I can’t believe some of the crap I lose. I know I had sixteen shares of HP stock that were actually on a physical piece of paper that I had stacked up with old phone bills on the floor of a spare bedroom. At least I had some idea where that was. I realized I hadn’t seen my car title since I bought it back in 2006, and now I need it so I can trade it in a new Prius. It was carefully placed in an unmarked folder and then thrown in the corner. What a mess. At least I found it and it only took about an hour.

Honestly, that was about the most exciting thing that happened to me today besides having to scrape the ice off of my car again this morning. Though I do think I’m allergic to my therapist (i.e. the dog at the gym I pet to lower my blood pressure). After a bit of scritching, my index finger starts to go numb. I figure that’s a bad sign, but I have to trade off numbness for the fun of interacting with the dog(s).

Last week the local PBS station sent out a warning that they were doing maintenance on Sunday night. Fortunately, I was up this morning before my alarm went off and heard the difference between a radio that was off and a radio that was on a station with no audio. I did have to scrape ice off my car windows, but that wasn’t so bad. Still, Monday morning was like you’d expect Monday morning to be.

Yesterday I did get both my ladders out and cleaned the gutter that is the least accessible. I have to put the ladders in my neighbor’s yard and even have to stick one in the middle of one of his trees. It’s a pain in the neck. I put up some netting to try to keep the gutter clear. We’ll see how well that works.

I’ve been wanting an aluminum extension ladder for a few years. I finally found that the local Ace Hardware store (Pearl Hardware) had the best price I could find. The problem was I had to figure out a way to get it home. I finally got my sister to help me move it and that should have meant it was time for me to clean the leaves out of the gutters on the garage. But no, it was freezing today and going to the gym just about killed me. So it was time to enjoy the knowledge that I now had the the ladder, but didn’t actually use it.

Sounds like my Prius is about to be sent down from North Seattle and I may have it next week. Only 10 months of waiting!

The other night when I was having trouble getting to sleep, I think I realized that a lot of the noise in my bedroom was coming from the dehumidifier in the basement. When I got up I started thinking about how I was going to have it not come on in at night. I thought about using a clock-controlled switch of some sort, that ran a solid-state relay that I could get at the surplus electronics store. Then I started to think that the clock could be synchronized to one of the National Bureau of Standards clocks. Or maybe it could be computer controlled and I’d just use, say, an Ethernet connection to the intarwebs to turn it on and off because all my servers are synchronized already. Well, I finally just went and got one of those old-fashioned timers people once used to on and off the lights in the house when no one was home. $5.99 at Harbor Freight.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the slivers of soap I end up with. I started searching the intarwebs for soap making information and I think I finally just realized I was on my own but figured out I could chop up the soap and microwave it in some sort of form. There was a line at the barbershop, so I killed some time at Kitchen Kaboodle where one of the sales people suggested a silicon cupcake form, but they were out. And the cheese graters I thought about using to chop up the soap were all about $15. Fortunately the punk rock barber girl had the best idea: Dollar Tree. I still don’t have the form, but my cheese grater (or, actually, SOAP grater) only cost $1 and I have a container with a bunch of powdered soap.

And finally, I left early because I wanted to clean my gutters before the weather turned to the usual Oregon winterish fun, but my mom sent me on an errand. While I replace my wiper blades about twice a year, she hadn’t replaced them for five years. They didn’t do much to improve the view when it rained. So I ended up at the Toyota dealer, where I also asked about the Prius I ordered in February but hadn’t seen yet. Turns out they just got one in, but it was the wrong color. There’s a good chance that by the end of the weekend I’m going to have a blue Prius and, as of today, the gutters aren’t clean at all.

I can’t believe I couldn’t get to sleep last night, but it was understandable. I was tired, it was late, but I was in the middle of trying to diagnose my network problems. I’ve started to rewire some things and my new intarweb provider is a cable company and not my phone company. So DSL degradation due to spectral interference is going to eliminate the viability of third-party providers so it was time to go to the cable company that I’ve been avoiding for years. I even had to cut my ties to my old ISP, a place I even worked at. It’s been TEN YEARS since I worked there, so that must mean that I’ve had the same ISP for longer than that. And I’m old and I don’t like change.

Well, onto the bright new world. My download speed is 10x faster so now I can fill my head with 10x more crap. And, if we’re lucky, my sister’s knitting (or whatever) blog should load faster as well. We’ll see.

I hate it when I’m sort of sick. I’m not sure how I ate myself sick when I didn’t even eat that much. I went to Ringside on Wednesday and Thursday I actually had to go home from work and take a nap. Well, I’m not sure it’s a nap when it was four hours long and didn’t affect my sleep later that night. I finally made it back to the gym on Saturday and afterwards I not only felt like I was run over by a truck (which is common) but I also was just dog tired. And today I felt worse, but that’s probably partially the brown bottle ‘flu. I still had to get out and clean the leaves out of the gutters, but that’s to be expected this time of year.

I suppose I did break out my new soldering iron yesterday and put some kits together, which made a lot more sense than earlier in the day when I was trying to figure out what to do with all the soap slivers I have from my shower. Surfing the internet for soapmaking wasn’t the most productive thing. At least now I have an iPhone charger and a SIM card reader, though I’ve only tried out the charger to see if it would make the iPhone think it was charging. Getting the SIM card reader working is going to take a bit more effort.

I’m not sure what the worst part of getting old is. Maybe becoming invisible to attractive women, but I’ve always been invisible to attractive women and now maybe they’re actually seeing me and thinking, “Hey, I wonder if he knows my dad?” But beyond all the aches and pains I experience, I had another unpleasant reminder of my age today during my annual physical when I got my oil checked. I’m not sure what age that’s supposed to start and I thought it was 50 but it’s begun.

Huh, I wonder if Google is silently dropping my emails. I don’t trust them either. In any case, I got my DSL back up and running and my not-nearly-as-fast-as-cable connection is back online.

Last year, the last run of the fall season was on a night that was about 41°F. Today, we had the same experience and my car said it was somewhere around 41°F. I complained bitterly last year but this year it wasn’t as bad. One of the reasons is probably because I was so tired by the time I had to run that I wasn’t feeling any pain, but really it’s because there was no wind today.

Beyond that, I have nothing that interesting going on in my life besides questions as to why I’m running my own email server, etc. I guess one of the reasons is because I can see what email comes in and does or doesn’t get delivered. me.com (the Apple email service of it anyway) silently drops some of my email. It’s not in my junk folder, it just never shows up. For example, it only delivers a certain subset of the email I get from OKCupid. Of course, I’ve been on OKCupid (a dating site) for probably close to five years and doing online dating for close to 20 and I think I’ve gone out with a half-dozen women in that time. And most of it went quite badly. So maybe Apple truly is my friend and is trying to protect me from myself. Time to play with my iPhone some more. Just why are those birds still so angry?

I wish I could tell you I had fun yesterday, but there was a lot of time spent transferring data from my brother-in-law’s old computer to his new computer. Now that I know how long it takes, I won’t have to sit around thinking it will be finished any sooner. Instead of telling you how much more time the whole thing would take, it told you how much time the very next step would take, over and over and over. It wasn’t all that interesting.

Even better, I think Qwest/Centurylink is “improving” my service by making my DSL modem obsolete and that meant my servers were off the intarwebs at about 9:15PM on Saturday. I called and talked to a guy with a slight Filipino accent who said he’d send over a new modem. My friend Joey the Unix Guru thinks that Qwest/Centurylink is going to upgrade everything to the point that DSL is dead and the next best option is a Comcast business account. I jury-rigged another connection so my servers are back up, but I’m not sure how long that will last.

Ah, well, it’s all progress, right?

I’m trying to track my mom’s flight from Japan. I have to get up at the same time I always do to drive out to PDX to pick her up tomorrow. It’ll be nice to see her home, but I wonder if she’ll like the cold wet weather. It looks like it was in the 60°F’s and sunny there.

I was surprised that I didn’t have that much hassle upgrading to my new iPhone 4S. I paid (in scientific terms) a metric shit-ton for an official, unlocked phone from Apple and all I had to do is pop out the SIM card from my iPhone 4 and pop it into m iPhone 4S. Then there was the requisite painful restore-from-backup but that’s because I have (in scientific terms) a buttload of crap on the phone. Compare this to the purchase of an AARP-approved phone for my mom. That took me a half-hour of waiting and then another 15 minutes of going through all the paperwork. To be clear, she used to have my old Blackberry with all the damn buttons when what she really wanted was a phone with speed dial for my sister and for me. Fortunately, AT&T still has those phones for sale!

I got my cell phone bill from Japan and it’s a bit expensive. I rent a Japanese phone for the convenience of having a Japanese number and using my US phone in Japan would be even more ridiculously expensive than this. The “Web” and “Adjustment for Web” are what really get me, since all I did was look at the “Maps” app. I also didn’t make that many phone calls, so I’m not sure why it cost me $70. But again, it’s still cheaper than using my US phone because the calls would have the cost of going from my phone in Japan, to the US, and back to a Japanese phone. Oh, and the US prices I have are an estimate, because I’m not sure what exchange rate they’re going to use.

And there you have it. For a guy who still has two separate wired phone lines to the house, I sure do have a bunch of cell phone drama.

The best part about my recent feelings of impending doom is that they’re usually nothing. Maybe doom is looming but it’s not here right now.

So I’m really too tired to think of much of anything. The workout at the gym was 5 pullups, 10 pushups, and 15 kettlebell swings over and over until 20 minutes were up. For some reason, seeing it up on the board didn’t frighten me as much as anything that involves running around the building. If I know we’re running around the building, I get nervous, and it’s probably because those workouts make me want to pass out at times. The pullup/pushup/swing one is quite tiring, but in an achy sort of way, not in a seeing-my-lunch-again sort of way. But it all has me fatigued to the point of inaction. It’s a cue to actually hit the hay, but somehow I’m tired without being sleepy. This may be the worst kind of tired. If I had any sense (and I usually don’t) I’d just force myself to lie down in a dark room anyway. Which, now, is my new plan.

I didn’t go to the gym this morning because my stomach felt funny. I wondered if I overdid it at Besaw’s last night, having two drinks with dinner plus dessert. As the morning continued, I realized that I was actually coming down with a cold rather than just being hung over. I just got over a Japanese cold, why am I getting an American one as well? I was so sick that watching football wasn’t that much fun. Weird. At least I finished my laundry.

I went to my sister’s and had Killer Burger. It wasn’t as good as I remember, but still quite tasty. It’s not my favorite, but it’s certainly worth going out of your way for it.