I’m beat and at 10PM some old classmates called and wanted me to meet them. I think most of them are in from out of town but I could barely keep my head up. I had a golf lesson today and then spent a lot of time afterwards trying to screw up what I’d just learned and get some awesome blisters. Yow. I can’t even think of anything else.

I got to work this morning and my eyes were feeling a little scratchy. Once in a while when I rub my eyes I have trouble with my contacts. Today I popped one completely out and lost it. Having one in and one out made my computer screen unreadable, so I took the other one out. I took mass transit to work so I figured it would be no big deal. Unfortunately squinting at the screen gave me a huge headache, so I went home early.

For some stupid reason I trust my Mac weather widget to tell me how hot it’s going to be for the next five days. It’s sometimes wrong. I thought it was going to be around eighty degrees but it was closer to ninety. So wearing long pants for the first time this week and an undershirt were both bad ideas. Instead of walking home from the light rail station, I decided to take the bus. In the middle of the day. Not rush hour. Basically, the words, “FREE CLINIC,” came to mind when I rode the bus. While I was tortured on the light rail by a high school cheerleader sitting across from me, the bus was full of people who didn’t have the access to bathing facilities or the ability to use soap.

After getting home I was rewarded by stomach upset, as is described in the Pepto Bismol song. I was tired and decided to take a nap upstairs, where it was probably over 100°F. Anyway, it didn’t make me feel all that much better and I missed the barbecue at my sister’s house.

And that was my Thursday. Sounds like Friday my manager is going to confront us with the bad reviews he got from us. Genius.

I drove again today because we were supposed to go golfing. One of the guys I go golfing with is leaving the company to move to Idaho of all places and we were going to golf with him today. He forgot his clubs and then the other guy bailed because it was too hot. In all honesty, it was way too hot to golf today, about 95°F. I used the time to go to the gym since I didn’t go yesterday. I think after two weeks away from the gym I’m back to being a pile of blubber and I’m going to be very sore tomorrow.

I spent some time at the gym talking to a woman who is applying to med school instead of diligently working out. Courtney asked me what her name was and I didn’t know. Courtney then told me that I’m supposed to know the names of the women I’m trying to date. Heck, she’s about half my age. OK, so she’s probably 24 or 25 and doubling that would make me 50, but I’m a lot closer to 50 than I am to 25.

So I had this great idea to redo my network. Re-misconfigure my network is more like it. Nothing physical, just packets running back and forth. Basically, it’s killed five of my days. Now it’s late and I’m still at this nonsense. And I didn’t even make it to the gym.It’s not like I got a lot of sleep last night, either. There was a total eclipse, and I woke up in the middle of the night. Twice. The first time I figured I’d better check out the window and the moon was still full and incredibly bright. Too early. The second time I got up the moon was just a sliver but I realized my glasses were in the room my mom was sleeping in. So much for that bright idea.

I only had a couple things on my to-do list for Sunday. Snake the bathroom sink that was flowing slowly and wasn’t fixed by the plunger. Sand and finish the part of the railing that gave me splinters. Well, I suppose I never did get around to varnishing the railing, but I did snake the sink. And I bought one of those laptop stands with the fans in it. The fan works a lot better than I thought it would on my MacBook Pro. Oh, I suppose I also moved a lot of stuff around on my computer because that’s what I do.

Today I played golf and got a great score by doing two things. One was playing a little better. The other was CHEATING LIKE CRAZY. OK, so that’s not the point of golf, but it was funny, I felt like I was getting away with something, and it was fun. So why not? Unfortunately the big boss came by as I was trying to leave and wanted to give me some work to do. The job sounds like a good way to cheese off marketing, but at least it’s work.

So the first thing I had to do this morning was help some little old ladies set up their email. I hope it helps them because it all seems a little confusing. Hell, gmail is confusing to me and I use computers all the time. Most of the time I was trying to get a woman to double-click without moving the mouse at the same time. Ah, well.

When I got home I noticed my neighbor was trimming the weeds in the gutter. He was doing it by hand and tried to guilt me into doing my “half” of the block. We’re the only two who cut the weeds across the street in the gutter by the school yard and I had done most of my half a few weeks ago. It was “community school cleaning day” so I decided I should probably make the minimal effort of getting the gas-powered weed whacker out. My neighbor was doing his half by hand. I did my bit for the neighborhood and even trimmed some blackberry bushes. I even met the new school principal.

The rest of the day was spent fighting my computers, like always. Didn’t have all that much trouble and everything worked after the requisite frustration. I guess it’s time for plumbing and painting tomorrow.

So somewhere around 12:30AM this morning, I was holding a razor blade in my left hand trying to figure out if I should cut into my right thumb. Keep in mind that I’m right-handed. I got a 3/8″ sliver in my thumb and at first I convinced myself it was just the blood after I pulled out most of the wood with my teeth. While I was lying in bed I finally decided that it hurt too much and it must be a sliver. So I got whatever cheap magnifying glasses, tweezers, and pins I could find and went to town. I’ll spare any more details, but it’s gone now. I’m planning on varnishing the basement railing to avoid this from happening again (it’s not the first time this has happened).

I have a cough now, and it’s pretty much the kind of cough I can deal with. It’s not waking me up at night and it’s not that often. This morning, however, I was coughing stuff up. Why is it that doctors always want to know what color the stuff was? My usual doc wants to know if it’s green, and the TB researcher up the street wanted to know if it was red. It was neither, fortunately.

I’ve spent much too much time trying to get IPV6 working at home. I doubt I’ll stop any time soon. Oh, well.

There are a lot of reasons I ate at McDonalds but the main ones are that the cafeteria frightens me and Mickey D’s is the closest cheap thing I could walk to. I also found a way to avoid a bit more exercise by walking AROUND the hill to the light rail rather than OVER the hill. The stop was a little closer, too. So, two strikes.

Oh, and Dave the Trainer blew me off and I didn’t make it to the gym.

YER OUTTA THERE!

Might sound ideal for me, but it’s my aunt, my aunt’s sister-in-law, and another friend from Japan. I’m off my routine, not that I have a routine. So far I’ve only had to be around for dinner, and I have no problems eating. I’ve had to skip the gym one night and cut short my awful performance at the driving range another night.

I mean, honestly, my golf swing is getting worse. I think it’s time to see an instructor. I mean, I want SOMETHING in my life to go right.

I should hit the hay, too. I may run into the same woman from Yahoo! on the train. She swears it’s the best job she’s ever had, and much better than what we’re doing across the parking lot from her at Megacorp. I wonder if she’s telling the truth or if she’s just deluded.

OK, so I exaggerate. The most exciting thing I did today was to go to the Ethiopian restaurant for lunch with a co-worker. She’s from Peru, and I didn’t realize that the food in Peru isn’t that spicy. Anyway, I ordered chicken, which was supposed to be medium spicy. They came back to tell me that they’d run out of chicken breast, but had chicken thighs, and I said that was OK. But they didn’t tell me that the dish with thighs was much spicier than the dish made with chicken breast. My first mouthful made me drink my glass of water.

I’m also in big trouble with some co-workers. I asked if we had to be physically present at our 7AM meeting and the boss said yes. If I had just kept my mouth shut, the boss could have been disappointed with us later when we were more awake. Oh, well.

I was moving things around in preparation for my aunt, her sister-in-law, and a family friend to come from Japan. I had to clear some stuff off of the bed in my “office” which really is another flat surface for me to pile up my clean laundry. I think I have way too many t-shirts. Fortunately, we’ve been taking a lot of my dad’s old stuff to Goodwill lately and my old clothes have been going too. My pants, which mysteriously shrunk, are among the things going. Oddly enough I bought a pair of shorts for golf from Target earlier this summer and what they call 32 is what I call a hell of a lot bigger.

In the middle of all of my “cleaning,” my sister called and wanted some information from the Parade Magazine in the Sunday paper. Of course it’s garbage day and I had to go out with a flashlight to dig it out of the recycle bin. I think she’d already recycled hers the day before. I should tell her my back hurts from all the stooping over the recycle bin. Not that she’d care.

when it’s been too long since you’ve had a girlfriend. This and posters of Natalie Gulbis.

Old picture for comparison:

Of course my back hurt and I used that as an excuse to watch golf, but the presentation wasn’t that great. Basically, they showed lots of gabbing and little golfing. I decided to trim back one of the rhododendrons in front of the house, and then decided that it should all go in the wood chipper with the stuff I hadn’t finished last week. Basically, I was either trying to prove that my back was OK or I was being a masochist. In any case, my back doesn’t feel so bad tonight. Rhododendrons aren’t nearly as hard to deal with as flowering plum trees.

P.S. I don’t have any posters of Natalie Gulbis.