Well, I doubt I’m going to make it to the gym today, and it’ll be the third weekend in a row that I’ve told myself I’m going and I haven’t gone. I still have Sunday, of course, and I may go tomorrow. But here are some reasons I’ve missed out so far:

1. I kept telling myself on Saturday that I’d go on Sunday, and then Sunday I was way too hung over.
2. I hurt my chest pulling on the lawnmower starter cord and it was bad on Sunday as well.
3. And today I’m kind of hanging out with my dad. I started out the day with a sinus headache. I was planning to sleep in but I was woken up several times. First it was my dad’s alarm clock (it never wakes him up but it goes off at 7AM), my aunt in Japan who was worried because she called at 6AM and it didn’t wake me up and nobody answered, and then my sister who just laughed at me. By the time I got around to taking some Advil, a downpour had started and I thought I’d put off going out until tomorrow. We’ll see how that goes.

Oh, and I went and looked at Hybrid Civics today. I went to the place I always send people but I’m never sure if it’s the best deal: St. Johns Honda. Heck, I walked in and asked if I could look at the S2000 (just for the heck of it) and then asked about the Hybrid and the guy tossed me the key to the hybrid. It’s QUIET inside. I am really tempted, but I do still like my sports car. I wonder if I should be good and boring and get a normal-looking car.

I was on my way to watch a movie with friends when I saw a woman looking at me. I thought she was just looking to see the guy who got out of the convertible, but a female friend says women don’t care what cars guys drive and she was checking ME out. Well, I know she wasn’t really, because my first reaction was to see if I had anything on the front of my shirt.

My dad decided not to go to see his cousin in Spokane. He’d rather sit at home. Hell, I’m a lot younger and I’d rather sit at home than do most things as well. Like father, like son.

I’ve been awfully cranky at times lately. I wonder if it’s because of the weather. I know soon it will be warm enough that I need to have my window open at night and that means the kids parking outside will wake me up and I won’t be very happy about it. I suppose I can try sleeping with earplugs again (even though that makes my ears itch).

My sister and my mom are going to Spokane tomorrow to see my cousin’s kid, who is visiting from Japan. My dad may or may not go. Like I said, he’s almost 90, and his cousin in Spokane is older. I hope he gets to go see Uncle Leo soon.

Well, I used to be a maintainer for the fink project, but I quit today. As you’d guess, it was over something quite minor. I’ve been telling everyone what I did to fix something, and some frog SOB told me that my solution was voodoo. For some reason that ticked me off and I quit. So no more complaining emails asking for help with some software I barely touched from people barely able to turn on their computers. Thank goodness.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean I have any more time to do other things. I wasn’t spending that much time working on fink anyway.

The only other exciting thing that happened today was that I had to take a grand detour to get to work today because of an unfortunate accident on the freeway. I had to take some windy back-country roads and oddly enough they got me to work a lot quicker than my usual freeway drive. Go figure.

Last week when Dave the Trainer made me run up the stairs, I didn’t feel so bad. This week I felt like I ate concrete for lunch which somehow accreted in my stomach. Well, maybe not concrete, because it did feel like it was moving its way back up my esophagus. My lunch never made a reappearance, mind you, but for a while there I just felt like lying down in the gym and taking a nap. Funny thing is I felt like this the first week I ran up the stairs, but felt fine last week. Maybe my poor sleeping habits are catching up with me.

In any case, I better at least pretend to try to sleep some more. Yesterday I even forgot to post my blog entry (like anyone should care) even though I wrote it. I have to quit watching 24. It does nothing to get me asleep earlier.

I used to read Wigu a lot until that SOB Jeff Rowland decided that people like me weren’t buying enough of his t-shirts to keep him and his roommate awash in Cheetos. So, after quitting comic books cold-turkey about twenty years ago, I had to buy my first comic book in years. Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel the same as obsessively clicking on his web site every morning, and so it’s not as much fun for me. I’ll have to get over it, but I miss my daily Wigu fix.

I slept in again because I didn’t sleep well. My chest quit hurting on the left side, but the right side still hurt. I roll around in my sleep a lot and any time I was on my right side or on my stomach, I woke up because of the pain, and I woke up a lot. Now my thumb hurts, but I think my chest is OK.

I washed my car today, which I hate, because that’s when I notice all the nicks and dings and scrapes. Also, I just don’t find it all that fun. I’d much rather pay a guy a couple hundred bucks to do it for me. I also noticed that some of the paint for some body work I had done is starting to bubble up. Yeesh. The first few months I had the car, it was hit twice. First, someone forgot to set his parking brake and rolled back into my car. Then, someone backed into my door. The paint from both of those repairs is looking kinda sketchy, but what can you do?

I also went over to my ex-girlfriend’s place to have some birthday cake and some tea. That’s a EUPHEMISM. What I really did was WENT OVER AND ATE SOME CARROT CAKE AND DRANK SOME HERBAL TEA. See, not too far from what I said the first time. Turns out she reads this drivel from time to time so I better be on my best behavior. Hah. She’s my EX-girlfriend so everyone understands that I should exaggerate with some alacrity. (That’s for her, she got mid-700’s in her GRE verbal score.)

So today I blew off two things I was planning on doing. First, I was going to go to dinner with my parents and my sister and brother-in-law. I was also going to try to squeeze in a cake-eating session with my ex-girlfriend (sounds like her birthday wasn’t all that much fun, so she was baking a cake with friends). Well, instead I hurt my ribs somehow while mowing the lawn.

I have this old gas mower which I really shouldn’t use because the lawn is about the size of two parking spaces. But when the grass gets thick and wet, it’s too hard to cut with a push-mower. I haven’t taken enough care of the gas mower, and it takes quite a few pulls of the cord to get it started. I was pretty happy with myself, thinking that working out had made my arm and core strong enough that pulling on the cord wasn’t tiring me out. Unfortunately, pulling on the cord made my ribs hurt. I didn’t notice until I was through, when a friend called for help moving a wood chipper. The chipper has to be hauled up a hillside about fifty feet along a walkway with stairs and that was when I figured out my ribs hurt. I took a nap after getting back, and that put a damper on other activities.

I had dinner with a friend (the same guy who participated in the “drink the girl pretty” experiment last week) at the same pub, but it would have taken a LOT MORE beer to make any of the women today pretty. Actually, there was one fairly attractive tattooed girl playing pool, but she was stiff and unhappy looking, like she’d keistered a bag of drugs and she was uncomfortable with the movements of playing pool. I’m really not sure why she’d keister drugs and hang out in NW Portland, so it must have been something else.

Friday nights are usually pretty boring for me. I’m way too tired to do anything exciting. Tonight, however, I had dinner with my sister and brother-in-law and that wasn’t so bad.

In summary, however, this week was a week of cafeteria failures. One day I got what I thought was water (it had no smell) but it was awfully bubbly. Turns out it was soda water and I was charged a dollar for it. Another day I ordered a large taco salad but got a small taco. And then finally there were two days where they weren’t ready for us when I first went to the cafeteria and I had to wait ten minutes before they could dish out the food. Yeah, it’s not a big deal, but it is the middle of the day and there’s not that much to look forward to at work.

I keep buying cheesy CDs after hearing the songs at the gym. And I always admit that I like the gym to sound like a gay disco. I bought one CD because it had a funny mashup of “Land of Confusion” by Genesis and “Upside Down” by Diana Ross. (I forget what’s it’s called, but it’s by Alcazar.) Today I heard another couple of songs I liked. Dave the Trainer said one of the songs is probably by Cher and I was chastised for liking a song by Cher. (Yeah, I’m not a big fan of Cher, either.) And there’s another one with a baseline that sounds like it’s from a George Michael song. It’s probably better that I don’t know what they are.

There was a beautiful woman at the gym today who looked quite angry. Perhaps she was angry that I was looking at her, but I think she had that look on her face the whole time. I’m not sure I’d ever want to go out with someone who starts out mad at me. If there’s one thing I know about my relationships, I know I can make women mad. I don’t need any natural tendency towards anger to help me in this matter. But I have friends, MARRIED friends, who say the ability to make a woman mad is half of what I need to make a successful long-term relationship. The other half is knowing that I’m always wrong.

There’s another woman at the gym who looks sad all the time and the only thing I’ve ever said to her was, “Hey, look! It’s the Mars Face on TV!” She just ignored me.

Instead, I was playing with my computer and then trying to unsuccessfully stay away from the katamari drug-of-choice. Sheesh.

I suppose it didn’t help that it was such a nice day today. The first day this year that it hit 70°F but how would I know since I was inside at Megacorp all day. Rebooting my computer over and over and also trying to see if our stock is going to keep falling. It didn’t look so bad today, but if the stock price keeps falling the upper management will start the wailing and gnashing of teeth and you know who gets stuck in the end.

Last week Dave the trainer mentioned making me run some stairs, so I told him about the local long staircase up the hill near my parents’ house. The stairs are concrete and divided up into three flights of around 50 steps each. At each landing, there’s a little bench to sit on. I’m guessing the stairs were put in around the time of the trolley (i.e. a long time ago) and there’s no way they’d put them in again. They’re good exercise, though, and Dave had me run them three times last week. First one stair at a time, second two stairs at a time, third time three at a time. I thought I was going to throw up the third time. This was interspersed with odd calisthenics, pushups, dips using the benches, lunges up the hill, etc. Well, we did it again today, and I can’t believe I did better today. If anyone wants to join us, just look for “Summit Dr at Summit Pl” on maps.yahoo.com and be there on Tuesday around 6:30PM.

Did I mention the young mom who was there with her little girl on her back who did the stairs three times? (She was making me look foolish, so I did the stairs 4 1/2 times.)