I got a call today at 6:15PM from Dave the trainer asking me where the heck I was. Well, after making sure I was supposed to be there on Thursday for my twice-weekly torture session, I realized that this is the last Thursday of the month and time for me to do my official treasurer’s duty at the incredibly sexy HAM RADIO club. HAHAHA. So, anyway, I sent Dave a text message on Wednesday morning but he forgot, I guess. I just hope I didn’t screw up his schedule.

I’ve been fairly busy and I haven’t made any progress on the book front. I better polish off a couple or I’m in trouble. I think I have about a dozen books checked out. Fortunately, I think a couple are kid’s books and should be fairly quick. But, come to think of it, Harry Potter is a kid’s book and those are hella long.

Someone asked me what I’d read recently and I realized that besides, “Harry Potter and the Nonsensical Gobbledygook,” I haven’t read a thing lately. They could take the smallest of my college degrees away from me for doing that. I was being funny when I said the latest thing I read was the TV Guide and I think it might have been truthful. Well, to catch up on a couple of series I keep reading, I checked out a stack of books. Now I just have to find time to read them.

I guess what really triggered this recently was finding out that Sue Grafton had come out with “S is for Something-Related-to-Murder,” and rather than buying it I decided to get it from the library. I gave up buying books a couple of years ago when I realized I had a whole lot of crap in the house and books were a large percentage of the crap. I read a lot of mysteries, and those are usually resellable, fortunately, unlike romance novels.

Speaking of unsellable old books, I think I’m going to have a bonfire with my old textbooks. Burning books just feels right somehow.

So, after spending a bunch of money on cell phone stuff (a car charger, case, and a Bluetooth headset) I finally got a package today. But it wasn’t my cell phone stuff, it was a Neti pot I think I ordered from Nepal if the markings on the package were right. A Neti pot is used in cleansing rituals by practioners of yoga, or for pouring water through your nose for heathens like me. Let me tell you, it kinda burns a little and feels like getting water up your nose at the pool. Big surprise, huh?

Weird how I can get a $10 pot from Nepal before I can get a bunch of expensive electronic stuff from Amazon.

It was reunion day at the gym. I suppose there’s all sorts of people who I only talk to for a couple minutes a month, total, but I like to chat with almost everyone (especially cute women). One person I hadn’t seen for a LONG time told me she just got back from six months in SE Asia! Wow! I need to ask her for the story when I’m not getting tortured by my trainer.

And I bet at bed time, not so much.

Why? I have night terrors, but they go away after a half-hour so that probably wasn’t it. Today at Megacorp I found out I made some mistakes and I had to FIX THEM IMMEDIATELY. I said something I was told I was DRAGGING MY FEET and INCOMPETENT. Yar. (OK, so maybe they didn’t say the incompetent bit explicitly.)

So after I got home and ate dinner, I finished a last little bit of work and then I was sleepy as hell. But I know that I have to watch Kiefer kick some ass at 9PM and that’ll probably wake me up enough that I’ll have trouble getting to sleep.
Oy, I’ve got a nice cramp in my upper back now, too.

I seem to be missing “Cupid and Psyche 85,” which happens to be one of my favorite albums. With one iPod on shuffle and the other so full of crap that I can’t find anything, I didn’t notice it was missing. I would have gone online to buy it but I bought enough stuff today. Contact lenses, a battery for an electric screwdriver, and a USB printer adapter. I’ll probably get over my cheapness tomorrow and buy it. Then the other copy will show up and I’ll have two. Did I mention that I have three copies of “El Oso” by Soul Coughing and two of “Erasure’s Greatest Hits”?
I actually left the house today to go return an iMic that’s supposed to be used with my iPod. It didn’t work that well. It recorded the sound of the internal hard disk quite well, but you had to hold it directly in front of your face to have it record your voice. Pretty worthless if you ask me. I was lucky because I thought they said I had three weeks to return it, but it was really only two weeks and I went in on the last possible day. It was part of my grand scheme to record my window, and fortunately that’s all over now (or so I hope.) In any case, I have a recording of the sound already so I don’t have to pry open a half-working device to try to get it to work.

I went out for breakfast and hung out with my friend Greg today, but somewhere along the line I got a haircut. That usually means my head gets cold and I get a little lethargic and need a nap. I suppose I should have a more exciting life but I don’t seem to. It’s a life, anyway.

I guess it must have blown pretty hard on Thursday night when the window was buzzing. I had to retrieve some of our trash cans from the neighbor’s yard. It’s not supposed to be that windy in Portland, and it’s not supposed to be that rainy here (volume-wise) either. I suppose I can say it’s probably all the fault of Geo. W. Bush.

I spend a lot of time in my co-worker’s cubes chatting because I don’t have the patience to calmly wait for my computer to finish doing whatever it’s doing. Today I spent an extraordinary amount of time in one guy’s cube because I’m a little better at SQL than he is (the blind leading the blind, as it were). I knew SOMEBODY would make a comment, and it was our manager. I fixed the SQL problem, too.

I went out to dinner with my buddy Il. It was his 42nd birthday and when I told my mom, she said it was a big deal in Japan and my grandfather had a geisha and a big party for his 42nd birthday. So I had to run around trying to find Korean people to see if Koreans did anything special for their 42nd birthday. Turns out they all said no, and my friend Sun even said, “No, it’s just something you sick Japanese people do.” I decided that I’d give into my Imperialistic tendencies and bought his a special DVD at a special store. We’ll see if it’s as good as it’s supposed to be.

Oh, and they finally heard the sound at Pella and they finally came out to look at the window rather than telling me to try things. The blew on some sort of cover the electric company put over the power lines with a compressor and decided that’s what’s making the noise. The cover was some safety equipment Pella made the electrical company use before work started on the window. Let’s hope they’re right and that’s what it was.

Well, more experiments with the window and it still makes noise. But the Pella guys called and said they’d replace the window part of the window (not the frame). So there’s progress!

I have a couple of phone calls I have to make (to doctors offices) and I have to ask my sister (who isn’t taking my calls right now, the little snob) about salt for a Neti pot. Of course, I’ve had to do these things all week and I keep forgetting. Plus, I should call the window people back and see if they got my email with the weird sound recording.

I guess I’m in a good mood today because Amazon isn’t as weak as I’d thought. I ordered a Bluetooth headset, a holster, and a charger, all for my magenta Razr cell phone (it isn’t pink, OK?) Well, I ordered it on the 15th of January and it is scheduled to be delivered on the 16th of FEBRUARY or later. But I got email today saying that it was shipped today. Since I paid for “regular” shipping, it should be arriving in several days.

Which reminds me, my friend Sun sent me a birthday present last year months late because of the awesome speed of Amazon. I need to send her a birthday present, but I probably already missed it. Woo. Someone needs to get a social secretary or something. Wait, I just found the email from last year. Someone remind me in early February about this, OK?

OK, so maybe I am crazy but I’m not having auditory hallucinations. Here’s the buzzy sound from my window. Yeah, they’re still not going to do anything about it but at least there’s proof that there’s something wrong. I’m not sure if I should file a complaint with the contractor’s board. Ah, well.

I felt kinda miserable at work today, a little off my feed. Not that it kept me from eating or anything. It sure didn’t stop Dave from torturing me for an hour. I can’t even remember what sort of odd pushup hybrid he had me doing that made me lose my breath. Oh, well, that’s what I pay him for.

Well, I saw the high wind warning and you can imagine what I’m doing right now. I’m listening to my window buzz. I took the Pella window guy’s advice and taped down all of the “rain seal” but it did no good. I had my voice recorder taped to the window, but it didn’t record any of the wind-induced buzz. I can give the frame a little thump and make it buzz, though, so I know it’s there.

In other news I found out the scratch in my trunk lid will cost about four or five hundred dollars to fix (it goes all the way through the paint.) Covering over it with a sticker would be much cheaper, but I’m not driving a car that crappy. And this evening I got an email from my project lead at Megacorp saying, “DO NOT USE THE (shared) COMPUTER UNTIL I SAY IT IS OK.” I don’t know why he was so upset about. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.

Morning update: the voice recorder’s automatic “start” will not work on the buzzy noise, so I have very little audio recorded. However, taping the voice recorder to the middle of the window stopped most of the quiet buzzing, but none of the loud buzzing. So, if I have to tape something to the middle of the window, it’s broken, right?

Last night my brother-in-law said, “Hey, how come your mom and dad have colds and you don’t?” Well, this morning I woke up with a headache and I felt like I had a head cold. Nothing that a bit of Advil can’t take care of.

Good thing I took some Advil, too, because some idiot stole the Honda emblem off the back of my car. A stinking HONDA emblem. What am I, a Simpsons episode? And there are BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes parked right down the street. The cheapest Honda emblem I found online was $80. Since the miscreants scratched the paint, I need to add a couple hundred dollars to that. Ah, well.

Oh, and here’s a picture of my dad from last week when he had a cold. He fell asleep while eating his pizza in front of the TV. Notice he’s still holding a phantom piece of pizza.