Is the weekend of gluttony finally ended?

You know there’s something fishy when your sister’s dinner came to $10 and yours came to $91. She only had a salad (at Ringside! the horror!) and I had a steak, two glasses of wine, and cheesecake. I figure the only thing healthy about it was the grapes in the wine and the blueberries in the cheesecake. All that working out for naught! It was a friend’s birthday party and we only get together twice a year, usually, at the Ringside and it’s another group where we could talk all night. In fact, I quit going to their get-togethers a while ago because I’d be the first one to leave at 3AM. We’d all just sit around and talk that long and we weren’t even drinking. I enjoyed it, but I’m old and I also enjoy my sleep.

Speaking of sleep, something kept me up late last night. I wasn’t able to sleep really well and it was one of those nights where you could swear you were up tossing and turning the whole time. It just seems odd to me when I’m usually doing the opposite and sleeping all day long. I wish I could just get the hang of not sleeping while I’m at work.

Almost through with my weekend of gluttony.

It’s Thanksgiving weekend and I can’t believe how much I’ve actually eaten. I know “’tis the season” but really, steak from Costco on Wednesday, too much delicious turkey at my sister’s on Thursday, leftovers from my sister’s on Friday, an outing to 50 Plates on Saturday, and tomorrow (or later today depending on what time this gets posted) I’m going to a birthday party at Ringside. I lost a bunch of weight when I got back from Japan because my mom was out of town but I’m making up for it now. There’s a 850 lb limit on what I’m supposed to carry in my Civic and I may hit that limit if I’m not careful.

NOW I’m sick.

Of course i usually get sick during long weekends instead of during the work week. I mean, my job has a fairly liberal sick leave policy so I should get sick during the week, right? I suppose I’m busy enough at work that being sick during the weekend is just as well. I don’t have to go back and clean up after the mess I’ve made by being away.

I even had to leave the gym early because I got a crick in my neck during the workout and then my lower back started to hurt. So I sat around watching movies today. I think I’ve known that I don’t like breakup movies and now I can remember why. My last breakup was years ago, but nothing good has happened because of it. I don’t need a movie to remind me of how miserable that can make you feel and I have no idea whether I’m ever going to have a new relationship like the one that ends those movies.

Well, off to take more ibuprofen and hope that my back feels better soon. I think the last time I hurt my back I was sick as well, and that time I was out for an entire month. At least the expensive bits of my tile are in now, and the thing I have to look forward to — my bathroom — is getting closer to completion.

Happy Turkey Day.

What a sleepy day. I got up and went to the gym way too early for me and then sort of stumbled around until I took a nap. I don’t know if it’s because it’s early or because of the weather, but I could have slept all day. It was a good thing that I didn’t because I would have missed dinner at my sister’s which included turkey with all the trimmings including two types of cranberry sauce. One was even from Parade Magazine.

Not much going on, but that’s a holiday for you.

Things not to do when leaving work early.

It’s the start of a long weekend, so I left work a little early. One of the labs I need support from told me that I should expect help on Tuesday at the earliest, so I thought that was a sign that I should just go home at lunchtime. I had lunch with my mom at a Korean restaurant that’s in a gas station and that’s where I found out that you shouldn’t eat the spicy noodles using standard noodle-eating techniques. Eating noodles with chopsticks usually involves a lot of slurping and that means the pepper flakes go straight into your throat and immediately trigger a cough. My mom had the curry and didn’t have the same problems I did.

So, I decided to make good use of my time off and watch a lot of the TV shows I had missed this season. NCIS was fine, but watching too many episodes of CSI was kind of gloomy. Too many episodes of The Office is kind of sad. It’s a good thing I had Bones and Chuck on the list as well.

So there you go. I finally had some time to be a couch potato. It was nice.

Get well soon THMFIC.

I don’t think I can blame a cold on my lack of motivation at the gym. I never did get sick. This week, however, I’ve been having trouble getting to sleep and maybe I could use that as an excuse. I haven’t been able to beat any of the yoots in weeks.

While I can say, so far, that I haven’t come down with anything, THMFIC seems to have come down with a cold. I’ve only known him for about a year, but I’m guessing he’s not one of the odd people who can be sick and non-demanding at the same time. So here’s hoping that the brains behind the gym (his wife Tina) survives this ordeal.

I’m very glad this is a short week at work. I’m too beat right now to think of anything clever. Not even about the last thing I asked my mom to buy me in Japan, AN ELECTRIC NOSE HAIR TRIMMER. Yeah, you get old and you worry about this sort of stuff, or about somehow poking yourself in the nostril with sharp scissors. So, instead of worrying, you want some contraption built by the Japanese or maybe the Swiss to trim your nose hairs. Nice and sharp and non-dangerous. I wouldn’t suggest any American gadgets made by Wahl or sold at Brookstone, nor any other half-assed trimmers from the land of the Flowbee. Other than that I think she got me some thermal undershirts from Uniqlo. Basically, it’s better that I go shopping for myself.

What planning.

I bought a brand new huge hard drive and I was going to put it into one of the hard drive cases I already have. I broke a warranty seal on one and the plastic side of another and it turns out the hard drive has a different cable than either of the cases. Now I have to buy another case (and tape together the broken case) and it’s going to be more expensive than if I just bought a huge hard drive already in the case. Hooray.

I did, however, get my fancy toilet seat today — a Toto SW554-01 Elongated Front Washlet S300 in Cotton White — but without the rest of the bathroom it’s kind of useless. Just another thing I have to look forward to, I guess. At least I have something to look forward to.

Outside procrastination help.

Where’s that Todd guy been? Did something exciting happen in his life? Or did he just get so boring that he didn’t have anything to complain about?

Well, I didn’t destroy my computer with the beta Macintosh OS and I haven’t been sent on any impossible quests by my sister. (Check out her blog to see the pens I got for her in action.) Friday night I stayed up too late reading the translated Japanese Old Boy graphic novels that were the inspiration for the Korean movie Old Boy. They’re both messed up in their individual ways, but different. I can’t remember what I was doing Saturday besides helping my mom slowly move things back into her room. All in all, quite boring and fortunately much calmer than the frantic moving out that we did to begin with.

Today was my day for raking leaves and cleaning out the gutters. The leaves haven’t completely fallen out of the trees, but it wasn’t raining so I had to do as much as I could. Of course, it ended up being pretty dark by the time I finished, and I just remembered that I left a wheelbarrow full of leaves sitting in the backyard.

In the morning, before I could get out and grab my rake I got a call from Staff Sgt. Evan Smith who was getting up some of my extra computer equipment including a brand-new printer/scanner and an LCD monitor. It was stuff I’d been hoarding in case I needed it, and I figured he needed it more than I did. Plus, it got more stuff out of the house. In exchange, he helped me move the heaviest piece of my mom’s furniture, a display case, back into her room. It was lighter than I remember, but I couldn’t have done it on my own. He also bought me lunch at the Super Burrito Express, where I haven’t been for nine years. Plus, he’s a complete crack-up and it’s fun hearing stories from a witty 24-year-old military adventurer.

When I got home from lunch, I was ready to pick up the rake but had to help my mom put the shelves back into her display case. About the time the rake started calling to me once again, we had another visitor: my dad’s goofy friend Ben. Ben wrote a well-known book, The Tao of Pooh, and more people know him by his full name, Benjamin Hoff. I don’t think I’d seen him since my dad’s funeral. I showed him the mess that the contractors made, and we discussed the difficulties of clearing out our parents’ belongings.

So finally, onto the raking. My next door neighbor, who is doing an addition to his house, was out raking as well, so we had to show each other how the contractors have been hard at work at our respective houses. I don’t think I’ve seen him since the summer, and he lives right next door. In any case, I finally got to raking around 2PM and I finally got to the gutters after 4PM. What a mess that was. Fortunately, I didn’t fall off the ladder, though I had plenty of chances.

So if reading about moving rooms into boxes was too exciting, you now have the ability to read about raking leaves. It’s spectacular, isn’t it?

Capital “L” Loser

My co-worker was talking about how he plays “Rock Band” on his Wii all the time and I countered with what I’ve been doing for the past couple of days: moving gigabytes of data around several hard drives in preparation for loading a beta copy of Mac OS X onto my laptop. He called me a big loser. I suppose he’s right and this is just a case of upgrade fever gone amok but whatever. It’s what I do for fun.

Now that we’ve established that I’m a big fat loser with no life, I must admit I haven’t figured out why people will read what I write and then expect me to change. These must be the same people who yell at the TV during Wheel of Fortune and expect to change the outcome of the game. The intarweb is full of things besides my blog and pr0n so I figure anyone who is disappointed by the lack of good news in my life should probably find something else to look at. Google for “shiba inu puppy webcam” or something. Sheesh.

My mom arrived home safely, but the painters don’t appear to have done anything to finish her bedroom besides leaving the door open to let the paint fumes dissipate. Hooray for progress.

Lack of motivation.

I’ve been sneezing since I left the gym and I wonder if I’m coming down with a cold. That, some more body aches than normal, and my total lack of motivation make me wonder. A lack of motivation at work is one thing, but I can usually get going after a warmup at the gym. And I came in DFL today. I’m not sure how, either. Oh, well, maybe it’s just seasonal.

My mom should be back tomorrow and I was hoping that her room would be closer to done than it is right now. Some more is supposed to be done tomorrow, but right now there’s no place for her to go. Her bedroom is being painted, the living room where she watches videos is full of my bedroom, and the kitchen where she does her puzzles is blocked by her desk from the bedroom. I hope we can move most of the bigger stuff back tomorrow so she’ll have some sort of useable space.

Now if only I can shake off this cold, if it is a cold. I can’t avoid going to work because I have a long planning meeting and then I’m going to a memorial service for a ham radio acquaintance. Life just keeps moving apace.

No gas left in the tank.

I was almost late to the gym today because Jay the Contractor was here checking up on his subcontractors and delivering the bathroom cabinets. They look pretty good. My pre-workout was helping him carry the cabinets up the stairs.

We had a quick sprint workout today and for some reason we were all pretty iffy in class today. We only went 3 rounds, but I assed out on the final run to the corner and just walked. I still wasn’t DFL because my row and ball slams were pretty quick but I felt like my lunch had formed a tight knot in my stomach and it just didn’t feel right. I never push myself to the point of throwing up because I’m old and I don’t care enough and I wasn’t about to start pushing myself that hard at this point. I mean, really, so I can beat someone to the corner and back. How is that in line with my goals? I remember I used to have three criteria for almost everything I did:

  1. Is it going to kill me?
  2. Is it going to get me chicks?
  3. Is it going to make me money?

That list was really just for show, because I hardly do anything that could even hurt me, let alone kill me; I am not doing anything to attract the opposite sex (check out my hobbies like ham radio); and I’m more likely to tell my employer to place a large sum of money in one of his excretory orifices than to put it in my bank account in the form of a raise. I’m really bad at being a cutthroat capitalist success story. I’m more likely to torpedo my own boat, so to speak.

Lazy and self-destructive. Maybe I should rewrite my 3 criteria:

  1. Does it require me to leave the house? (The nice warm house with internet and cable TV?)
  2. Can I take a nap instead?
  3. Are you going to eat that?

Much better.

Getting nothing and liking it.

Turns out THMFIC at the gym is really sensitive about what I write about him, so I’m going to blithely ignore his objections and keep saying whatever the hell I feel like saying. Depressing things that don’t exaggerate his complaining ONE IOTA. Hah.

One of the songs heard at the gym is the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The simple philosophy appeals to many, including THMFIC. I can list the things I couldn’t get tonight.

  • I went out to look for a cheap furnace air filter. Turns out the only ones I could find that fit are at Home Depot and cost $31. With all the dust generated by the construction, I figured I get some cheaper ones, but I can’t find any.
  • The bathroom sink doesn’t drain very well, so I took it all apart again and snaked the drain. I got nasty wastewater all over me, and the improvement is minimal.
  • I wanted to come home to less of a mess than the contractors made.

The other part of the song says, “You find sometimes, you get what you need.” All I really got today was dinner at Popeye’s Fried Chicken. I’m not sure I needed that and I’m fairly sure that my arteries didn’t need it at all. I also need to iron some shirts, but that conflicts with a need to get some sleep before I go to work tomorrow. I also needed to get the garbage out to the curb, and I got that, so I guess sometimes I do get what I need. I declare victory: time for sleep.