Sun asked if she’d forgotten my birthday but, no, she remembered it’s in APRIL. So that means it took eight months for this stupid thing to arrive. It’s “just” a USB connected radio with some recording features, but now I can record some NPR shows so I can listen to them later.
Not much I can say about work or the gym, except that one of my old bosses is often there and he’s buff as hell now. After he sold the internet startup I worked at, he hiked the Pacific Crest Trail solo. He wears shirts from some military combat camp where he went to play soldier. Yeesh.
Oh, and Carolyn appears to have eaten something horrible that doesn’t want to digest peacefully in her stomach. How does one get ginger ale delivered to your door when you’re sick and away from people who’d do that for you? I suggested safeway.com but there aren’t any Safeways in Chicago. And gone are the dot-bomb delivery services of homegrocer.com and even better, kozmo.com. Now that I think of it, she could have ordered the soda from a pizza delivery place, but who wants to call around to pizza delivery places looking for ginger ale when you’re tossing your cookies? I’ll have to think about this.
Or is it me? The sound quality is a lot better than previous phones but that’s probably because I’m using a Motorola flip phone with a microphone closer to my mouth than the candy-bar Nokia’s I’ve had before. And I can do a lot more like take videos or pictures and email them. But it all costs more money. And Cingular is more expensive than most everyone else. Oh, well. I guess that’s just life.
I think my birthday present is about to arrive. The RadioShark my sister got for me last year was scheduled to arrive today according to FedEx, but they told me “mechanical failures” delayed the package. I first heard about the RadioShark a couple of years ago and it’s finally being shipped. We’ll see how useful a TiVo-like radio thingy is.
Oh, and I found out what the explosions I saw were. On my way home, at about 7:30PM, the sky lit up like they were shooting off aerial bomb fireworks off in the distance. I thought it might be transformers blowing up on the ridge, but the arc of sky that was lit up was too wide. And it couldn’t have been lightning because the sky was too clear. I found out that it was a problem at a substation 15 miles away in North Plains, OR. Holy crap. Sounds like no one was hurt by the explosion. I hope the lack of electricity didn’t do more damage than that.
OK, so I’m not the one missing work since it was a beautiful Sunday. But beautiful days around the start of the year in Oregon mean it was BUTT COLD. Here’s a puny picture from my cell phone. The phone has a short focal length meant for taking pictures of people a couple feet away, but I took a picture of a mountain hundreds (at least dozens) of miles away. I cut out most of the sky and freeway, as they were uninteresting:
National Lampoon’s Movie Madness is on and I decided to watch it. It doesn’t compare favorably to the bad westerns I saw yesterday: A Fistful of Dollars (a ripoff of Yojimbo, which is, in turn, a ripoff of a Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest), For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I know people think they’re masterpieces but, really, unless they were chopped up for TV, the movies aren’t that good.
I went to the gym today and they finished moving the equipment around and I’m not really sure that it’s an improvement. Previously, my favorite machine was the Bodymasters vertical chest press and my second favorite was the StairMaster StepMill. This was because I found $0.75 in quarters near the vertical chest press and $0.25 on the StepMill. Now that things are moved around, I don’t what my favorite machine will be (or why there’s so many quarters rolling around the gym.)
