They admitted my mom for observation and pain management. I took her to the ER for possible abdominal bleeding and appendicitis and it turns out she doesn’t have an appendix. She’s been admitted for observation and pain management which generally means that her primary care quack and his “just take Tylenol” crap was way off base. They think she may have gallstones or something like that.

And once again, I’m at the hospital until 3AM. I wish I could have had dinner this time.

There were small things I meant to do and I’m still taking baby steps. I still haven’t done any USB programming, but I did solder some wires onto my RFID card reader. This required some moving of crap in the basement so I could actually get to my soldering iron. I found out that I can read and write certain types of smart cards and unfortunately that’s only the one that came with the reader. Back to the drawing board.

I made it into the gym today and saw Dave the Trainer even though he’s no longer working there. I think the joblessness thing is getting to him as much as it’s getting to me. He has options – finding another gym isn’t overly difficult – but it’s still stressful. I suppose I should be looking harder for a new job too.

I suppose the most success I had tonight was donating a computer to Portland State. It’s an old SPARC server that I never plugged in because I was afraid it’d suck up too much juice but they have server rooms for that sort of thing. Hooray for education.

You’d think a guy with as much experience at being rejected as I do would be better at it than I am. However, it’s more like being allergic to something. It upsets me more easily sometimes. Yesterday I got my formal rejection email about the job I most recently applied for. And today my co-worker told me he was probably going to take the job that we both applied for and that I actually wanted. He’s being rewarded for doing absolutely nothing for a year while I worked my ass doing things I thought were ridiculous. Life’s fair like that.

My mom’s leg still hurts and when my sister came over this morning she noticed that the area where she fell on was hard, so I called the doctor again today, a day after I last called him. His medical assistant was an awful shrew, yelling at me, “I TOLD YOU YESTERDAY THAT THE DOCTOR SAID IT WOULD TAKE A LONG TIME TO GET BETTER. ONLY CALL IF IT GETS HOT TO THE TOUCH.” The tenure of a Medical Assistant is usually quite short and I hope she’s gone soon.

Additionally, I kind of felt like I’m coming down with a cold.

But I suppose it’s not all bad today. A few months ago my friend Sun sent me some cookies from Amai Tea & Bake House and one of the cans was full of crushed cookies. Well, the owner of Amai, Kelli, saw my comment and sent me a new tin of cookies and they’re fine!

Also, I got this weird USB microscope when I was in Japan from Thanko, or the Raremono Store. I had it out earlier to look in my ear and today I decided I should try getting it running in English instead of Japanese. I haven’t gotten it to work on my Mac yet, but I found the driver on Vimicro’s web site. I got it to work by downloading the camera detector from the same site. Here’s a video of my teeth. It doesn’t seem to work quite right on my Mac and obviously, I need to floss.

I really need to find a new job.

I was invited to a Christmas Party and a Hanukkah Party on Saturday. Fortunately, they didn’t completely overlap and the Christmas party was next door at my neighbor’s house. The Hanukkah party was far away, closer to Megacorp and traffic was awful. They were both interesting, though the neighbor’s party was a little more yuppie than I’d care to visit on a regular basis. I was about to go all lefty on one of the Republican yuppies, but just left for the Hanukkah party instead. Fortunately, the Hanukkah party was at a co-worker’s place and we share a similar, cynical, world view.

Other than that I guess I’m getting closer to the end of my massage thingy. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do after going through the course of 12, because It’s not like everything is all perfect now. For example, the horribly painful right-side IT band massage from last week was repeated on the left side, and I could have sworn he did that already. We’ll see, I suppose.

I was supposed to be at a party tonight with a plethora of libertines but I’m at home watching TV. Earlier in the day I had a visit from an annoying friend of mine who wouldn’t leave and demanded snacks for his daughter. He thinks that exposing people to his daughter will make us love her instead of filling us with murderous rage. In any case, the party was run by another friend who is equally annoying. Since I had my fill of annoyance for the day, I decided not to go. Besides, it was a part of “SantaCon” where a bunch of bunch of annoying Burning Man-ish trust fund hipsters get together, dress up as Santa, and annoy the general population. I didn’t need any part of that.

Earlier in the day I had to accompany my sister to a Cisco dealer to listen to a presentation for the place she works for. They’re trying to get a phone system set up and I was her technical backup. It was almost TWO HOURS LONG. Then I had to help reinstall Vista on the Vaio I told her not to buy. I was unsuccessful. Man, do I hate Sony laptops.

I had my passport for nearly 10 years and it had nearly expired before I finally left the country again. I’m getting really boring. Heck, I hardly ever leave the state and Washington is 20 minutes away when the traffic isn’t bad.

I did go into work today and I’ve realized that I’m being quite the slacker about applying for jobs. I should be hounding people because, well, that’s what it takes in Megacorp. Unfortunately, I don’t really have it in me to hound people for some of the jobs I’ve applied for. Maybe when desperation starts setting in. It hasn’t started quite yet.

So L.A. Fitness has taken over the gym and the place feels a little different already. I was in early, so a lot of the people looked unfamiliar as well. I guess the independent personal trainers were given a week to clear out and they’re probably happy to be gone. As a native Oregonian, L.A. is the last thing I want to see moving into the area.

I tried to get out of the gym early, and I wasn’t too late. I had dinner with friends who wanted to try a Japanese restaurant downtown which has had great sushi the times I’ve gone. They wanted to let the sushi guys decide what to make and were afraid they wouldn’t be able to tell them that one of them had food allergies. The waitress ended up speaking great English so there was no problem at all. Well, at least we all got to eat great sushi and Murata in Portland lived up to its reputation.

I postponed my dental checkup twice and I usually don’t postpone it at all. The first time I was in Japan and second time I had an interview that I still haven’t heard back from. I finally made it in and I had a new hygienist who was a bit weird.

The hygienist seemed to be a bit new to dealing with real people. She said, “RELAX YOUR LIPS,” and then grabbed my upper lip. I’ve never heard that before and I’ve never had anyone grab my lip before. I can imagine that dental hygienists have trouble saying the same things over and over but usually they tell me to, “close my mouth,” or, “close my lips,” around the tube that sucks all the liquid out of my mouth and, “open,” or just, “OK,” to tell me to open my mouth again. This hygienist said, “G’head,” to tell me to close my mouth around the tube and, “Mm, hmm,” to tell me to open my mouth again. And she kept hitting my teeth with her tools.

I wasn’t in the best of moods anyway. I had trouble sleeping because of the storm. The rain on the window and the roof kept waking me up. Then, when I thought about sleeping in, the doctor about my mom’s prescription. My mom also told me she was having “hip pain” because of a fall she took in the hospital (she fell on her ass and it started hurting even more today). So I had to make an appointment for her and then throw on some clothes to take her to the doctor. Then I had to rush home and get ready for my dental appointment.

The rest of my day wasn’t as bad. It was miserable outside, windy and pouring and I was lucky enough to be able to hide after lunch. There are trees falling on houses and creeks flooding people out. I’m lucky to just be stuck in the house.

I always liked the idea of buying Sears appliances because it was easy to go to the Sears store and buy replacement parts if something broke. Unfortunately, that theory is kind of busted for our refrigerator. Little plastic bits keep breaking in our “Hecho en Mexico” refrigerator and they’re expensive to replace. The front of the vegetable crisper was first, and now one of the rails a roll-out freezer basket is broken. I hate buying extended warrantees, but maybe it’s necessary if every little piece of plastic is going to break and costs $90 to replace.

Other than that the only excitement I had today was to go to the Nike Factory Store and buy some golf clothes. Not like I’ve played since the weather’s turned to crap, but I can always dream. (And I can dream that my slice has gone away, too.)

So today I really did do almost nothing. I even skipped my weekly breakfast with my buddy Greg because I ate so much last night that I wasn’t hungry until dinner tonight. But I did go over and fix some problems my sister was having with her computers. Really, though, I sat around, watched football, and felt like I shouldn’t have eaten so much last night. Sort of like vacation.