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.

I just moved offices at Megacorp and there’s good things and bad things about it. The good thing is that it’s right by public transit. Bad things include it’s dark, it’s sticky, it’s loud, and the cafeteria is awful. I walked around and finally went with the default cheeseburger with onion rings and somehow they got both to taste like cleanser. They could have used that cleanser on my desk, because that thing is still sticky after repeated spritzes with desk cleaner and wipedowns with Clorox wipes.

Also, I have to figure out what I’m going to do with that 45 minutes I’m on the trolley. I figure I can read magazines, but what happens after I run out of those? I don’t really like reading books on public transportation because I get too nervous about missing my stop. Ah, well. I can figure something out. Also, I have to figure out what days I should drive so I can have my golf clubs with me. Heh.

I was told to stay out of the office I’m moving from and out of the office I’m moving to, so I checked my work email from home all day. I walked downtown to run some errands and my feet felt great. I guess those $100 shoes were worth it.

The bad news is that Good Dog, Bad Dog closed their original downtown store and now it’s an inkjet cartridge refilling store. Come on. How is an inkjet cartridge refilling store a suitable replacement for a place that sold homemade sausages? I really had a hankering for hot dogs, not fancy sausages. After I left to the Apple store (to buy iWork and iLife) I walked to the other end of downtown to Superdog and had a Nathan’s Famous. Fortunately I also went to GNC to get some nutritional supplements.

Good thing my next door neighbor knows I’m a big geek. He reminded me to go out and see the Space Shuttle/Space Station go overhead tonight. It was just a bright speck that crossed the sky, but it was fun to see.

As much as my iPod denies it (I heard Swing Out Sister and Scritti Politti on the way to REI to buy my shoes), I am a dude and I’m not used to spending a lot of money on a pair of shoes that are probably going to wear out in six months. At least that’s how long it used to take.

I used to walk about 2.2 miles to and from work, which took me about 45 minutes each way. I figure that’s about 2.25 miles. My shoes would wear out in about six months, so that’s:

So it makes sense that my shoes wore out in 6 months, but another new pair of shoes in 6 months is bad when you pay $100 for a pair of shoes.

I suppose it beats the wear and tear on the car and it also means I get some more exercise.

I suppose I’m happy to see that more of my back hurts from all of my exertion on Saturday. My lower back pain is mainly on the left side, but there are cramps higher up on the right side. This makes me think that a proper massage will be just the ticket, and I even have one scheduled for Sunday afternoon.

In any case, I figured two days in bed were all I should be allowed, and several sites on teh intarweb told me the same thing. After two days, get up and walk around. I don’t think I was supposed to get up and pack my office for the move this week, but I didn’t have much choice there. Fortunately, it got better as the day went on. Now if only other things would go so well.

I’ve spent the last two days in bed with a backache. I’m finally able to shuffle around the house like an old man but it’ll take some time to get back to normal. Good thing I have a massage scheduled for next Sunday.

I didn’t get all that much done while in bed. I read another book by Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead which I would recommend to mystery readers, watched Afterlife and North by Northwest and found out that Vicodin doesn’t do that much for me. I wasn’t expecting to do cartwheels, but being able to get up to go to the bathroom would have been nice. It might have made me a bit too maudlin to watch Afterlife which was a sweet movie but about dying. Worth seeing, but I think for now I’m going to stick to comedies and things like watching Matt Damon kick a lot of ass.

Before:

After:

The tree was too big and it was blocking the front of the house. I kind of think that’s why we weren’t getting the paper reliably. My preference was to just cut the top of the tree, but the branches were all in the top of the tree. The tree had pretty flowers in the springtime, but it was a little unkempt.

The tree fought back, though.

Not only does my back hurt so bad that I can’t pick anything up off the floor, but I have big gouge on my palm and a scrape on my neck. My shins are also banged up. (It hurts more than it looks.)

I was going to run some errands today but the tree took up all my time. And I’m not even finished. I clogged up the wood chipper and had to stop. Oh, well, there’s always tomorrow, if my back is better.

Oh, and hey, it’s my sister’s birthday. Happy Birthday you stoopy.

My mom and my brother-in-law had dinner tonight. My sister is off running somewhere. He showed us the progress he’s making on his house remodeling project. He’s a high school teacher after all, so he has a whole summer to not go to work.

I worked from home today because I really just have some programming to do. I can honestly say I’m not a big fan of Ruby on Rails. I did have a chance to sleep in and even get a haircut during lunch.

The sleeping in was probably the best part. I even had a dream where I was setting up a computer in a classroom at MIT and they started the class. The first guy was analyzing some sort of electromagnetics with a Jacobian matrix. I don’t even remember what a Jacobian matrix is and I’m dreaming about it? What happened to dreaming about attractive women I can’t go out with?