I got home from my twice-yearly gluttony with Il and went to bed right away. I was pretty tired. But I didn’t seem to sleep all that well and when I finally got up I wondered if I was just getting too old for the kind of excesses I’ve been used to. I cut down on the food and on the drinking, but maybe splitting a bottle of wine three ways and then having a dessert cocktail is too much now. All I had planned was to go to the gym and then crawl around in the attic today, but I didn’t get to any of that. I went back to bed and slept in until 1:20PM.

When I finally got up I figured out that I wasn’t hung over, I was just coming down with something. The difference was sort of like the difference of having a cold vs having the ‘flu. What felt bad wasn’t the same. Plus, I slept well most of the time and had weird dreams. The construction noises from next door were incorporated into a dream about an awning project over our driveway that my dad was overseeing. Later I was watching people innertubing down a ski slope and my co-worker convinced me to glissade down because there was a free soda machine at the bottom. The soda machine was Japanese, with Japanese Fanta in it. All very bizarre and amusing.

I spent most of the day just sitting around watching TV from the past week and finally saw Portlandia, the show all the California transplants think is so funny. It’s OK, but I didn’t find it that interesting. Things that annoy me about Portland were on the show annoying me. Hipsters, check. Hippies, check. And I hate when people complain about Portland drivers. The only time I drive slowly is when I don’t care, or when I’m purposely trying to fuck with some douchebag who is speeding on a city street. On the freeways I agree with the speeding. On the surface streets I think people need to go the speed limit. If you think the driving is bad then MOVE THE FUCK BACK TO CALIFORNIA where you can either drive 90 or drive 5 because of the awful fucking traffic jams.

I suppose I’m just too much a native Portlander. I remember meeting a friend’s wife a few years ago (ex-wife now) who as well as being loud and large, she wanted to me to know she was a belly dancer. “I AM A BELLY DANCER! DO YOU KNOW ANY BELLY DANCERS? I BET YOU DON’T KNOW ANY OTHER BELLY DANCERS!” Uh, I grew up in Portland. I know several. The friend went on to date several exotic dancers (strippers to you and me) because there are a lot of them here. No shortage of meth or narcissism and so you should be able to follow the cause and effect.

Il’s birthday dinner at Ringside again. Woo.

I should probably stop reading so many RSS feeds and twitter. I’m not being as obsessive about Facebook, so I’m making slow headway, but I stay up way too late reading nonsense. I already read the crap printed in our local newspaper most days and listen to NPR. I also listen to several nonsense podcasts. I have to cut down.

And why am I checking my sister’s blog for spam? Shouldn’t she be doing that?

There are hard days at the gym and there are easy days. This has been a hard week. I feel so beat up right now and the best thing I could be doing is going to sleep early, I’m sure. But who has that kind of sense?

Oh, and we had a work function at Big Al’s today, a big bowling alley/arcade chain. What possessed them to get the domain name ilovebigals.com? The first time I saw it I thought it said, “I love bi gals,” which is pretty normal for Portland but is a bit sketchy for my corporate workplace. At least I know now what $20 of skeeball feels like and I bowled a 145 on a dark and flashy bowling alley too. Didn’t win anything and listening to the MC made it feel like work, but it actually could have been work, which it wasn’t. Back on our heads tomorrow.

I had some half-baked theory I was going to expound on, but I think I’ve forgotten what it was. It probably wasn’t about fairy dust, but who knows? I am a step closer to getting my upstairs doorbell chime installed. I mail-ordered a bigger doorbell transformer and now I can run both sets of chimes with no problem. I can’t believe how much work I’ve done to get a second doorbell chime installed, and nobody ever comes here anyway. I suppose if I was holed up in my office upstairs and I got a package delivered I could hear the doorbell. And I do love my Amazon Prime.

Ah well. At least the doorbell hasn’t been an expensive project. All the more money to spend at Ringside for Il’s birthday dinner on Friday. Hooray for that.

I take a two week trip to Japan every year (or at least I’ve done it a lot lately) and pretty soon I think I’ll have eight weeks of vacation I can take at once. My current plan, which I came up with while drinking, is to get an apartment in Tokyo and waste a bunch of time there. I’ve never lived in Tokyo, and this could be a grand adventure. The other plan is to get the apartment in Osaka, because I’ve lived near there in the past and I like it better but, really, which has more adventure potential?

Maybe I can live somewhere in the sticks instead. Some of the smaller cities have even better fun to be had and I kind of think that the air in Tokyo is pretty bad. And what could be lonelier than being by myself in a crowded city? I’m sure I could look up some old friends there and maybe just sit around watching TV for a while. I should, probably, find something to do or I’m going to end up spending a lot of money like I usually do when I’m bored.

Yeesh. Planning. I’d much rather wing it. Well, I have almost two years to think about it.

What would stop me from writing my drivel on this blog besides maybe my default New Year’s resolution to be lazy? Mainly it was a weird combination of computer issues that meant I was staying up to midnight trying to fix things that were half-broken. As an example, a server slowing down because of a bunch of spam. I can’t remember what else it was, but it was the same sort of stuff several nights in a row. Then came the laziness.

I have two excuses for laziness this weekend. The NFL playoffs and a lingering sinus headache. I’m not sure what warm damp weather has  against me, but my head hurts.

Usually when I take time off from the gym (or in the past, from running) I usually feel guilty enough that I call my sister about it. But the past couple of days I haven’t felt guilty at all. My stomach isn’t feeling right, I’m tired, and there was even an ice storm of sorts predicted for tonight. I have plenty of excuses.

I didn’t make any resolutions and so maybe being lazy should be it. It was going to be “up my goal of 3 rounds to 4 rounds” (most of the stuff at the gym is something like 8-12 rounds, but I like to say I’m going to do 3) but why not go the opposite way and just shoot for two?

I’ve spent several days, maybe weeks, trying to get a doorbell upstairs. Tried to run a wire down the same way I did before, but the downstairs renovations blocked my way. That took a day. I was told I should try using the duct chase that used to be the furnace chimney and that required holes in the sheet metal firebreak and an access panel in the sheetrock. Do you know how hard it is to find an access panel that isn’t made of chintzy plastic?

Anyway, just getting a hole in the sheet metal isn’t good enough, so I needed to get a rubber grommet in a hole that I had to make by hand. A punch would have been nice, but I only had access to one side of the metal. Anyway, after I got the wire to the basement, and routed through the rafters/floor joists down there, I wired it up only to find that it wasn’t quite right. I’m not sure what clown wired up the doorbells but I think things were randomly connected until things worked. Add a couple of hours while I rewired things to make sense, and I was able to hook the upstairs doorbell up for testing.

Then I found out that the doorbell transformer wasn’t beefy enough too handle two doorbells. Guess what I’m going to try to find tomorrow?

I didn’t really have time to be much more than busy at work, and then I finally left it wasn’t early. I made it to three hardware stores and OfficeMax tonight so I can get on with my weekend wiring activities. Actually all I want to do is to wire a doorbell but it’s going to require installing an access panel, cutting a hole in a sheet metal firebreak, and then some more easy drilling as I get the wire over to the transformer. A lot of work to put a doorbell in upstairs so I can be in my office and actually hear the thing ring. Or not.

Really, I just need another way to get wires from upstairs to downstairs now that my old route is blocked off. It’s taken me weeks so I’m pretty excited to get this done.

I’ve been giving myself haircuts for the past few weeks. I can’t get the back of my head as well as someone else can, but it does seem more even than the professional barber gets it. The sad part is after four uses my professional Oster blades seem to be dulling. Might be my Asian hair doing it.

I know, I’m not going to attract any women doing this awful self-barbering, but I’ve realized women like things that I’m just to stubborn to do. At least on the dating sites, I seem to be lacking a desire for:

• camping (my standard response is: if I wanted to sleep with a stick up my ass, I’d shove a stick up my ass and sleep in a comfortable bed)
• dancing (really, the only other people who want to dance to the music I like to dance to are guys who want to dance with guys)
• live music (I’ve always found live music to be too loud and distorted, but my first concert was Journey and my ears rang for a week afterwards)
• kinky sex (I’m very liberal in what I think other people should be able to do, but I’m really boring in what I do myself)

So I’m boring and stubborn and this is going to keep me alone. But it is going to save me money on haircuts.

It’s bad when I think about my life sucking especially since I know that I’m just waiting for my luck to change and I’m not taking an active role in making things any better. But I can live with that. What’s worse is when my body fails me and I realize that I’m getting old. Life threatening chronic conditions aside, I just live in a state of denial and that keeps me going day-to-day so more back pains and lower abdominal muscle cramps remind me of my mortality and just put me in a worse mood than my job (where every day lately feels like a Monday), or the Republicans regaining the House, or the neverending repairs to the house.

I know my troubles aren’t that bad, but I really hate being jostled out of my fantasy normalcy. I just want to live my crappy life with the things that make me happy, eating as much bad food as I want and standing in my shower for as long as I want. I think standing in the shower is the happiest I am all day long and I don’t want to be reminded of the natural resources I’m wasting.

OK, enough of that. Eater Magazine has a list of the 38 Essential restaurants of Portland and I think I’m going to try hitting a few more of them. By myself, of course, since I have no friends. At my age I’m supposed to be married with kids and without interests besides the kids sucking my life out of me.

AND IF YOU’RE WONDERING I’M DRINKING MYSELF HAPPY RIGHT NOW SO I’M FEELING QUITE FINE. THAT AND ADVIL AND TOMORROW WILL BE A NEW DAY (with a 20 mile commute and a soul-sucking job).

I got home late from the gym because I was making sure that one of my friends had a way to stay out of the cold as he waited for the locksmith to let him into his car. The worst part was that after waiting over an hour, the locksmith who had quoted him $35 on the phone wanted $145 to let him in his car. I’m not sure who the service was, but Pop-a-lock only quoted him $60. I think he talked them down to that price and got on his way, but not without some doing.

Not really sure if anything else exciting is happening on a Tuesday. Kind of craving a cheeseburger, but that’s about it.

I was feeling like I was in a bad mood, but I couldn’t remember exactly why I should feel so bad. After my first day of work of the new year, I kind of felt tired and saw a bleak future ahead of me but that’s not any different than most Mondays at work. I went to the gym and it was one of the workouts where I get DFL but Sean beat me to the finish, or whatever you do when you get beat by someone who comes in after you, but I’m never upset by getting DFL or close to DFL in that workout. I found out one of the guys I know at the gym is an M.D., which reminded me of how I failed to get into medical school, but he was a doctor with a sense of humor and even told me some doctor jokes.

So basically, nothing really good happened, but nothing bad happened either.

I tell doctor jokes and it pisses off humorless doctors.

• Q: How do you hide a dollar from an orthopod?
• A: Hide it in a book.

• Q: How do you hide a dollar from a radiologist? (The doctor with the sense of humor is a radiologist.)
• A: Pin it to the patient.

• Q: How do you hide a dollar from a plastic surgeon?
• A: You can’t.

He told me a joke I can’t really repeat because it’s obscene and makes fun of anesthesiologists, who are usually my people, i.e. Asians. Oh, and when he told me he’s a radiologist, I said, “Funny, you don’t look Asian,” and he got it.

So there you have it with some of my bad jokes. I’m an old man. I’m entitled to tell bad jokes.

On the plus side, I won an eBay auction today. It’s for a butt-set with tone dialling, something I’ve wanted but really have limited use for. If you’re wondering what a butt-set is, here’s a picture:

I usually need a butt-set once or twice a year. Maybe I can use it for a Halloween costume.