Every year the Vaux’s Swifts come back and roost in the chimney of the school across the street. The birds are only a little annoying. You can’t wash your car for a month, for example. The real annoyance is the people who come to watch the birds. There usually aren’t huge crowds until the middle of the month but there sure are a lot of people this year. It wouldn’t be so bad if I was able to just either stay away from 6-8PM or hide during that time, but I get dragged outside every weekend by a friend.

Not much else has been going on lately. I got a Network Accessed Storage device from a friend and filled it full of 500GB hard drives. That means I spent $500 on computer crap that doesn’t work quite right. The joys of technology.

Dave the Trainer was away at Burning Ham for a week and now that he’s back, he needs to make some money. He already has my money, but he won’t get any more until he works the time I paid for. Well, “works” means makes me do stuff, but you know how the personal trainer thing is.

Somehow I seem to have scheduled several doctors appointments for this week so I’m ditching work on a short week. This still isn’t making me feel guilty.

I meet people from time to time who love their jobs. I find them to be a curiosity, mostly. But after I had a meeting with my boss’s boss today (who seems to be kind of wondering what to make of us), a co-worker asked, “Is Windows programming what you really want to do?”

She has pointed out that she has the out of having kids and taking care of them instead of playing nice with Megacorp and taking whatever they dish out. I don’t have that option. And, honestly, Windows programming is NOT what I want to do, but it beats not having a job.

I think I have to find some different reading for the commute to work. I subscribe to a couple of magazines and I figured I could work on the unread stack while riding on the light rail. But I only really have ham radio magazines that I go through quickly and Men’s Health. Men’s Health does have a lot of articles on, well, men’s health, but it also has a lot of articles on boobies and such. I find it rude to be reading such things on the light rail next to other people. Perhaps I am uptight. Anyway, I suppose if I read a novel on mass transit it could very likely be text about boobies and such. At least I will look more studious from far away.

My aunt and her sister-in-law went back to Japan today. They’re incredibly goofy and easy house guests but now I get my “office” back. My mom must have felt a little relief because she wanted a Jack-in-the-Box breakfast croissant for dinner. Easy, inexpensive, and no clean up.I’m not sure I did anything today. I thought about doing some more yard work or some plumbing, but none of that happened. My excuse is that I’m waiting for my back to get better. Plus, I want to see how my structural integration is going to take. So far, my back feels good, but why push things?

There’s a fancy Korean restaurant in our neighborhood and I’ve always been a little leery of going in there dressed in my usual slovenly garb. But yesterday I noticed that the place had changed a little. Even though the dishes were still about $15, every table had little kids sitting at it. The parents weren’t dressed real well, either. So we went there for dinner tonight. Turns out the food is still great.

So I went for my first “structural integration” session today. I’m doing KMI, which is sort of like Rolfing but different. Holy hell it hurt. Nothing that I couldn’t bear, but there were times that I was just thinking, “When is this going to be over?” And the worst of it was the oddness of some of the sensations. For example, there was the loosening of the fascia around the neck that pulled on things connected to the other side of the neck, making it feel like I was being choked. Most of the things felt like the “nerve pinch” you got when you were a kid. Anyway, I actually feel a lot better now so I’m guessing there’s something to this.

I also had a golf lesson today. I’m not good, but I am getting noticeably better. Noticeably to myself anyway.

Oh, and my buddy Keith is making me help him count the Swifts going into the chimney again this year. There are already about 1700 birds going in the chimney and the people are gathering to watch it. Sheesh.

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.