLE WAGES. Actually, it was because his dad was in town and he was having dinner with him. Even then, I didn’t get out of there until about 8PM. I must be a gym rat. Not because I look like a rat (after all, I am SO HOT now.)

Mariko & Peter’s silly dog Dede is here while they’re hiking in the wilds of Oregon. She’s quite wily and keeps getting into my dad’s candy which, unfortunately for Dede, often contains chocolate. Well, apparently chocolate doesn’t immediately kill basenjis, but it does give them horrible gas.

Good thing I got to work early.

I had an hour-long phone meeting today with a guy who really likes the sound of his voice. Actually, I think he’s just not quite right, and he likes repeating obvious things loudly and clearly. Some people on this particular call often try to talk over the guy, and that really just makes it a shouting match. The hour-long call went from 12 noon to 1:40PM. My 4PM group meeting, scheduled for an hour-and-a-half, went until 6:40PM. At least that was interesting.

MARIKO IS NOT MISSING (yet). She’s hiking in the mountains with Peter and Dr. Harris.

Yesterday at the gym, I was called a gym rat. I only go 2-3 times a week, but sometimes I’m there for 2 1/2 hours. I also was asked how old I was because I’m always picking on Timmy, the Stanford guy, like it was grade school. Ah, well. At least I got a tour of the local animation studio afterwards.

Tom Cruise, fired!

Let me tell you, I think the whole Tom Cruise thing is SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING than the whole Jonbenet Ramsey thing. Dave the Trainer even had a rumor that they found Tom in NYC spanking some guys and feathers all over the room. I think he got suckered by some fake rumor in the local “alternative” newspaper, but who knows? Weirder things have happened.

Everyone at Megacorp is still worried about getting laid off. The ones who got it early are the best off, since they can look for jobs before the number of unemployed people in Oregon skyrockets because of the layoffs. The best bet, according to the guys I have coffee with, is to get hired by Union Pacific driving railroad trains. For some reason, there’s a shortage of applicants. It sounds like a pretty nice job, really. Honestly, I think I might actually go for degree #5. Masters in Public Health? Bioinformatics? Masters of Nursing? A law degree? I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll just try to keep my job. Change is scary.

I am so hot.

I forgot to mention that the woman who cut my hair has changed her place of employment. Actually three of them all changed their place of employment and now it’s all changed! Change is is a bit odd at “Rough Cut” where the women who has been there for seven years is known as the new one. I used to go from barber to barber to see who would cut my hair shorter (it grows back, after all) but for some reason they had their limits. One of the “really new” people had no such qualms. I am SO HOT now.

Short hair.

Hee hee.

FINALLY!

I spent the better part of the weekend fixing my laptop. Aside from the time I spent on forced frivolity Friday (where Megacorp sent us on a river cruise for team building, etc) I watched web sites as they tracked the progress of my laptop from the repair facility to the Apple Store in Portland. It took the store a while to process my laptop, but I got it back. And then the fun began.

There’s a lot of uninteresting details I could provide about how hard it is when you try to be clever, backing up the drive to an image, repartitioning, finding out the backup software won’t restore from an image, hooking up a hard drive and two laptops to copy data to a place where the backup software might possibly find it, find out that the computer won’t work when you restore it that way, etc, but I finally had to just go out and buy a $200 external hard drive to do what I needed to do. The backup had to be restored to the $200 hard drive that pretended to be a Mac pretending to be a hard drive. All using Firewire, which is more expensive than a USB external drive. Oh, and I decided to buy the drive at the local Mac chain rather than the Apple Store, and I just realized that I paid an extra $20 or so for the privilege. (Not so bad, actually.)

In any case, I fixed my Mac after days of torturing myself with it. This, combined with my desire to watch as many NFL games as I can, will probably make me irresistible to the women of Portland.

Broken blogs.

Hell, I wouldn’t know if my blog was broken or not. I get like three or four comments on a good week. My sister can get dozens each day. Unfortunately, she breaks the comments sometimes and then I get blamed for it. Apparently one person even said the comment had naughty words in it. (Of course it did, the thing she saw was the words that were being blocked from my sister’s blog.)

The layoffs at Megacorp continue, and while the only promise from the CEO was that the process would be, “open and fair,” the whole thing is getting more secretive as it progresses. Not that I have all that much to say about it. THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES!

Pining for my laptop.

So I’m still waiting for my laptop to come back from repairs. I just got some software I bought that needs the new laptop to run.

I wish I could say something interesting happened today, but it was just another frustrating day at work, trying to get my computer to behave. Fortunately, I think I got some help on the intarweb on an IRC channel. If you don’t know what that is, just think chat room only full of people even geekier than a regular chat room. Oh, what nerdy depths I must plumb to come up with such information.

I’ve been keeping an email around as an example of the quality of writing I expect in my daily correspondence:

Hy there! It has been a long time since I haven’t heared about you!

Pretty good, huh? It’s from a friend of a friend of Claire. I think the only Claire I know is my friend’s late parents’ friend, who is a nun. It’s pretty sad when I’m actually waiting for emails from Gouranga.