You know there’s something wrong.

I spent most of the day looking for cell phones on the intarweb. I also had several meetings, and more of my time was probably spent in different meetings, but the one thing I did the most of is looking for cell phones. I’ve been told I need to get my mom a new cell phone, and that means we’re getting me a new phone and she can have my old Razr. I think I’ve decided on the Samsung Sync, but we’ll see how that ends up. I think I better do it soon before it impacts my job any more.

Speaking of impacting my job, I just met with my new manager’s manager and we’re supposed to carry on as normal right now. Unfortunately I’m kind of in a lull and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing, besides waiting for outside vendors to get back to me. Oh, well, I suppose waiting is part of working.

Nobody called me names at the gym today.

I stood around at work today wondering what I was doing there. All this due to a three-day weekend and a reorganization of our group. Nothing is different, but it’s not the same, either.

It’s hot today and I made it to the gym, like I always do. Nobody called me names, but there was this guy who smelled like pickles. Actually, Dave the trainer thought he smelled sour, like rotting garbage, but I’m sticking with pickles. Once again I was impeding the serious people there, but there’s this one woman who does the cable chop like she was doing the robot. It’s interesting to watch. Too bad she didn’t do it tonight.

My head hurts.

I had a list of things I was going to do today but I woke up with a headache. I think I inhaled too much dust running the chipper yesterday and stuffed up my sinuses. I ended up taking a couple of nice naps. It’s a holiday, after all. I did end up buying some weed killer but couldn’t use it because there are rambunctious young boys visiting next door. And I looked up the tree my backyard neighbor had planted (and that I cut down) and it’s supposed to be a monster. I’ll probably want to cut down the replacement, too, but it’ll ruin his fence before it does anything else.

I did go golfing again, and this time at a course that wasn’t so hard. I was still the worst but it was a lot more fun. We only played the front 9 or the Eastmoreland course and I heard from several people that the back 9 is a lot harder. There were 3 of us and a kid showed up to fill out the foursome. He was only a junior in high school but he was hitting it 300 yards (like 5-6 times further than I hit it).

It’s supposed to be in the 90’s this week and as a native Oregonian I’m not all that happy. Heck, as a native Oregonian I’m not happy when it gets above the 60’s. Ain’t no way I’m playing golf in that sort of heat.

I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK.

Yesterday I played golf for the second time ever. It was also the fourth time I ever held a golf club. So, where do my “buddies” take me but to the Heron Lakes golf course to the Great Blue course which I saw somewhere was rated one of the hardest courses in the state. Well, it didn’t look that hard but there was plenty of grass and wetlands and I just have lost 30 balls. If I hit it further than 20 feet, it was most likely going to sail into a pond.

I finally got to spend some quality time with the wood chipper today, and my neighbor behind me wasn’t happy. I went to look for them to ask if they had any objections to my cutting down a cedar that my dad planted in no-man’s-land. I’m kind of sure it’s their property, but my dad was planting things there, so that makes the property line murky. Anyway, I also cut down what I thought was a volunteer which happened to be an American Redwood he planted. I told him I’d pay for the replacement and he wasn’t too upset. I don’t think he wanted me to cut down the cedar, either, but it was leaning into our “airspace” so it had to go.

My mom’s crazy Japanese auto mechanic, who lent me the wood chipper, came by to give me a “new” lawn mower. I think it’s lighter than my current mower, and he’s going to sell the metal of the heavier one. In any case, he was impressed by how much progress I made in the backyard. I’m pretty tired, but I have lots more gardening to do. Or maybe I should sort through my dad’s stuff some more. It’s all a big question mark for me. I might just sit around and do nothing since it is a holiday.

All someone else’s story.

I have some stories from today but they’re not really mine. Like how I got an angry phone call from a friend who happened to be a little lost in Olympia, WA. He’s moving to Hawaii, and was driving his car to Seattle where they were going to ship it to Maui for him. I guess they don’t allow cars with cracked windshields into Hawaii so he had to get it fixed before he left, and then driving up to Seattle a truck threw a rock into his brand new windshield. He got off the freeway in the first big town he found (Olympia) and called his dad for directions. Well, his dad is a physician and directions aren’t his strong point. Fortunately for me, I went out with someone from Olympia YEARS ago and I remember the three blocks that make up the town. That, and I can read a map off the intarweb and give semi-coherent directions.

I also heard that Chicago has the most expensive gas in the country, which makes some sense because it also has the highest paid person that I actually know. If I actually thought about it, I probably know some highly paid surgeons or something but I don’t think of them very often and I can’t even think of who they’d be right now. Come to think of it, my friend who is moving to Hawaii has a dad who probably makes a boatload of money, so I take it back, it’s not fair that Chicago has the most expensive gas in the country. Lake Oswego, Oregon should have the most expensive gas in the country. Actually, we should just force them to secede from the Union and put a fence around them. (I have issues with rich people.)

So I have been going to the gym and this week I was called a weirdo by one guy, and another guy kind of implied I’m a geek. Geez, and with all the fancy gym clothes I wear, like the Jelly Belly World Tour shirt I wore on Tuesday or the Intel vPro/Microsoft Management Conference shirt I wore today, how would anyone think I was a geek?

Eco-turrist.

When I think of the word “eco-turrist” I think of someone committing turrist acts on nature. I’ve been accused of such acts because I cut down two Japanese pear trees in the backyard. They were convicted of the crime of dropping uneaten fruit all over the place. I suppose I could have harvested the fruit and taken them to the shelter, but I’m not sure that the woody fruit would have been very nutritious. Anyway, it’s too late.

It’s springtime and my fantasies are interfering with my work. What fantasies, you might think, and are they going to be TMI? Are they about the young woman at work with the big backyard who keeps giving you the stink-eye? Are they about golf? Today I kept imagining going home and digging up the remnants of the awful crabapple tree that’s in the middle of the backyard, shooting up suckers square in the middle of everything. And I thought about digging up my prized (and ignored) rosebush that had the graft die and went back to being a wild rose.

But it wasn’t to be. When I finally changed into my work clothes, it started to rain and I watched TV instead. So much for fulfilling my fantasies.

Me no like doctors.

One of the reasons I really shouldn’t be a doctor (besides never getting in to medical school) is because I hate doctors. Smug bastards. I oversimplify, though, because there are a lot of pleasant doctors at the gym and just one kind of snarky one. The snarky doctor is the one who the trainers were trying to get me to ask out but I could kind of tell she wasn’t the most pleasant person and, besides, she’s an Asian woman so she’s not going to want to go out with an Asian guy.

Snarkzilla was also mad because everyone was saying she’s a doctor. Well, sheesh, if you wear scrubs to my gym, there’s an 90% chance you’re a doctor, a 9% chance you’re medical staff, and a 1% chance you’re just a freak show. And seriously, I talk to EVERYONE at the gym except for the people who just look incredibly stuck up or scary. And it turns out a lot of the scary guys are pretty sweet and a lot of the stuck up women are pretty nice. And salary.com says the average pay for a cardiologist is $263,722. If you make that much money, just join the damn Multnomah AryanAthletic Club. (Yeah, I have issues with that place, too.)

Anyway, it wasn’t so bad, really. I just thought I’d complain.

Unremarkable disappointment.

I spent most of the day waiting for the two-hour season finale of 24 and I was unsurprisingly disappointed. This whole season was kind of weak and tonight’s plot was kind of obvious. Ah, well. That’s all that happened today.

Well at least with the TV season ending, I should have time to read more books. Or to go out and work on the yard. I need to tear out a lot of plants to make my putting green. Actually, I’m just doing major weeding and getting rid of random overgrown plants that were neglected by my dad. He never would let me do much cutting and I think I’m going to try to get rid of the dark forest look my dad liked. We’ll see how successful I am.

Meanwhile, down at the yacht club…

We finally got around to helping my buddy with the expensive yacht fix his antenna. We probably didn’t need three of us there, but we got things working. Oddly enough, we had a very basic problem (the brass power bus turned out to not be very good at being a bus) but we have enough experience to figure out the simple problems, thank goodness. We made sure the antenna worked as an antenna and declared victory.

After that I went out to a co-worker’s open house. While I don’t envy his commute, his house is in a beautiful location and well-maintained. There tall evergreens all around and views of wooded hills. I think I’d end up filling the place full of crap and letting the yard get overgrown, but it’s a good fit for him. My ultimate house would either be a whole apartment building with separate apartments full of different crap, or a house attached to a warehouse. The heating bills on the warehouse would be awful, I bet.

Unmanly injuries.

A lot of my injuries aren’t very manly, like carpal tunnel and paper cuts. Last Thursday, for example, I got my finger stuck under a weight at the gym and injured a finger. Today I have a couple of cuts on my left hand from a machine gun and from cutting down a tree. It sounds manly, though.

I was supposed to help my rich, but cheap, friend John work on his yacht that’s worth more than the house I live in. Instead I had to drive a bunch of guys an hour down I-5 to a machine gun shoot. I was going to spend all the cash I had in my pocket to shoot some interesting things I never see, like a Lewis gun (off of a pre-WWII biplane) or some huge 50-caliber, or a full-auto pistol, but I didn’t.

What I did do was get back to town too late to dog-sit for my sister. I hope Dede did OK.

Another Friday night.

I spent this Friday evening catching up on TV shows from the last two weeks. I could have sworn there were more, but I had enough season ending cliffhangers to gag a goat. Exciting, eh?

There’s so much stuff to do around the house that I kind of feel overwhelmed. I need to take care of my dad’s “stuff” and then I need to do all the maintenance on the house that hasn’t been done. Last weekend, for example, I finally fixed the shower. This weekend I may pull up some of the old, nasty carpet. It’s enough to make a guy sit around and read a book instead, which is what I did when I first got home. That and take a nap. But then I went out to the garage to find a chainsaw and cut down a tree.

My dad has a bunch of trees he planted and then just left to grow to a monstrous size thanks to the Oregon climate. A couple of the trees are fruit trees and they leave a mess every fall. One fruit tree was planted in the neighbors yard, so that’s going to drop apples on our garage forever. The two Japanese pears trees, however, are going. They’re the old-school Japanese pears that aren’t as sweet and it’s harder to give those away than zucchini. Perhaps I’m not trying hard enough. Anyway, I get to pretend I know what I’m doing and run the chainsaw for a while. Chainsaws make Oregon men feel more manly. Heh.

Oh, and I should mention that my stomach HURTS, especially when I sneeze. Too many sit ups. Darn that Dave.

I have to learn to get to bed earlier.

I’m not sure what I was doing until now but I did go to the acupuncturist and then had dinner with my ma, sis, and brother-in-law. I paid some bills, rebuilt an OS, crashed the computer, sent in the crash log, and now it’s tomorrow and I’m going to be up in less than six hours. I am a moron.

I’m uncertain why there are so many people extolling the virtues of Burgerville. If they’d ever gone to the one near the convention center, they’d know what kind of inedible pucks they’re capable of putting out. And the one by Megacorp in Hillsburrito isn’t all that good, either. I still haven’t had a bad burger at In-N-Out. So there. I have to admit I still remember liking Big Macs, but they make my stomach hurt.