I don’t have enough sense to go to sleep on time, but when I do finally get to sleep I’m having trouble sleeping. When I go to bed early, I seem to wake up early, and way before the time I want to get up. How is this fair. Oh, well, I guess I’ll have to deal with it.

The hope of Sunday was extinguished by the reality of Monday. Actually, I had a head start when I checked my work email last night. Not much more to be said about it, but the daily drudgery has begun anew. Or so I can think with this crossing of the artificial boundary into 2010. Yeesh, I’m getting bleak here. That’s what happens when I don’t get my cheeseburger ration. Or maybe it’s the government nanobots in the H1N1 vaccine altering my body chemistry.

OK, sheesh, it’s Monday. Don’t I get a day to get morose? I actually blame it all on a LACK OF DESSERT. I’m hungry and I need a cookie but it’s a weeknight and all I had was a salad for dinner. I suppose I can go back to fantasizing about the semifreddo at Wildwood, or the bread pudding at Hopworks. Oh, heck, why don’t I just think about the cheeseburger at the Carlyle again? If I keep this up I won’t be able to sleep.

I just spent the last couple of hours spending a bunch of money on electrical crap. More outlets, switches, ethernet jacks, wall plates, and other boring things that most people wouldn’t care about but I figure I should just buy everything and worry about it later. I got started on the buying because somehow I got sidetracked today. I have my list of errands, but I wanted to sit on my fat ass and watch football until it was time to go to Foster Burger for dinner. Turns out they didn’t have any football games today, only massacres, so I started in on my list of errands.

Getting an H1N1 vaccine is a lot easier now. In fact, I called the local Fred Meyer and Walgreens and they wanted me to sign up for Tuesday’s waiting list, but then I called QFC and they just told me not to come in too late. It’s the same QFC with the Coinstar machine that spits out Amazon gift certificate codes for “free”. Instead of losing 8.5% for the privilege of using the machine, I get a gift certificate for 100% of the change I pour into the machine. Then I waste the gift certificate on electrical outlets and telephones. I also bought a 2-line phone for the two lines in the house.

I had $29.57 worth of coins, and my insurance paid for the H1N1 vaccine. I think it might have been the vaccine that lead to my stomach upset, but who knows. All I know is that my stomach felt funny. I did end up running yet another phone line and Ethernet drop upstairs and that required a lot of crawling around in the attic, and I also started thinking about wiring a light into the bedroom closet. The bad part is that everyone bailed on me for Foster Burger for dinner and so that didn’t happen.

Oh, well. Doesn’t look like Foster Burger is going anywhere. I’ll get there soon enough.

I was told that I really shouldn’t have described what I was doing when the New Year rang in (sitting in my room by myself, reading comic books). I actually missed the stroke of midnight because of it. I was expecting to hear a lot of fireworks going off, but it was pouring last night and I think that pretty much put everyone off of standing outside for any length of time.

I wasn’t as antisocial today as I usually am. Went to the gym and then to Trevor and Megan’s to watch the Rose Bowl. Then it was off to dinner at Red Onion with my mom, sister, brother-in-law, Megan (from San Francisco), Nadeem, and Craig. Quite an eventful day, really.

So I think I’m just going to write down a couple of resolutions. A date per month or at least 12 this year. I always blow this one. A trip to Canada. Why not? And studying kanji with some sort of measurable outcome. I’ll have to figure out what that really is.

So much for the first day of the year.

It’s the last day of the year and I usually wait until the last minute to make my charitable donations. This is my excuse for blowing people off during the year (especially the ones coming to the front door), that I’m waiting until the end of the year. I donated to my semi-lefty causes and had to call VISA three times because most of the donations were for the same amount and it set off the fraud detectors at the credit card company. I’m already getting grief from some of my friends for contributing to Planned Parenthood which is ridiculous. They should know that Planned Parenthood provide a full range of health services and should be on me for donating to Oregon NARAL instead.

Calling VISA repeatedly was kind of funny. I figure it’s part of the game. The last time they asked me a bunch of weird questions. “Do you live in a) Benton County, b) Clackamas County, c) Washington County, or d) none of the above? Another question was about several of my previous addresses. I lived in Japan for five years (only 2 different addresses) and back here in NW Portland for 36 out of my 45 years. But they pulled out some weird addresses from my summer jobs. The best part is that I had forgotten some of my old summer addresses (I still can’t remember where I lived in North Carolina) and they asked me about the one place in California where I live for a whole summer but forgot the address of. I’ve actually gone back to that neighborhood and driven around trying to figure out where it was I used to live, and now I know. Thanks to VISA, and their questions where they’d give you a street address where you used to live and ask you to identify the city.

Looks like I spent New Year’s Eve sitting at home watching DVDs, Showtime, and reading comic books. There you go. Another exciting start to a year.