So Apple announced new laptops today and they’re lots faster than the one I have. Or so they say. And I can get a bigger SSD hard drive for a whole lot of money. Yeesh. And here I was thinking I wasn’t even going to get an iPad until my sister started talking about paying for half. I’m going to put it out of my head for at least 6 hours. Just because those 6 hours are sleep hours doesn’t mean anything, right?

Speaking of which, maybe I should get a head start on that already.

It’s a tradition at the gym to do birthday burpees. Perhaps you remember burpees from gym class as squat-thrusts, but there’s an extra pushup added to them, and they suck. Last week I was trying to get a guy to stay at home so I wouldn’t have to do birthday burpees with him but he’s only 26 so that wouldn’t have been so bad, though I wouldn’t have been able to do them straight through. Forty-six of them was awful.

I went out to Metrovino for $5 bubbly/$5 burgers tonight. Thanks to Nurse Tiff for organizing. The guys at Metrovino are incredibly nice and the single-patty Monday burger was delicious. I may have to come back again soon for the double-patty bar burger though. They’re that good. Don’t miss the desserts if you get to Metrovino.

I had other things to say, but it’s already tomorrow, and I have to work. Hooray for that. I hope the birthday burpees wear off by then.

I’ve noticed a lot of the ads I see on match.com (and I reply to almost none of them because no one replies to me) seem to say the top end of the guys they want to go out with is 45. So there you go, another statistical reason not to be on match.com, especially after tomorrow when I turn 46. Besides, match.com sucks.

I spent most of my day reading comic books today. The problem is that there’s always more where they came from. I also started more birthday gluttony by going to Laurelhurst Market for dinner and having the second steak of the weekend. I’m not entirely thrilled about waiting 40 minutes for my dinner, or waiting for the entire party of four to arrive when the restaurant was half-empty, but the food was tasty.

Tomorrow I’m making another trip to Metrovino for dinner. Hooray!

Let me first say that you do not have a constitutional right to be happy. You have a right to pursue happiness. Nor do you have a right to not be annoyed. If you misconstrue something I’ve said to have way more negative meaning than I meant to have, let me know and next time I’ll meet or exceed your expectations.

The plumbing supply keeps calling me to pick up all the stuff I bought. I went down today, waited in line for 20 minutes, and was told they want to deliver all my stuff, especially my tub. THE ONE THING I TOLD THEM I DIDN’T WANT TO PICK UP UNTIL MY CONTRACTOR SAID IT WAS TIME. So I was all set to go pick up the rest of the stuff, a toilet, a sink, a Washlet, etc, but I’ve decided that they can store them for me. If they really want them out of the warehouse, they can deliver them.

It may be hard to see, but that’s a $1135 faucet.

I had a good time watching the UFC fights with friends, but what awful fights. Yeesh. BJ Penn just looked tired and thanks to Anderson Silva for making UFC look like just plain out-and-out drudgery, just like work.

Burger club, where a bunch of us from the gym go out and have burgers, is getting a big overlarge. We had thirteen people tonight and we went to Metrovino. The burger there was excellent, and it’s probably close to the one from Laurelhurst Market.

It was a giant double burger and they only had five left. Fortunately, it was big enough that ten of us split five of them. On the minus side, there were no fries. I had the bacon-wrapped date salad instead. It was quite tasty.

The desserts were good as well, though the cheesecake at Laurelhurst Market is my favorite right now. On the minus side, the curb outside of Metrovino is ridiculously high, and not only did I scrape up my bumper on it, but someone slammed my door into it as well. I guess that’s why I drive a Civic.

Anyway, the burger is definitely recommended, though it is huge.

I kind of knew something awful was going to happen at the gym, and for some reason I just didn’t care that much. I figured I’d take the run easy, then I decided I’d do the kettlebell swings easy, and then I tried to stay on the pullups longer than I usually do. I finally broke the 10 minute mark on Helen today by doing something else quite simple: cheating. My last few pullups weren’t as pretty as they should have been.

My new bathroom scale is a bad thing to have. I’ve been weighing myself every time I go to the bathroom, just to see if going to the bathroom makes me lighter. I think I weigh more than I thought, but I won’t really know until the morning when I’m good and dehydrated. My clothed weight and my unclothed weight are closer than I thought. The surprising thing is that going to the bathroom does make me measurably lighter. Going to the gym took about 1 pound off, so that means I lost about a pint of fluid even after I drank half my water bottle? Yeesh.

I’m afraid I’m going to have to hide the bathroom scale soon or it’s going to drive me nuts.

I never get enough sleep, so I really don’t need a call at 1:30AM from a FAX scammer. My phone lets me turn off the ringer during specific hours, so I could just let everything in the middle of the night go to the answering machine, but the last time someone called in the middle of the night it was my friend’s wife because my friend was in the hospital. I got up and went down there as fast as I could for moral support and that’s a good enough reason to leave the ringer on. But if these FAX scammer bastards keep calling I don’t know what I’ll have to do.

My shiny new bathroom scale was supposed to be delivered today, but I got an email that said that UPS had broken the scale and they were refunding my money. Why didn’t they just SHIP ME ANOTHER ONE? Maybe they know I’m going to be jumping on the scale repeatedly and MAKING A GRAPH. Nobody really cares about what I look like naked, and really I’m too lazy to be neurotic about that sort of thing. I mean, who (besides my doctor) is even going to see me naked? A man of my age should probably be wearing EXTRA clothes.

My sister asked me what I wanted for my birthday and told me she’d pay for half of an iPad. I was going to wait for the second generation iPad, but why wait?

I’ve decided I’m pretty close to completely nuts, so I just need two more things: an accurate bathroom scale and bagpipes. The bathroom scale I’ve been using is older than I am. My mom doesn’t know how old it is since it was in the family since before she was married to my dad. It seems to give repeatable measurements, but I’m not sure how accurate it is. Now I can weigh myself all the time and make a graph, like all the weight obsessed weirdos that hang out at the gym.

Speaking of weight-obsessed, I was all set to do 60 push presses with a pair of 40lb dumbbells, but I ended up using 35lb dumbbells. Probably just as well. It would have taken even longer than it did with the heavier dumbbells.

I had a couple of burgers in the past few days that were OK, but not that great. The burger patties at the Mad Greek and Helvetia Tavern are probably from Sysco. I’m really unimpressed with Helvetia but I have reasons other than the burger for my loyalty to the Mad Greek. In fact, my Yorgo Burger at the Mad Greek was free because of their Tuesday Facebook giveaway. I was feeling the burger in my gut all day. Today I had my favorite thin-patty diner burger at Skyline Burger with fries, and a chocolate malt. Somehow that combination is hard to beat.

I forgot that Easter is a big deal for some people. Skyline Burgers was open, but there weren’t many people there, maybe three tables. When I took my mom out for dinner, both Portland Brewing and Justa Pasta were closed. Widmer Gasthaus was open and is probably a bit better food than Portland Brewing. The Gasthaus is usually pretty crowded, but wasn’t tonight.

I was just going to watch Life of Brian for Easter but I lent my copy to my brother-in-law, so I watched TV instead. I’m still not caught up from last week’s TV. Plus, that pile of books is still sitting there taunting me. I had to finish at least the library book that’s due this week. Stupid deadlines.

That’s pretty much the idea, but yesterday I was at a birthday dance party and quite sober but tonight I’m watching TV and movies and drinking. I must say that this Maestro Dobel Diamond that they’ve started to sell in Oregon is quite nice. Today I had to drive THMFIC to a submission wrestling tournament and I figured I’d better not be hung over in a room overfull of testosterone and lack of sense. I had a good time at both, surprisingly, standing in the corner at the party and at the tournament. Turns out it’s better to stay out of the way in a lot of places. At the party I could have met some dangerous nurses. In the tournament I might have made some friends who wanted help taking the wheels off of their houses. A dull life, but the life I’m used to.

So we cancelled burger club this week in favor of salad club because several of the usual suspects are participating in a jiu jitsu tournament this weekend and they’re watching their girlish figures. In fact, I went as far as looking for a vegetarian restaurant for the guys, but like my sister says, we only go to vegetarian restaurants BY ACCIDENT. Anyway, instead of burgers, we did Thai food but NONE OF THE FLAKES SHOWED UP. Sean had a good excuse: he was feeling sick. But Jeff said he had to punt to get some work done. Come on, jiu jitsu guys DON’T HAVE JOBS. At least the Thai omlette was as good as I remember at Thai Orchid on Burnside. I know they think they’re too good for us, but at least we had a good time.

I finally filled out my census form today. I KNEW it said I was supposed to do it after April 1st, so those census guys better not be coming around.

Today I did a 345lb deadlift. A good rule of thumb I heard was the ability to deadlift twice your body weight. Well, if you count my minimum body weight, first thing in the morning after a whole night of dehydrating, it’s about 162 lbs. So that means I really only have to deadlift 324 lbs, which I did last week. But as it is, I weigh something around 172 lbs when I go to the doctor (they don’t let me get all nekkid on the scale there) so I got twice that body weight today. My next goal is to deadlift twice the weight I peaked at, 2 x 185 lbs or 370lbs. That might take a while.

Since I can’t find any woman to go out with me, I figured I should look for my ideal woman. And how else to do that but with MATHEMATICS? You know the minimum age thing where you take half your age and add seven? That’s nothing. I figure I should go out with a woman who turned 33 1/3 when I turned 45. I keep doing the calculations and getting different numbers, so I figure I should show my work and let someone else make sure I got it right.

Here’s where it gets tricky. What exactly is 1/3 of a year? And do I want to get the exact time of birth in this? Aw, heck, I’m never going to find this “ideal woman” anyway, so I might as well half-ass the math like I’d half-ass anything else.

So that gives:

So I googled that date and I found one woman born on that date, a Japanese actress from the area I lived in back in Japan, Tomoka Kurotani.

Woo, and the Zodiac says:

The Aries-Sagittarius combination is very good, because you are both Fire signs and you have so many ideas that you could recreate the world from the beginning. You are both curious about anything that surrounds you.

The Chinese Zodiac rates Dragon (1964) and Rabbit (1975) a 7 out of 10 for compatibility.

So where does that leave me? Actually, it leaves me just about finished updating the software on my mom’s computer, which is where I wanted to be. It still makes me a lonely dude living with his mom, but the Mac’s up-to-date.