Stupid old man.

I just felt like a washed up old man at the gym today. I was tired early, and trying to run outside in the windy 40°F weather was pure misery. I actually had to put on more clothing in the middle of the workout and I needed a hat. I even went to bed early yesterday and I felt more Monday morning malaise than usual.

So why am I trying to watch episodes of Party Down, read through a dozen emails, 403 news items, and 249 tweets while also answering work email? I also have to watch the weekly episode of the web series Non-Esssential Personnel. I think I might be better off without the intarweb at nights, but meh, we all have our issues. It’s not like I have anything better to do.

Getting things going.

I did very little today after getting up rather late. I think all the garlic I ate last night was finally catching up to me, and it caught up while I was sleeping. I’ve found it useful just to stay in bed when my stomach hurts, at least it gives me yet another reason to sleep in. But the lack of any real football games gave me time to take care of a bunch of little tasks that I’ve been putting off for weeks. Sanding the downstairs bathroom and priming, check. Priming the replaced outside shingles, check. Cleaning the shower, check. Putting in the bathroom coathook, check. Finally putting the doorbell on the wall, not so much, since someone is borrowing my drill.

I also was fooling around with getting more than one operating system on my new computer. I got it working, but I wasn’t sure it was as fast as I’d like it, so now it’s just sitting around idling again. I suppose eventually I’ll figure out what I’m going to do with it, which would be good since I did spend a bunch of money on it. I suppose it’s been a fun distraction so far, so that’s not so bad.

Too much trust in my DVR.

I NEED MY FRINGE. I don’t really need Portlandia, so I’m not worried about that. For some reason my DVR didn’t pick up that there were new shows tonight and now I have to count on the shows replaying sometime soon. How sad that my life depends on TV shows and an iffy piece of electronics. Speaking of which, my Comcast internet connection seems a bit iffy as well. I love technology.

Beyond that, I’m just doing whatever it is I’m doing, in whatever unorganized fashion I usually do it. Vague and aimless, that’s me.

Chicken and egg.

The computer struggles continue. The onboard network is too new to be recognized by my system software and I want to try to add it, but it’s hard to get files onto the computer easily without a network connection. I think I’m going to need a lot of time with this monstrosity to get it working correctly.

I had a heck of a time getting to sleep last night and I have no idea why. Perhaps it was because I had a 7AM appointment with a doctor. A dermatologist, actually. It was the easiest appointment I’ve ever had, since the parking lot was empty and the doctor didn’t take very long to look at me and tell me I was fine. He had some suggestions about what he could do with the weird thingy on my face (some sort of oil or fat gland thingy, I quit listening too carefully after he told me it was benign) but really it isn’t big enough to worry about.

Oh, and I found out that SOMEONE LOVES ME. Or at least someone WANTS me. Too bad it’s just the courts and it’s jury duty. This is my fourth or fifth time and I’ve only seen the inside of a courtroom once. It’s usually lots of sitting in a big uncomfortable waiting room, hoping there’s a place to plug in my laptop. So it’s sort of like work.

Aaaaaigh.

So somehow I was convinced that the new processors made by a certain processor company are much faster. So I ordered a processor and a motherboard. They arrived today (stupid tracking told me they did) and so I went out and bought a new case, power supply, RAM, hard disk, and CD/DVD drive. I put it all together and went to plug in the video monitor when I realized, IT DIDN’T COME WITH BUILT-IN VIDEO. One of the biggest advancements in this processor is the graphics, but the motherboard has nothing that uses it. AAAIGH. Now I have to go out and find a video card before I can tell if this thing even works. Yeesh.

Man, I think I’m still really tired. I went to the gym but I should have had someone follow me with a wheelbarrow so they could haul my carcass around. For that reason, I meant to go to sleep early. HAH!

Still tired.

After sleeping eight hours, I still passed out during the third quarter of the NFC championship game, or as a gym friend said, “the sportsball match.” I guess I’m still tired from something or another and another week of that is about to start. Whatever.

I did manage to move the doorbell around again, and now it’s closer to my office. One of these days I’ll figure out how to get it into the hallway and I can stop all the nonsense. Ah well, nothing much else going on. Just as well, but why couldn’t I be sick during a work day? I have sick days to take.

Better than hallucination.

I got home from my twice-yearly gluttony with Il and went to bed right away. I was pretty tired. But I didn’t seem to sleep all that well and when I finally got up I wondered if I was just getting too old for the kind of excesses I’ve been used to. I cut down on the food and on the drinking, but maybe splitting a bottle of wine three ways and then having a dessert cocktail is too much now. All I had planned was to go to the gym and then crawl around in the attic today, but I didn’t get to any of that. I went back to bed and slept in until 1:20PM.

When I finally got up I figured out that I wasn’t hung over, I was just coming down with something. The difference was sort of like the difference of having a cold vs having the ‘flu. What felt bad wasn’t the same. Plus, I slept well most of the time and had weird dreams. The construction noises from next door were incorporated into a dream about an awning project over our driveway that my dad was overseeing. Later I was watching people innertubing down a ski slope and my co-worker convinced me to glissade down because there was a free soda machine at the bottom. The soda machine was Japanese, with Japanese Fanta in it. All very bizarre and amusing.

I spent most of the day just sitting around watching TV from the past week and finally saw Portlandia, the show all the California transplants think is so funny. It’s OK, but I didn’t find it that interesting. Things that annoy me about Portland were on the show annoying me. Hipsters, check. Hippies, check. And I hate when people complain about Portland drivers. The only time I drive slowly is when I don’t care, or when I’m purposely trying to fuck with some douchebag who is speeding on a city street. On the freeways I agree with the speeding. On the surface streets I think people need to go the speed limit. If you think the driving is bad then MOVE THE FUCK BACK TO CALIFORNIA where you can either drive 90 or drive 5 because of the awful fucking traffic jams.

I suppose I’m just too much a native Portlander. I remember meeting a friend’s wife a few years ago (ex-wife now) who as well as being loud and large, she wanted to me to know she was a belly dancer. “I AM A BELLY DANCER! DO YOU KNOW ANY BELLY DANCERS? I BET YOU DON’T KNOW ANY OTHER BELLY DANCERS!” Uh, I grew up in Portland. I know several. The friend went on to date several exotic dancers (strippers to you and me) because there are a lot of them here. No shortage of meth or narcissism and so you should be able to follow the cause and effect.

So tired.

I should probably stop reading so many RSS feeds and twitter. I’m not being as obsessive about Facebook, so I’m making slow headway, but I stay up way too late reading nonsense. I already read the crap printed in our local newspaper most days and listen to NPR. I also listen to several nonsense podcasts. I have to cut down.

And why am I checking my sister’s blog for spam? Shouldn’t she be doing that?

There are hard days at the gym and there are easy days. This has been a hard week. I feel so beat up right now and the best thing I could be doing is going to sleep early, I’m sure. But who has that kind of sense?

Oh, and we had a work function at Big Al’s today, a big bowling alley/arcade chain. What possessed them to get the domain name ilovebigals.com? The first time I saw it I thought it said, “I love bi gals,” which is pretty normal for Portland but is a bit sketchy for my corporate workplace. At least I know now what $20 of skeeball feels like and I bowled a 145 on a dark and flashy bowling alley too. Didn’t win anything and listening to the MC made it feel like work, but it actually could have been work, which it wasn’t. Back on our heads tomorrow.

Now what?

I had some half-baked theory I was going to expound on, but I think I’ve forgotten what it was. It probably wasn’t about fairy dust, but who knows? I am a step closer to getting my upstairs doorbell chime installed. I mail-ordered a bigger doorbell transformer and now I can run both sets of chimes with no problem. I can’t believe how much work I’ve done to get a second doorbell chime installed, and nobody ever comes here anyway. I suppose if I was holed up in my office upstairs and I got a package delivered I could hear the doorbell. And I do love my Amazon Prime.

Ah well. At least the doorbell hasn’t been an expensive project. All the more money to spend at Ringside for Il’s birthday dinner on Friday. Hooray for that.

My next big vacation.

I take a two week trip to Japan every year (or at least I’ve done it a lot lately) and pretty soon I think I’ll have eight weeks of vacation I can take at once. My current plan, which I came up with while drinking, is to get an apartment in Tokyo and waste a bunch of time there. I’ve never lived in Tokyo, and this could be a grand adventure. The other plan is to get the apartment in Osaka, because I’ve lived near there in the past and I like it better but, really, which has more adventure potential?

Maybe I can live somewhere in the sticks instead. Some of the smaller cities have even better fun to be had and I kind of think that the air in Tokyo is pretty bad. And what could be lonelier than being by myself in a crowded city? I’m sure I could look up some old friends there and maybe just sit around watching TV for a while. I should, probably, find something to do or I’m going to end up spending a lot of money like I usually do when I’m bored.

Yeesh. Planning. I’d much rather wing it. Well, I have almost two years to think about it.