There was a time yesterday when I wanted to be asleep. I was hung over, after all, and I didn’t want to be awake to experience it. Unfortunately, some clown decided that our number was the one he wanted to call at 5:20AM and when no one answered, he called three times. When I finally got to the phone, he figured out that he had misdialled THREE TIMES. Later, the election calls started. Usually they’re recorded nonsense and they’re quite annoying.

In Oregon we have 100% mail-in voting. Somehow they can tell when you’ve sent in your ballot and they stop calling. However, there’s no way for me to mail in my ballot and then find out if they actually received it. Voting seldom makes sense.

It’s raining so hard here that the police had to be called to block some streets that had become lakes. It usually doesn’t rain that much here (I keep reminding myself), it just rains all the time. We also had a 2.7 earthquake (barely an earthquake). Somehow, even with all that, I got myself so tired at the gym that I can’t get excited about it.

I got up at 4PM today. I think I’ve realized long ago that after about three beers – the stronger microbrew ones anyway – I should stop. It was a horrible day, with pouring rain, and probably the right day to sleep in. In any case, I should probably get to sleep but I’m busy watching Doc Hollywood and trying to clean up things in my sister’s blog. I have lots of ways to waste time.

I realize that random people read my blog when I get random responses from time-to-time. Often its on weird stuff. A year-and-a-half ago I complained about a girl I knew in grade school and today someone wrote to me that Holly Ann Reinhorn is now Holiday Reinhorn, married to one of the guys in The Office TV show. She’s even mentioned on his IMDB page. Weird.

My sister has left for Japan today and I’d say more but I’m about to pass out. Being fat and lazy and not going to the gym for two weeks does not make the return any easier. Plus, I’ve been getting little sleep this week. I’m so tired that I immediately start having nightmares when I fall asleep and that makes me wake up. It doesn’t help that my group at Megacorp is still (STILL) in flux and my putative future job sounds so terribly tedious that I’m going to spend part of the day tomorrow polishing my resume. Yow.

I don’t know why I’m still going. Well, it’s probably doing SOME good, but I can’t be sure. Today was kind of strange because I got there 15 minutes early and he kind of rushed me into an exam room, then he got me on the table in record time and after a few minutes the batteries in his electro-stimulation-thingy went dead. I kept trying to get someone’s attention to fix it, but no luck. I was out of there in record time, and when I got to my car the acupuncturist was leaving as well.

I had a meeting with my new 2nd-level manager at Megacorp. Or at least the guy who is likely to be my 2nd-level manager. Most of the meeting was him talking on his cell phone in some Indian language. I thought I had a boring job already, but it looks like I’m going to be doing something so much more boring that I couldn’t even imagine it before. Well, we’ll see what they decide to make me do, before I decide whether to make myself part of the solution by removing myself as part of the problem. At least in this transition time I’ve been removed from all of my scheduled meetings.

Well, I suppose they’re not terrorists. They’re just annoyanceists. And there were EIGHTY-FOUR of them. Or so I think from these calculations:

I got home early, like I do every year, and waited until around 5:30PM for the first trick-or-treater. I should learn that they don’t come early, but there’s a lot of 1-to-3-year-old kids and I know they go to bed fairly early. The last trick-or-treaters came around 8:10PM but I sat and waited until much later. This meant my late trip to the gym was canceled and I am still a fat pig. (A fat pig with 35 leftover packages of Skittles.)

Oh, and I keep losing my sticks of Chapstick. I mean, really, where could they be going?

It’s an exercise thing and I think it was a lot worse when I was running. I felt a lot of guilt when I skipped running and called my sister to be absolved from my crimes. Not that not running was a crime. In any case, I was away on a business trip for a week and the only time I was close to exercising was in the awful Holiday Inn mini-gym, or carrying my bags through an airport. Tomorrow is my usual day at the gym, but it’s the one day a year I get to hand out candy to a bunch of little terrorists. I have to do it. It’s yet another compulsion of mine.

The other thing I feel guilty about is the garbage can I just put out. It’s mostly empty. I have a lot of stuff I need to throw away, but I never plan far enough ahead to put aside the things I should be throwing away. And if I put aside things, my father will start picking through them.

And yet another thing I feel guilty about is not doting on my father, but if I tried to do that, he’d drive me nuts. I mean, it’s hard enough trying to get him to put on pants. And by put on pants I mean not go around wearing a t-shirt and absolutely nothing below the equator. You’d think a guy who’s always cold would want to wear more clothing, but it’s not the only thing he does that confuses me.

So now that I know, this gift card makes sense. I helped Sun with her computer, so she sent me a gift card. She enlisted my sister to help her, and my sister just called the Ringside directly. My sister, in turn, just called Ringside. So I got an undecipherable card in the mail that I first thought was from, “Sten.”

Now I can see it’s from, “Sun.”

I meant to post something about my dinner last night, but I went to the weenie little workout room in the hotel instead. Met a kid who was interviewing with Toyota. Guess there’s a headquarters in Cincinnati somewhere.

The conference in Lexington (we have no nightlife), KY was over for me after the morning sessions, so I drove back to Cincinnati in the middle of the day. I tried to go on a tour at the Toyota production plant in Georgetown, KY on the way back but the tours were all full for the day. I could have seen where they put my ma’s car together if I was early. It was raining pretty hard by the time I got back to the Cincinnati airport area where I was staying at the Holiday Inn, so I didn’t do all that much. I did go out to dinner at an unnamed restaurant suggested by my foodie sister.

I had the ribs and duck and they weren’t the best I’ve had. Both were a little overdone and I think the barbecue was of the variety that tries to mask mistakes in smoking by using a lot of sauce.

The duck was pretty good after I got through the dry bits.

I decided to drive around and maybe see some of the sights. Unfortunately the rain didn’t abate and when I got to the place suggested by the hotel staff, I found a mall with paid parking. I got quite lost on the way back. First I accidentally crossed into Cincinnati by accident, and then I followed Route 8 until I found I was on a two-lane road following the Ohio river into the dark countryside. DARK COUNTRYSIDE. What ever happened to populating the picturesque riverbank with McMansions? Fortunately, I found the end of road and a way back to civilization.

I got up this morning at 5:45AM EDT, which is 2:45AM PDT (the timezone that matters to me) so I spent most of the day incoherent. I went to go visit my sister and she got to hear my cursing regarding the flat tire I had and other things I had to complain about. She thought it was prudent to take me to Target and Famous Footwear. Nice.

Today at lunch we went to a place at my suggestion that had a big sign saying Burgers and Shakes. In fact, I think the place was named Burgers and Shakes because the employees were wearing t-shirts with Burgers and Shakes printed on them. It was the kind of place where you could get a cheeseburger, chili dog, fries, and a medium Coke for $4.65. You walk up to the, “Order,” window, and by the time you step to the, “Food Here,” window there’s a brown bag waiting for you with grease soaking through it. It was quite tasty, but that doesn’t help my upset digestive system much.

I can’t believe how much I’m spending on my hotel room. Oh, well, I guess that’s business travel for you. We’ll see why my old manager is scheduling a meeting with me when I get back. It’s in a conference room, not in the cafeteria, so it may be an exit meeting. We’ll see.

I was going to hit the gym tonight after the conference let out, but the European contingent showed some cohesiveness by ditching the guy from London. Well, he’s a guy from Hong Kong originally but he’s still a Euro to me. In any case, he was stuck by himself so I had to tear myself away from the chick flick I was watching to go out to dinner with him. We ended up wandering around downtown Lexington which does double duty as a ghost town on Tuesday evenings.

My usual metric for finding a restaurant is to find something that has regional food and that isn’t empty. Unfortunately, the most people I saw in a restaurant was six, and that was the place I insulted two of the wait staff who were having a smoke behind the place. I asked if the place could be any good with so few people in it and when I realized what I had done I told the Londoner that I didn’t want spit in my food so we kept moving.

I finally stopped a couple of people and asked where they would eat and we went to what I would call a dive. There was a woman close to my age with a kid who looked like he was in his early 20’s. The animated conversation was not one that relatives have; it seemed more like a date. It didn’t spoil my dinner of fried green tomatoes and a pork chop with apple sauce (the apples were from the cook’s back yard).

Maybe tomorrow I’ll make it to the gym. The Gold’s down the street is only open until 9PM!

I’m too used to seeing the Monday Night football game at 6PM. It’s over around 9PM. But people on the East Coast know it starts at 9PM and ends around midnight. Funny thing is that I’m actually tired already and it’s not that late.

Went to eat at Lee’s today. It’s kind of like Kentucky Fried Chicken but I bet it never made it outside of Kentucky. There were only two people working there, and they didn’t work together very well. The guy in the kitchen looked like the manager with a staffing problem, and the woman at the counter didn’t talk directly to him and he couldn’t hear a thing she said. I wonder if the unemployment rate is low here, because the people at the fast food place weren’t exactly top notch.
So, do you think I was down in the hotel bar with the single woman or in my room fixing the lamps and watching TV in my underwear? Did I mention I’m in room 420?

And, as far as I could tell, nobody but white folk in Covington, KY. Not even one at the airport. I don’t know what’s going on.

The Megacorp traveling curse continues. Someone told me that it depends on the level you’re at within the company. I always get the last row in the airplane (by all the little kids) and a lower floor room. I think the lower floor room is to keep Megacorp employees from jumping out the windows. Other than that the trip was fairly uneventful. I had dinner at a Skyline Chili just outside of Cincinatti and I have to admit it’s different. I can’t say it’s my favorite thing called chili or Coney Island.

Getting to Lexington, KY from the “Cincinatti airport” (in Covington, KY) was supposed to be difficult according to one of the raving loons who will be attending the conference here. He said it was hilly and curvy and difficult. I can’t remember an easier drive. In the dark, we were all doing about 80MPH, and there was no danger beyond the fact that I was an Asian guy driving a rented Hyundai Sonata. The car, by the way, kind of a piece of crap.

The bar downstairs is kind of a washout (the one at the Radisson was a lot more populated) and the guy first sold me some “local beer” instead of the local bourbon I asked for. I hope Megacorp doesn’t mind that I drank my dinner.