I was busy doing something. Perhaps un-screwing-up my computer. I do a lot of fiddling, and it’s sort of like backing your car into a spot that you can’t seem to get it out of. Ah, well. In any case speed dating is tomorrow and today was merely the day of disappointing lunch. It was late, it was cold, it was mediocre. What are you going to do?

Which also reminds me: time for another “free” iTune. I bought “My Girl” from Chilliwack the other day and I think it’s time for “I Want You to Want Me” by Cheap Trick.

Why do I need a girlfriend (or a cat) when my iPods all get all huffy if I don’t pay attention to them every single day? There’s no way I’m getting through a shuffle of 580 songs because if it sits for too long (longer than a day) it just resets itself.

So, nobody asked, but here’s the story with yesterday’s picture. My friend Greg cut down a lot of his trees to put in a pasture for horses. I think horses are stupid and stay away from them, but his daughter likes them. So far, he’s cut down five acres of trees, put up a $60,000 barn (or something like that) and it was time to seed the pasture. Anyone with any sense would rent, borrow, or buy a seed broadcaster. But not us. The picture shows what we did. We tied his leaf blower to the back of his pickup truck, drilled a hole in the blower tube, and taped a funnel to it. I stood in the back of the pickup with four 25lb bags of seeds, pouring the seeds into the funnel with a cup as he drove around in circles. Luckily, I didn’t fall out.

Besides mowing the lawn and finishing my parent’s taxes, today I tried to see if I could start an electrical fire. I finished a PIC programmer and it requires 18V at probably around 70mA. I found a power supply that puts out 18V at 7A. That’s 100 times more than required. It also means that if I had screwed up the wiring somehow, I’d have some nice sparks to watch. You’ll also notice that the power supply is open has wires with “DANGER” labels on them.

Oh, and I also got a call to try speed dating on Tuesday. My sister thinks I’ll probably piss every one of the women off, and probably some of the men as well. I told her I’d see, since a certain unnamed person is still talking to me, I thought I’d lost my touch. She thinks that a certain unnamed person is a female white version of me, so that’s why we seem to get along. HAH.

Well, we’ll see if I can still make women’s eyes glaze over in under a minute. I used to be good at that.

It has to do with a couple of idiots trying to make their own seed broadcaster rather than buying, borrowing, or renting one. I’m too tired to explain right now, so here’s the picture:

More details tomorrow.

I want to update my iPod mini’s software, but I have it on “shuffle” and I want to listen to the 580 songs on it at least once. If I update the software, it resets the iPod and I have to start over with a new shuffled list of the 580 songs.

I didn’t go to the gym today because I got a ride home and started thinking about the chip programming kit I got in the mail yesterday. Then, of course, I had to start building the kit and you can imagine why I never made it there. I only go three times a week, so if I get motivated enough, I can go tomorrow. Or not. My sister gave me permission to take the day off. (I always call her for permission to alleviate any guilt I have about not exercising.)

OK, so she wasn’t lost, I just lost track of where she was. She even has a blog where she said something, well, controversial and everyone is writing their opinions to her. Obviously it involved religion, politics, or both. You can check it out for yourself. BTW, did I mention my friend is very attractive? She’s also happily married with two kids. 🙂

Speaking of blogs, all my complaining got Carolyn posting on her blog, but now I have to hear about all her escapades with the boys of Chicago. And I’ve had dry spells. You better believe it.

Well, I got my new soldering iron and chip-programming kit from China, so I’ll be geeking out in the basement. ‘Cause you know, chicks dig geeks. They’ll be on me like bees on sh*t.

Or as I’ve heard it called, Drag-on ball. I used to watch it in Japan on Wednesday nights at exactly 6PM. Japanese TV was pretty darn precise back then. I don’t know what it’s like now, fourteen years later. Anyway, it’s a serial cartoon that came from a comic book. I used to read comic books all the time and I think it might have helped me with my Japanese reading. Or maybe I just looked at the pictures.

I’ve been tracking two of my packages on UPS’s web site. One was shipped 2-day air and it’s in Portland already. The other is making it through a bunch of towns I’ve barely heard of: Mesa, AZ, Phoenix, Riviera, AZ, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Boise, Hermiston. OK, I was in a wedding in Hermiston but I’m not sure why my soldering iron is stuck there.

My co-worker had to get his passport picture for a trip to Fiji (his dad’s a DOCTOR after all) and we saw some awards in frames at the photo shop. I figure we should start getting them for ourselves, and post them on the walls at work. Unfortunately, the only thing we could think of is giving ourselves awards for going to the same Mexican restaurant FIVE DAYS IN A ROW. It probably wasn’t all that good for us and it wasn’t the best Mexican food I’ve had, but it was good.

I think I get to work late again tomorrow. Joy.

I remembered what else was bringing me down: I was staring at the New York Times crossword puzzle for THREE HOURS and making little progress. It’s not all that hard, but I got nowhere on it.

My sister isn’t the only one crafty in the family. I finally put up a gallery of pictures from a show of my grandmother’s crafts. She died last year at the age of 98-years-old (and five months).

And I suppose that’s about it. Went to the gym, read about DSPs and FLASH RAM (what else do you do when you’re climbing an endless set of stairs) and I suppose that’s about it. Besides hiting reload repeatedly on GirlReaction and getting no gratification.

Got up today feeling quite tired. So, after taking a nap, I decided to do my taxes! After wrestling with TurboTax and typing in all my medical expenses, the software ended up submitting the 1040EZ for me. Hell, the 1040EZ is designed to be filled out with a CRAYON and I could have done that in a minute. I wonder why I went to all that trouble. So onto the task that makes me crazy: doing my parents taxes. Mostly because I have to dig through my dad’s crap to find most of his paperwork. He likes to squirrel things away for some reason.

Anyway, being tired and cranky and doing my taxes made me realize that things are probably ebbing right now. No more pretend girlfriends, etc. Magic Date Ball will repeatedly tell me, Not a chance! Friday I was on the phone for about an hour trying to clear up my mom’s insurance with all the referrals and authorizations and other mumbo-jumbo and arcane incantations required to get the bills paid up and it looks like I’m going to go through the same sort of torture to get my dad’s taxes all straightened out.

Oh, well. I found out I won a door prize at the Ham Radio Swap meet and so I can run all sorts of things that require 12V. That’ll have to amuse me until my mail-order soldering iron arrives.

I probably forgot to do it. I was going to mention that my friend Sun realized that she’s known me all her adult life (whatever that means) and that we seem to have misplaced a lot of the friends we had. TERRY PRIBBLE, WE’RE TALKING ABOUT YOU. And Ian Griswold (though he’s married and in a different category) and Greg Watkins and Ed-whose-last-name-slips-my-mind-right-now, etc.

Anyway, two other things. One is that I went to the ham radio swap meet and bought another Morse code key:

Something I’ve wanted to find for a while and it says “Flame Proof” on it. Not that I’m going to test that.

The second is that some woman I know called me up late at night to tell me about her date! I can’t get anything going and she’s out with an accordian-playing janitor she met through online personals. I really haven’t seen any online personals I want to follow up on, myself. I suppose that’s my own problem, though.

OK, so I even went as far as calling Il’s co-worker Rick. Well, I TRIED to call his co-worker Rick, but I didn’t know Rick’s last name so I think they gave me the wrong Rick. No wonder he didn’t call me back. In any case, Il was off on a cruise in the Carribean and swore he told me before he left. We figured out that he did call, but didn’t get me and didn’t leave a message on my answering machine. He did, however, gain 10 pounds on his trip.

Did I mention my 88-year-old father was poking me yesterday, telling me I am fat?

Oh, and let me know if you can’t read my blog, since SOMEONE is convinced that it’s broken. Yeah, I know it would be hard to read that if you can’t read this blog, but I don’t need to make any sense. I should, however, quit using the intarweb to cheat on crossword puzzles.

OK, not Chan, but my friend Il Oh. I figure he’s just on vacation or something, but I haven’t been able to contact him since before SuperBowl Sunday. He’s one of the three people I call on my cell phone, and since my sister is always watching some horrid TV show and can’t talk, he’s really just one of two people I call. I get bored on the walk back from the gym.

Speaking of the gym, I didn’t feel any better after going today. Usually I feel a little better and a little less tired after I finish, but today I just felt beat. Perhaps I’m still running a temperature, but it’s probably because I let some TV show recordings pile up and I had to watch several episodes of Numb3rs (or however they spell it) and didn’t get to sleep until around 1AM. You-know-who from the midwest was talking the show up so I had to watch it. It’s as silly as Alias but entertaining.